The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 33

tutorials are timely and relevant. There is, unfortunately, an unskip-
pable tutorial portion.
Right: Tutorials are auditory in nature, and the visual informa-
tion on screen is minimal. Tutorials are timely, relevant, and
read to the player in character voices from the game and film.
Wrong: Redundant on-screen text and an unskippable tuto-
rial portion.
I have gone over quite a few tutorials here and given them a kind of
judgment. I want to again clarify that these judgments have nothing
to do with the quality of the game. I am analyzing all of this from an
educational and cognitive psychology background. In many of these
cases, the teaching methods are not consistent with how the mind
actually learns things. It is my hope that over the course of the topic,
you will have a better understanding of some of the psychology of
learning, and how you can apply it to game design. Let's talk a little
more about what makes these tutorials good or bad.
You've Said Right and Wrong: Why?
This is a complicated question. I have spent in and around 10 years
as an educator, with much of that consisting of formal research in the
areas of cognitive and educational psychology. These two branches
of psychology deal with how the human mind assimilates and stores
information. My particular branch of research deals with how people
learn from video games, not necessarily how we can teach them using
video games, but rather the things going on in the human mind while
we are playing. I certainly can't claim to know everything, but in my
opinion, games aren't analyzed in this way very often, and it brings a
new set of eyes with which we can examine game design.
That said, over the years, cognitive psychologists and educators
have dug out some salient points about what constitutes good and
bad teaching and learning. It is a lot of heavy research, but it is my
opinion that these things can be boiled down into game design prin-
ciples. Much of my work has revolved around reading, writing, and
researching the way our learning can affect our enjoyment of games.