Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 63

At this point you might be thinking
1. Dewey is a fatalist. (If we can't make things interesting, why
bother?)
2. All teaching is inherently wrong/unmotivating.
3. How do I teach someone something without making him or
her rage- quit?
Teachers struggle with these problems on a daily basis. How do
I make the Kreb's cycle of acid oxidation interesting? Dewey and I
would argue that this is exactly the wrong cognitive approach. I force
my students to include a tutorial of some kind in all of their creations.
Their answer is usually, “Aw crap, how are we gonna make a tutorial
interesting/fun?” Again, this is exactly the wrong cognitive stand-
point. Neither education nor the tutorial is intrinsically separate from
the content to be delivered. It is not the teacher's job to somehow
make the Kreb's cycle interesting. A teacher is not some kind of spice
you can grind up into powder and sprinkle on bland food to improve
its flavor. Wow, that's an awful metaphor!
No, it is a teacher's job to create problems, which the students must
solve, that reveal something about the Kreb's cycle, and let the natural
psychological process of interest do the rest. Game designers have a
leg up on teachers, however. It seems like when a student has one bad
experience being taught biology, they then associate it with biology
instead of with the teacher, the class, etc. In games, however, it seems
like players are more likely to call this a bad shooter and that a good
shooter. Bad RPG, good RPG, and so on. So, take this as a message
of hope, and consider yourself fortunate that you are not immediately
slanted toward failure in designing new games due to the plethora of
bad experiences your players have no doubt endured.
Let's take all of this talk about interest together, and consider a
carpenter for a moment. While she has gained considerable skill in
woodworking, this skill might not transfer to other seemingly similar
skills. Place her in front of an arc welder, and suddenly the challenge
is too high for the skill, and she is met with anxiety, fear, and ulti-
mately disengages from the task. On the other hand, if you ask her
to build a birdhouse, she is still likely to disengage because the skill
required to do so is far below her level of experience. While at her
job she might be forced to hang pictures, build simple shelves, or do