The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 32

Wrong: Audio is accompanied with irrelevant, redundant sub-
titles. The player has to visually attend to the tutorials while
simultaneously visually attending to enemy attacks, health
bars, and more. The tutorials are not always “on time,” and
you may be killed before you get to the point in the com-
mander's speech where he tells you something useful.
Dishonored™
Dishonored starts like any other game of its kind, with how-to-move
controls and pop-ups, and not much guidance. After figuring out basic
movements, you are able to follow an NPC around to your first spat of
combat. Unfortunately, as soon as combat starts, the game pauses the
action entirely and occupies the entire screen with a visual-only pop-
up, containing a text box full of information and images that dem-
onstrate the player attacking. While the accompaniment of images is
nice, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, the visually redundant education,
the lack of audio cues, and the removal of the player from the action is
conducive to reduced engagement in the task. This is extremely com-
mon in games, and you will see a lot of it in this topic alone.
Right: Tutorials are contextually relevant.
Wrong: Tutorials pause the game's action and only offer visual tips.
Madagascar 3™
This movie game is an excellent example of how to use audio to hold
learner attention. I can't help but think that this is because the devel-
opers knew that the primary audience would be very young. The audio
cues are great, and narration is present throughout the game for tips
and tutorials. On the downside, however, the visual text is left on the
screen as well as the audio. This is inefficient and bogs down player
learning, as I will discuss in Chapter 6. Other than that, though, there
are all kinds of things done right in this game. Character voices are
used to narrate the tutorials in a way that seems relative to the movie,
the audio cues are great, speech is casual and well enunciated, and