Learning Things - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 49

desire is to motivate and teach your players to play your game, you
must not expose them to clique behaviors early on—they will balk.
For this reason, clique behavior is a topic of significant research in
mental health, nursing, and personal counseling scholarship. *
I have gone over quite a few ways through which people become moti-
vated to learn things, or to do things generally. Learning new stuff feels
good once we get it, but along the way, it tends to hurt quite a bit. The
key is balancing our feedback through game design to make sure that
players learn with plenty of feedback. This leads me to the next section.
How to Teach People Stuff
Gamers don't come to our games with instinctual knowledge of how
to play. “Core” gamers, on the other hand, have a large body of knowl-
edge upon which they can draw. So many of us grew up with incred-
ibly popular games, we have never really thought about how people
got into games in the first place. Well, games taught us many difficult
things. I'm sure you don't believe me, but let's take a look at the very
first level of the very first Super Mario Bros. game on the Nintendo
Entertainment System ™. This is a game I'm sure almost everyone read-
ing this topic has played at some point or another, so it makes a great
point of reference.
For the sake of this discussion, let's assume that you've never played
a game before, ever .
When you first start up Super Mario Bros. , assuming you're able
to press the START button to start the game, you are faced with a
little funny-looking Italian plumber ready to jump on things. He's not
really doing much of anything, though; there's just music playing and
we're not moving. Eventually, if your intention is to play the game,
you will start to play with the controller in your hands. If not, you are
going to sit there until time runs out, which hopefully will discour-
age your catatonia through punishment. When you press nothing,
nothing happens. You are being discouraged from inaction through
extinction. Essentially, you are being de-motivated to perform an
undesired behavior.
* See, for example, Barton, S. A. et al. Dissolving clique behavior, in Nursing
Management (2011). 32 (8).