On the learning curve in modern video games

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

I detect a case of “get of my lawn” and “old man crying at the cloud”.

I understand the sentiment, I feel it too, but I do remember being young and have old men yelling at me to get of my lawn, so I remember a bit more than rose tinted glass. That is:

  • game were huge successful at 200k unit sold, now you are a player at 24M, 3M is a failure, and the biggest success are at 125M (fortnite)
  • game pad had less button, game had less control overall
  • you had a manual, you still has to read them, even if they don’t gate you
  • there wasn’t as much game offering then, you had a game and got stuck with it for a long time, no huge steam backlog
  • there was less diversity in genre too (but mechanics wise that’s another thing, there was no convention)
  • most gamer were also tinkerer, the audience was more specialized and smaller
  • there was cheatcode and magazine, they were the tutorial to read
  • you could ask friend/sibling/family to show you stuff
  • game had demo sequence that show the game being played before or after the screen title, to show you what you could do
  • arcade game had animated sequence showing the button before play
  • a lot of game were simply badly design and had obscurity through incompetance
  • a lot of game were simplistic, so much that figuring the interface were the only complexity, I dare to say the only gameplay
  • game presentation were much more limited, elements stand out more by simple limitation of tech that force minimalist design
  • game were much more repetitive, due to storage limitation, palette swap communicate more effectively function than endless asset variation
  • game where shorter and enforced repeated play to pad length, you gotta learn the 3 moves through sheer recurrence
  • you didn’t know better because that didn’t exist, so it was all amazing at the time and you grew attach to those idiosyncrasies of the time (like me and most old timer)
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I disagree with the majority of this. To hit just a few points, this is not a case of remembering the past with nostalgia that twists the reality into a fairy tale; I play old school games to this day, and there are plenty out there that I haven’t played and will discover. To say that the majority of them were designed badly and that bad design/obscurity was the challenge is ridiculous. I am nowhere near old enough to be complaining about children on my lawn and have no memories of old men being angry with me for trespassing on theirs.

“You didn’t know better,” is perhaps my favorite point, since it is pretty much the point I was trying to make. I didn’t know better because I hadn’t played an RTS before. Now they are literally everywhere, and yet here I am, met with the same instructions on how to play as though they haven’t existed since my childhood.

You seem to be mistaking my post in which I am explaining how I dislike having my hand held in a video game for someone saying that video games used to be better, which was not what I was saying. Almost none of points you’ve made make much sense in the context of what I was saying; the fact that more people are playing video games could just as easily suggest that more of us have experience with them and don’t require instruction as it could suggest that more people are playing games for the first time and require it.

I also don’t see how asking a friend or family member is different than asking google or opening the help window. If anything, it was more difficult for me to learn a game than it is now, and I was a lot younger and dumber, and I still got by just fine. Cheat codes have literally nothing to do with in-game instructions, nor does the fact that arcades existed, or really the majority of the points you’ve made. Fewer buttons? My keyboard has always had 101 keys, with the exception of windows keys and what-not.

You mistake my point too, I’m refering to only the quoted part, and it wasn’t about distorted nostalgia, which I point at the last sentence, it’s about attachement to thing like they were back in the day and not letting go when kids have a new context. What I listed was more a list of context, thing that don’t necessarily apply to all games, but if you learn hadoken just by playing the game you are a liar :stuck_out_tongue: Modern game are the way they are now because the context are different not because they are necessary. You basically blame game for your literacy of them, but they always need to have instruction, especially now they are “more” new player born everyday :smile: You grew up but they haven’t yet.

Obscurity was a given back then, we call them “secret”, every games where chokeful of secret room, secret spot, etc … You had to do dumb thing like jumping inside a hole that would normally kill you only to find a barrel, or destroy a wall 2 screen back with a barrel found near another destructible wall, I even found secret in mario 3 that were not documented in any walk through book I use to read. And puzzle had these nasty convoluted solution like using a rubber chicken to cross a chasm, or create a mustache with ducktapes and cat hair. Cheat code allowed you to bypass the normal way to play the game when you couldn’t, until you figure out things, and you did because there is more games released in one day than there is snes and nes game combined. There is still game I can’t google anything about them, not all games are guarantee to have a wiki, a community and be AAA, especially those damn mobile games.

But it doesnt’ matter, you defend your childhood ferociously, because that’s where all your good memory are, there is only a a single first time, and it’s precious, that’s why it feels best.

