Learning Things - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 52

with the most awesome explosion of juiciness that I remember in the
8-bit era (although there are plenty of other examples). Mario will
jump up things that look strangely like stairs, inviting us to climb
them. At the top, there is a flag, and you'll jump to it, or not. In either
case, it will stop the music, play an awesome jingle, and then blast out
fireworks (sometimes) and count down your remaining time with a
ringing and jingling reminiscent of a jackpot on a slot machine with
coins pouring out. This pattern continues for the rest of the game.
Super Mario Bros. teaches us to play by providing us with motivat-
ing conditioning that makes us learn the mechanics. The rewards are
intrinsic to the game itself, and are borrowed right from the psychol-
ogy of design. Minimal punishment and maximized juicy reinforce-
ment serve to teach the player the mechanics needed to play the game.
Bad behaviors are pruned out non-harshly early on, as the farther you
get in the game, the more painful the consequence of death (you must
repeat the levels you previously conquered to reach the area in which
you met your demise). This is an important consideration, and later
Mario games would refine this further by adding checkpoints and
overworlds allowing you to save progress.
On the other side of positive teaching experiences are negative
ones. I would like to highlight how demoralizing a negative experi-
ence with task-education (like learning to play a game or screw in a
light bulb, use your imagination) can be. For better or worse, humans
tend to internalize our faults. Even those of us who have an external
locus of control, which means we tend to assume we have little control
over our success or failure, tend to internalize and dehumanize our-
selves at the point of failure. Consider this excerpt from The Design of
Everyday Things, :
I have studied people making errors—sometimes serious ones—with
mechanical devices, light switches and fuses, computer operating sys-
tems and word processors, even airplanes and nuclear power plants.
Invariably people feel guilty and either try to hide the error or blame
themselves for “stupidity” or “clumsiness.” […] I point out that the
design is faulty and others make the same errors. Still, if the task appears
simple or trivial, then people blame themselves. *
* Donald A. Norman (2002). The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books,
pp. 34-35.