Jenna In Real Life

I went to a very liberal private school.  From the descriptions I’ve heard of other high schools, my school was actually more like college.  We could leave campus whenever we wanted to walk downtown, and generally were expected to take responsibility for our own educations.  There wasn’t a lot of room for teenage angst :)

My mom used to recount one story from a time she was on campus that really encapsulated the experience for her.  She was walking by two students talking about (I believe) what they had to do to sign up for classes that semester.  As they passed my mom, one of them said “I have no idea how to do this, but I can figure it out.”

This for me sums up what I got out of my high school.  Yes, I learned alot (A LOT), and got one of the best educations I could possibly get for a high school, but more importantly I learned how to learned.  I came out of high school with a healthy work ethic, great analytical reading and critical thinking skills, great organizational abilities, and a love for learning.  I was, it suffices to say, rather over-prepared for college.

How does this relate to tutorials?

At face value, the purpose of a tutorial is to teach players about a game.  For smaller and simpler games, this suffices.  What we need more than this, however, is to give the players tools to learn how to learn about the game.  Particularly for MMOs, we can never possibly teach users everything that they need to know about the game in a simple tutorial.  What we should teach users are things that they can extrapolate from.  We can’t teach users the in-depth workings of entire systems, so we need to teach them smaller parts of that system in a way that helps them understand the entire system.  For example, in “A Tale of the Desert”, you quickly learn that when a sand icon pops up in the upper-left corner of your screen you can click on it to collect sand.  Users can quickly extrapolate from there that the same thing can be done with slate, mud, grass, and any other resource that can be collected.  Clearly, organized and intuitive GUI can play a large role in this.

The second half of teaching players how to learn about a game is teaching them where to turn when they’re not sure about something.  In “A Tale of the Desert”, there were several times in the tutorial area that I was unsure of what to do.  Thanks to previous prompting from the game and clear GUI I could find the information I was looking for, and the helpfulness of the other players also played an extremely important role.  Instead of despairing and feeling stuck, my feelings were more along the lines of “well I’m not sure how to do this but I know I can figure it out.”  And that, my friends, is what we want our players to be feeling when they’re stuck.

One reason I mention all of this is that I recently tried EVE Online.  As a disclaimer, let me just say that the experience I had clearly is not the experience that everyone had as they have been very successful as a virtual world.  While playing through the tutorial, I was simultaneously overwhelmed and bored.  I was immediately confronted with a lot of GUI elements, but my understanding of how they worked never got very deep because the tutorial told me what to do, and not always how or why I was doing it.  Following directions along the lines of “Open GUI A and press button B to open subpanel C and then press button D” quickly bored me.  Progressing through the tutorial, I didn’t really feel like I was grokking anything and put it down after about 45 minutes.  Perhaps at some point I will give it another try, but there’s only so much effort I’m willing to put into something that does not feel intuitive to me.

What have been the best and the worst tutorials that you have tried?  What do you think is the most important thing in teaching players about a game?