I generally walk away from games that try to hand hold you for more than a couple minutes. It is especially bad on many mobile games, where they should expect you’re only going to be playing for 10 minutes at a time, yet try to hand hold you for 30.

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I can count the good memories from my childhood on one hand. I actually got into gaming to escape the reality of my childhood. I also cannot shake this feeling that you are still missing the point. This isn’t about a game’s difficulty, or a game’s secrets, or its cheat codes. Older games were given as reference point for comparison, not as an example of perfect execution.

The entire point of my post was that current games hold people’s hands much, much more than games from the past, to the point that I find it intrusive. It breaks my suspension of disbelief. It takes away challenge and, in the case of many mobile games, replaces that challenge with timers that only exist to make you feel as though you need to visit the store to find a sense of reward. Freemium games don’t want there to be a challenge, that would get in the way of you spending money in their store. They want the game to be addictive so you get to the point where your sense of reward comes at a price. That is literally their entire business model. So they offer you a flashing arrow to make sure you get started as soon as possible; discovery means more time between customers and the checkout, and that hurts the bottom line.

That’s mobile, which in my opinion is a shining example of the worst of video games (there are a lot of exceptions, but as a whole this market is saturated with freemium, pay-to-win games that take advantage of people’s addiction to all things mobile). What really bothers me is when this creeps into the rest of the industry the way it has, and devs who release games in the PC/console markets lean on those same “help” systems that they have become familiar with via the mobile markets.

Example: Super Mario Bros, a game that the majority of us have played or are at least familiar with. First level, one of the first pipes; you can beat the level without ever trying to press down on the D pad to enter the pipe. If you were clever enough or the type to try and explore new ideas, then you might try going into the pipe. You might try 10 pipes before you finally find one that actually lets you enter it. That’s discovery. That’s trial and error, learning through experience, and you get a sense of reward that you would not have otherwise gotten had there been a giant flashing arrow pointing at said pipe. I remember playing as a child and trying every single pipe I came across because I knew that eventually I would find one that worked. Finally, to credit Nintendo and their design, at the end of the first level Mario walks up to a pipe himself (while the player doesn’t have control), ducks, and enters it. At that point the player has two choices (the choices I referenced earlier): they can continue their game wondering what they may have missed by not trying all the pipes in that level before jumping on the flag post, or they can continue and try the pipes next time they play the level. That’s replay value, not bad design.

And they now have the Windows 10 store, which at first glance looks incredibly similar to the mobile markets. I dread the thought of PC gaming moving more and more towards UWP.

I think this is part of the reason I enjoy sandbox games.
You just get dropped into a world. No instructions, no goals, no idea what kind of things the world contains. All you can do is start exploring and learning.

These games still exist. AI Wars, Frozen Synapses, Factorio, Kerball Space Program, Dwarf Fortress. All of these games dropped you straight in. The expectation is you would need to go search in other places to figure out how to play. Or trial and error it until you got somewhere interesting.

The thing is hand holding games have ultimately proven more popular in the market. Bigger budget games need more sales to sustain. So they have to do the things which are most popular.

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And I was only focusing on that quote, you can’t blame new audience for not being like you and having different type of want. Oh and trial and error has been decided by the industry to be bad design. Again it’s a matter of perspective, which is what I point, not invalidating your feeling, but you should not invalidate other people feelings too! Just play game aimed at you, avoid game made for a different audience in mind. OR Gave up all hope and adopt a cranky kong avatar.

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I am not trying to be difficult, but couldn’t the same be said about Loot Boxes? They have proven popular in the market and generate sales to sustain the game. I realize that news articles make it seem like the entire industry is up in arms, but obviously a whole mess of players were buying them. I still buy them on Overwatch on the rare occasion I get to sit down and play a few rounds.

As a player:

I don’t know. I don’t like hand holding either, but I don’t think the game teaching you the controls to be hand holding. How you interface with the game is the most basic aspect of it and I don’t think there’s a lot of discovery to be had there. The discovery comes from exploring the mechanics.

Or at least, if a game tells me I can press “A” to jump, I don’t think it has ruined my sense of discovery :slight_smile:

As a developer:

Okay, if I let you do that, will you promise not to send me an angry e-mail about how shitty my game is and how frustrating it is to not know what to do?

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Controls are one thing. I get it, not every game is the same and someone’s game might need to have some things explained. That’s a necessity.

