Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 66

Let's discuss those three terms. First, just-in-time instruction refers
to instructions that are given at the precise moment when a learner
is about to disengage, due to either frustration or boredom, which as
we've discussed are the primary reasons people stop engaging in a task
and, ultimately, stop learning. This is easy for an educator because an
experienced teacher can see when his students are about to disengage
and intervene. For example, if a student is performing a calculus task
and getting frustrated, perhaps due to not remembering the appropri-
ate formula, the teacher can become aware of this through years of
training and practice in recognizing physiological signs of disengage-
ment, such as crossed arms, certain facial expressions, lack of physi-
cal attentiveness, and so on. The teacher will then intervene with an
instructional solution to keep the learner on task. This is, of course,
not the same action taken by a game system. In fact, a game has to use
programming hooks to detect when players perform certain behaviors,
and then adapt procedurally to that behavior in order to either correct
it or encourage it. In that regard, there is a certain behavioral element
to just-in-time instruction, as we discussed in Chapter 3. Let's take a
look at an example.
Referring back to World of Warcraft , the swimming pop-up illus-
trates how to swim even if the player already knows how (so long
as the tutorial is turned on). Again, patronizing skilled players will
result in them turning the tutorials off entirely, and potentially miss-
ing information they could use later, or simply frustrate them, low-
ering their valence and increasing their arousal. Now, what if the
game instead detected when the player was having trouble, say, by
drowning, a mechanic that is already present in World of Warcraft ?
Another example might be the hearthstone, which is an item in World
of Warcraft that returns you to a chosen location. The hearthstone
takes a few seconds to channel, and can be interrupted by moving,
using another spell, or taking damage. The tutorial by default pops up
when you first interact with the item. Why not wait to see if the play-
ers figure it out themselves and offer help only when the players fail
to do so? This is significantly more consistent with how humans learn
and accords nicely with just-in-time teaching. To boot, it is not that
difficult: the simple code snippet below keeps track of player errors in
using the hearthstone and interjects with a tutorial when it becomes