Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 75

of them in order to succeed, and what behaviors would lead them to
failure. Consistent with having a high skill level, low-experienced
players will be able to relay behaviors that will lead to death (“don't
fall down there, you'll die”), and behaviors that will lead to pleas-
ant feedback (“ jump as high as you can to get the best score!”). Let
me digress for a moment: in my years in university, one particularly
inspirational professor gave three students and me each a golf club.
He brought us to the front of the class, golf clubs in hand, and placed
three balls on the floor. He said to hit them in any way we liked.
Since we were indoors, we all invariably putted our golf balls across
the room in different directions. Arbitrarily, he pointed to one of the
students and said, “You win.” He waited a moment for the feeling of
cheapness, unfairness, and slightedness to sink in before reaffirming
this pedagogical nugget: without a clear outcome, whether students
succeed or fail, they will always feel terrible. This is additionally true
in games, where a victory via means that are misunderstood by the
player is interpreted as a fluke, and the player learns nothing. This
leads to interesting and confounding results in user research, which
sometimes shows players succeeding on mission tasks, but reporting
low satisfaction, having low arousal, and generally not having fun.
This means providing clear goals to players from the start. While met
with much vitriol on the Internet, the golden trail in Fable II ™ kept
players engaged by ensuring they had a clear objective. I would argue
this could also be done through level design. Regardless, the goals
and outcomes were clear from the beginning, which is of paramount
importance in promoting flow experiences.
Summary
I hope that this chapter has given you some context on what makes
players continue or stop playing your games. The various psycho-
logical factors should probably surprise you, as to most of us it
seems automatic: either we like something or we don't. In the next
chapter, I am going to talk about how we can differentiate groups
of players along psychological lines, and how to make certain that
our learning design is accommodating all of them to the greatest
extent possible.