High Dynamic Range Lying

Being a gamer for the majority of the time I’ve lived upon this planet, my experiences have shaped the way I interact, not only with gaming based media, but with the world itself. Steven Johnson wrote in his 2006 book, “Everything Bad is Good for You”, that a gamer’s first reaction when presented with a new game environment, is to test its boundaries. Gamers test the abilities of their character, and the bounds of the world, to find what they can and can’t do. Often this test can result in the player character’s death, or an undesirable outcome, but it’s a natural and beneficial process.

Gamers come in all different types. Some enjoy poring over a thick full cover manual before turning the game on, soaking up as much information they can. Others would rather start the game as quickly as possible, skipping manuals and tutorials in favor of a guess-and-test approach. New gamers, on the other hand, do not seem to pick up games so easily.

When I returned to Colorado last winter to visit my family for the Christmas holidays, I found that that scientifically methodical approach to gaming is in fact not a natural reaction. I watched as my parents, and eventually my cousins, had their first bout with Nintendo’s Wii Sports.

Wii Sports could not have an easier learning curve. The game provides visual aids on the screen when a player first begins one of the mini games, to help the player grip the controller properly, and provide fluid motions. Despite all of these pointers, several family members found themselves lost.

“What do I do?” was always the first response. My aunt flailed the controller around, unable to figure out what to do next. The game wouldn’t continue without the correct button presses. “Read what it says on the screen,” I suggested, pointing to the corner of the screen where a diagram of what to do had appeared.

For the most part, people seem to find tutorials intrusive and irritating if they’re too structured not integrated into the game, but find the game intensely unapproachable and inaccessible if no help is provided at all. What is a developer to do?

First Person Shooters have had their fair share of approaches, from integrating the tutorial into the story in Half Life, to hiding it behind a simple calibration session when the player awakens from cryogenic slumber in Halo. These tutorials tend to teach the player how to do absolutely everything, from looking around to aiming the weapon. RPG tutorials tend to stick to teaching the player the essentials of the combat system, and how to interrupt the game’s statistics system, rather than teach the basics of movement and camera control.

Playstation era Final Fantasy titles were the worst offenders when it came to introductory tutorials. Rather than letting the player follow instructions to perform certain tasks within the menu, the game would scroll through each menu automatically, slowly. Even if the player had never played the game before, they found themselves rapidly hitting start in a vain attempt to skip the entire tutorial, and learn the mechanics on their own at a later time.

What of manuals, though? How much information should be left in the manual for the player to discover, and how much information should be given to the player in tutorial form? I have always been of the opinion that a manual should serve as more than a simple functional “how-to” book. With the prevalance of, and the demand for tutorials in gaming today, a simple black and white 10 page manual with basic instructions is nothing more than a redundancy.

The best manuals, these days, are full color ones that not only provide reference material if a player forgets how to perform a specific action in the game, but also offer background information for characters, objects and the world as a whole. It’s especially nice when a manual provides several pages of optional back story and mythology to read through, like Starcraft or Diablo II.

What needs to be done is fairly simple, but it’s the implementation that becomes difficult. Moving forward, we have to look more at how to provide players with the appropriate information at the right time, without coddling the player, and slowing the gameplay to a halt. Perhaps a manifesto is in order:

1) Tutorials should be interactive, rather than recorded video of the gameplay. We play games, not watch them.

2) Provide only the appropriate information for the situation is currently facing. Giving the player too much information can overwhelm them, and confuse an otherwise simple game mechanic.

3) Provide visual aids when explaining something if possible. If the tutorial is concerning health, draw a circle around the health bar to draw the player’s eye over to the task at hand.

4) Do not repeat helpful information unnecessarily. Provide the information once, and allow the player to toy around with the tools at their disposal. Provide a single button press that will repeat the tutorial instructions, in case the player is confused. Nothing is more irritating than a game barking the same orders repeatedly.

5) Provide large manuals that don’t just offer redundant tutorial information, but also offer full color art, additional literature for the player, and some other extras.

6) Don’t bother extensively teaching the player how to do simple movement, unless your control scheme is something whacky and/or new. Even new gamers are smart enough to figure it out, as long as you provide a simple correlation between the appropriate stick or button, and the action.

Manuals and tutorials have, for too long, been redundant, intrusive, and sometimes completely useless. Considering both of these tools can make or break a player’s initial impression of a game’s environment, one would think they could spend some more time on the “first impression.”

Have any ideas on how tutorials and manuals could be improved? Drop us a line, or just simply leave a comment.

NOTE: Please stop accosting me for the erroneous grammatical nature of “How do I played games?” It is a reference (albeit possibly too vague) to the internet meme “How do I shot web?” I’m surprised people on the internet still do not know about it.