Is anyone else tired of starting a game and immediately being met with instructions on how to play? Maybe it’s because I when I started gaming was entirely different (they came with manuals, made of paper, with illustrations and text that often served as their only piracy protection), but this assumption that I need to have my hand held from moment one until the end of level 4 (of 10) is getting tedious.
You have choices as a developer: you can tell me immediately that I need to build a structure in order to produce something, or you can prompt an alert if I haven’t done that in the first few minutes of gameplay; that is just one example in a very, very long list of ways that assisting a player on their learning curve can be accomplished without the equivalent of a college lecture.
Warcraft II never held my hand. It gave me some story, threw me in the mix, and gave me some objectives that, by accomplishing them, taught me how to play the game. “Build some farms” was offered, not an arrow pointing out the exact button I need to click from the moment I enter the level. It never showed me how I can click a worker and assign him to chop down some trees; instead the first level just had some workers harvesting some trees and the functionality was implied. I picked up on it pretty quickly, no need for a prompt, any text, a blinking arrow, etc.
I understand we need to appease the everyday person nowadays, and back in the day you were appealing more to a culture of “gamers”: people who suffered through the trials and tribulations of IRQ channels and CONFIG.SYS files in an effort to get their Sound Blaster installed and working just to hear MIDI music, but it is now to the point where my daughter feels overwhelmed by the assumption that she has no idea how to play game when she starts playing it. I find it annoying because, during my childhood, part of the fun of gaming for me was the learning curve; something that ultimately ended as a career in game development, because I enjoyed that process - the puzzle. Super Mario Bros. didn’t show a prompt telling me how kick a turtle; I made the effort to read the instruction book if I wanted to, or I grabbed the controller and found out, often times on accident.
All of this leads to a lack of a sense of discovery. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems gaming is heading more and more towards the notion that realism is what is most important, not the gameplay. That it’s best to just cram everything the player needs to know in the first 15 minutes of gameplay so they can start focusing on these amazing graphics we’ve created, and it leaves the experience feeling very hollow for me.
I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t game that much these days, and when I do I am reaching for ZORK II, not the latest shooter. And while I understand every game is not supposed to be a puzzle, I also feel that it’s a disservice to the player to assume total ignorance on their part; to start offering helping hands when none has been requested. It’s akin to a point I made in another thread in which I touch upon friends offering up unsolicited advice when all you needed was a confidant. Sometimes I just want to vent, and sometimes I just want to play a game, not take a course on mechanics.
It can be as simple as one of those prompts that asks how much experience you have with this type of game, and turning off tutorials accordingly. Again, the list of ways to teach someone to play a game without forcing them through on-screen instruction booklets with animated icons is a lengthy one at the very least.
Honestly, I think that is why rougue-likes have become popular (are they still, I can’t keep up). Some of them are notoriously unforgiving with learning curves that only really offer instruction up in the form of your most recent failure. I think that, for the most part, we want to be left to our own devices and our style of play, and if we get stuck we all know how to use google. I doubt any of us need to be told that the right-mouse button is used in your game; we’ll try it, you can rest assured on that, even without provocation. In fact, we’ll probably try it on things you didn’t even think of when you were developing it; we’ll try everything you didn’t think of when you were developing it.
Here’s my plea to the community as a whole: Let me screw up. Let me get to a point where I learn something and reach that crossroads where I can either 1) continue forward on my current save game with this new knowledge, or 2) start a new game and apply this new knowledge from the start. I’m not just there to explore the world in which your game takes place, I want to explore the game itself as well. I don’t need a tour, and if I do I’ll be sure to check the menu for a help section. This is supposed an experience in which I’m lost on this little island of code and graphics, learning how to survive on it, but with the added benefit of a reset button that I am not afforded in real life. That’s the point: I can screw up without consequence. I don’t need knee pads or a helmet here, please stop forcing me to read the safety instructions.
Edit: several words because I suck at spelling sometimes