Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 61

to game. When we are playing Minecraft and joyfully exploring new
terrain, this is low arousal but high valence. When we are franti-
cally dodging bullets in a shoot 'em-up like Ikaruga ™, we are high
arousal and high valence. There are two ways, then, to keep people
from becoming frustrated or bored: keep valence high or keep arousal
right in the middle. Keeping arousal in the middle means peppering
intense games like Ikaruga with breaks and power-ups to give players
some time to breathe, or spicing up games like Minecraft with creep-
ers and zombies. How do we teach players to have high valence all
the time when they're playing? Tutorials. Tutorials embedded directly
into the mechanics of the game, like the examples from Contra or
Super Mario Bros. Let's consider a hypothetical player for a moment.
Going back to our previous example, when someone plays Super
Mario Bros. for the first time, he or she is faced with a little dude that
moves back and forth when you press the controller buttons. Valence
starts low—he or she is just experimenting. It doesn't mean much
to him or her yet, because the player hasn't created schema for play-
ing games. As the player plays more and more, his or her long-term
memory is altered, and the player gets a skill set that he or she uses to
overcome in-game obstacles. The tutorial system of the game slowly
ratchets up skill level by dynamically detecting failures and successes
accordingly, not unlike a teacher educating his or her students. Skill
is key to motivation, or interest, and was known in education classi-
cally to authors like John Dewey * and even as far back as Aristotle. †
We therefore understand that as skill level in a task increases, there
is a natural increase in motivation to continue performing the task.
However, we also know that as skill level increases, so too do the
challenges necessary to maintain a high level of valence, and therefore
keep the player motivated. I would propose that this is one of the great
challenges of both game design and education—keeping players and
learners motivated and interested as their skill level increases, while
simultaneously not alienating newcomers.
Let me expand on this point for a moment. Dewey believed that
in order to be interested in a topic, we must have had an experience
with it at some point that was positive. In other words, we are driven
* Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
† Aristotle's De Anima , Book III, Chapter 10.