I like the press “A” to jump part, because I immediately thought of Super Meat Boy. It provides instructions, but those instructions are just enough to leave you plenty of room to screw up. There is gameplay time, discovery time, trial and error time in between each set of instructions. It’s weird because the game is very linear but doesn’t feel like as you play, and I honestly think a big part of that is how well they executed the instructions. They really don’t give you much more information than you could gain from looking at the controls window, but it never feels like a lesson; it is woven into the game as a whole so well that you hardly notice you are learning how to play and getting better as you do. It gives you enough information to make the level seem like it can be beaten, but once you get into it, you soon find out that those instructions only get you so far; there will be much more needed to get from point A to point B.

The player also gets to dictate the speed at which they gain instruction, since the next set is not offered up until they beat the previous level, which almost makes the next set of instructions a reward in itself.

Conversely, I recently tried an RTS (that I’ll keep nameless since I am about to use it as an example of what I do not like) that all but played the first several levels for me. It was done under the guise of teaching me how to play, but I really hadn’t learned anything. It’s sort-of like give a man a fish, teach a man to fish. I am much more likely to remember where the build button is if I have to find the panel and then the button rather than having an arrow that points both out. The former ingrains it in memory, while the latter is easily forgotten and can often leave a player feeling about as lost as before the blinking arrow came up. You’re not remembering where the buttons are, you’re remembering where the arrow is that is no longer there was located.

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Sure. Loot boxes worked for funding. They also were declared illegal under gambling laws in several countries. They also produced a fair bit of consumer backlash too. Using them (or not) is a commercial decision game companies need to make based on the potential revenue and the risks. But I’m unsure how this is related to the point of this thread.

You’re taking my use of loot boxes as an example and extrapolating that to the point it no longer fits the narrative. My point was not that loot boxes are good; the way what I said ties into the OP is that I was responding to someone saying that hand holding is good for business. So were loot boxes, at least until the customer backlash, but that doesn’t mean that they are inherently good for gaming as a whole.

If you were going to extrapolate what I said, then it would be that you cannot say something is beneficial simply because it generates revenue, which was what they had said in reply to what I said. Yes, hand holding sure pads the bottom line since it gets people spending money sooner (using freemium as an example here), but just because the industry is not outraged over it doesn’t mean it makes for a better game, which was my original point.

Man you use a lot of words. I’m not sure I’m following you completely. A few thoughts anyway.

Very few people actually care what is good for gaming as a whole. You can see this across the industry. Everyone is concerned about what is good for their own game and their own bottom line. The industry is simply a reflection of the meta that comes out of everyone’s own self interest. That’s the way free markets work. You can see the same sort of pattern across most industries.

Even better games is a relative term. What you consider a better game is different from what I consider a better game.

Hand holding does tend to increase the marketability of a game. It upsets experienced players a little bit, and opens the game up massively for new players. At any given point there are more new gamers then experienced ones, so the trade off is worth it.

Ultimately if you want to change the industry, you need to convince people to pay for games without hand holding. These games do exist. Spend your money on them, and encourage other people to do the same.

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And anyone who has experience in the broader market know it’s a catch 22:

This happen a lot when you start being a game dev more than a gamer

Much ado over nothing.

Know your audience. That’s all.

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I think it’s all about audience.

Big AAA games are going after the largest audience and most of the populous has a low attention span and don’t want to take the time going through a finely crafted tutorial, they want plain and simple: this button shoots, this is how you double jump, these are your tools, go! That works for most games because you want the players to get right into it.

There are plenty of games with great tutorials that don’t feel like tutorials though. It’s pretty much a staple of the Metroidvania games and platforms. They trap you in a room and force you to figure out how to get out. Developers for games like that expect you to experiment and if you can’t figure it out, it’s the 21st century, they know we have Youtube walkthroughs.

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A game that has instructions on how to play does not understand how to teach you how to play, so it substitutes for it with a silly embedded instruction manual, which totally takes you out of the game. In the old days you would NEVER see anything of this sort. The game itself would be set up so that you would learn automatically without even knowing it. Instruction manuals in games is in my opinion a total fail, unless you are trying to appeal to a really super casual audience perhaps who need a bit more hand-holding. The game experience should teach you all you need to know. If the user interface is not intuitive and needs all kinds of tutorial crap just to learn it, it’s a design fail.

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