LANGUAGE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 5

This is shockingly popular. I see it not just in the big-budget commercial games that have
the economic incentive to keep as few players from getting confused as possible, but also in
smaller games, in freeware games, in games created by one or two people working out of
their bedrooms. When I met Pietro Righi Riva, one of the creators of the downloadable game
Fotonica , at the 2012 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the first thing he said to me referred
to my take on New Super Mario Bros. Wii: “You were right. That game didn't need a tutorial.” This
kind of blunt instruction speaks not just to a disrespect for the player's intelligence—and one
that influences how she feels about the game, make no mistake—but also to a lack of confi-
dence on the part of the creator.
Super Mario Bros., 1985, didn't need a tutorial. It used design, a communicative visual vocabu-
lary, and an understanding of player psychology—gained from watching players play the
game, changing it, and watching them again—to guide the player to understanding the basics
of the game. Those first screens teach everything the player needs to know: Mario starts on
the left of an empty screen, facing right. The floating, shining reward object and the slow but
menacing monster—set in opposition to Mario by walking in the opposite direction—give
the player an incentive to jump. The platforms are a kind of jungle gym where the player can
experiment with jumping, discover the properties of various kinds of blocks, and encounter
her first power-up. Even if the player's not sure whether the power-up is dangerous, it moves
too quickly and in too confined a space to be avoided. When the power-up turns out to benefit
Mario by making him grow, the player has learned something about how monsters and power-
ups look and behave in this game. Then the final pipe barring access to the rest of the game
makes sure she knows that the height of her jump is dependent on how long she holds down
the button.
You can argue that coding a game in 8605 Assembly for the Nintendo Entertainment System
in 1985 was much more demanding, and building a dedicated “tutorial” into the game would
have been harder. People like to point to technological justifications for things in digital games
because most videogame fans are sold on the idea that the history of games is a history of
technology. If there were technological reasons that dissuaded the designers of Super Mario —
Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka—from training the player through instruction text and
encouraged them to use design to teach the player, then God bless the limitations of 1980s
game machines. Design is not technology. The printed manual packaged with the game con-
tained more information about how to play, but perhaps keeping in mind how often manuals
go unread or get lost far before the software they accompany, Miyamoto and Tezuka made sure
that the game itself could convey understanding through playing.
Someone in 2009 looked at the opening screens of the original Super Mario Bros. —someone
had to, to copy these screens note for note into the first level of New Super Mario Bros. Wii —
but didn't understand what they meant or why they were so effective. Why are game creators
unable to understand and learn from their own history? Why are they bumbling over problems
that were solved almost 30 years ago?