The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 29

frustration, sort of like trying to get a 6-year-old to do calculus—it's
just not going to happen.
Let's take a look at some tutorial levels from published games, and
talk about what is wrong and why. Then I will link it to education
topics, so you can get an idea of how this could have been done better,
and how you should implement teaching practices in your games. We
will get into much more detail about this later in the topic.
Examples of Existing Tutorials in Current Games
This section will go through some current tutorials in commercially
available games. Please bear in mind that these are all awesome games.
I am making no value judgment about the quality of the games, just
illustrating a few points about how the games teach, or fail to, and
indicating where in the topic we are going to work on those points.
BEYOND: Two Souls™
Games like this are story driven and, as such, the tutorial mechanic
is light. I have previously written about the tutorials in games like
Heavy Rain as being awesome, intuitive, and amazing, whether the
developer intended this or not. Unfortunately for BEYOND , the tuto-
rials return to traditional, didactic pop-ups. The tutorials are visually
thin, which is great, because as I am going to discuss in Chapter 3,
too much visual load can overwhelm players and make them forget, or
at the very least, not pay attention to the tutorials. Unfortunately, no
audio cues are used, and the game action is sometimes paused to show
tutorials. Interrupting the action is usually a bad idea.
Right: Tutorials are visually thin, appear in-line with game action.
Wrong: Learning is visual only and presented with the same old
pop-ups you have come to expect. Action is paused to deliver
educational content.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent™
This is an awesome game, but thin in terms of actual teaching and
objectives for learners. The downside here is that in an attempt to make