Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
General: Game Tutorials & How We Learn
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh recently attended the LOGIN conference. While there, she attended a lecture that focused on the tutorials in video games and how they could be approached differently.
)
Sheri Graner Ray is no stranger to the game industry or game designers. She has been making games since 1990, is the author of Gender Inclusive Game Design - Expanding the Market, a co-founder of the International Game Developer's Association and has been recognized for her work in gender and games. In her lecture, she spoke of the three different types of learners:
Visual learners - those who learn best by reading and visual aids
Audio learners - those who learn best by listening
Kinetic learners - these are those of us that can't sit still but have to move while learningShe then moved on to the two knowledge acquisition modes which were what the lecture was mostly about:
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I think you've raised an excellent point, about exploratory and modelling styles of learning. Although it's true that women love to explore areas in a game and try out new things, I certainly did my best as I grew up to learn from other people's mistakes, so that I wouldn't have to make the same mistakes. Just look at your Windows settings; how often do you fiddle with and tweak them? Women would love to experiment with these settings as muych as men, and some do (I've "broken" at least one system doing just that, but I learned a LOT in the process), but most are, of course, afraid they'll break it and lose all of their information.
It's possible that as a result, women have a better grasp of what a game's death penalty should be. In the back of my mind, I find I only care when my character dies if it happens several times in a row... and that's just the annoyance of paying repair bills. It bothers me that there's little else to make me careful as I play.
Good article!
one of the few things I like about being in a Beta is trying out new characters and doing the thing a number of times with character wipes in between. You can learn on something that isn't a 'real' character.
Good post!
It's true about boys, the jump in and mash buttons until I've learned it. versus the how's and why's in general females seem to want before jumping in. I tend to start playing and then read the tutorial when I get stuck or can't figure out what to do.
I do set up my UI as soon as possible though, as being left handed the WASD is not an option and I like my screen set up to look as close as possible MMO to MMO as it makes game hopping much easier. Games that don't allow for that are off the list quickly.
I do hope developers will put a bit more thought towards female learning in game. Its the same with the whole map reading - women tend to be landmark oriented versus direction/mileage. The go three miles East turn and head eight miles North, then NorthEast 3/4 mile versus go to the blue house with the big oak tree, turn there go past the gas station and turn next to the walnut orchard.
I was trying to think which game has the best tutorial and honestly I'm not really sure one is better than the rest.
Proud member of Hammerfist Clan Gaming Community.
Currently playing: RIFT, EQ2, WoW, LoTRO
Retired: Warhammer, AoC, EQ
Waiting: SWToR & GW2
I favor a page from the RPGs: the journal. All help files accessed in game go into your personal journal and can be accessed thru the journal at will, whenever you need them. They should also, like pages, be constrained to a single page of information, no more than 2000 characters long, and worded simply enough that the idea they are trying to describe is passed on almost effortlessly. It's sad that City of Textwall didn't get it right for those playing, since they made their game less than intuitive and help files are really a necessity, not an option.
Be that all as it may, is it so hard to keep things organized and ready to roll? I think not. It seems to be a fairly standard system used outside of MMOs. Why haven't they adopted them into their fold, yet?
As for repetition learning (what you call modeling), kinda makes the kill 10 rats quests seem almost like they thought about that, huh?
I believe the third 'learner' type is kinesthetic - not meaning so much 'moving while learning' but rather a learner who learns by active participation (jargon: "hands-on learner"). Kinesthetic learners are often the ones who dive into something and enjoy experimenting with things to see what they do, rather than reading the instructions. They learn best by repeated performance of an action.
There are also hybrid types. Those who learn things by hands on but also read the instructions. Or those who can do something but need to hear someone explain it before they try. Then there are those who balance (or vacillate between) all three learning styles - which unfortunately is typical in learners with problems involving the ability to focus where they need to move back and forth between learning styles to absorb the material they are trying to learn.
Kinesthetic learners are sometimes misdiagnosed as having an attention deficit disorder. If faced with a learning method that involves a lot of visual (reading) material, they can become quickly distracted, negatively impacting their ability to absorb information.
The more interactive the 'tutorial' is, the better I feel it teaches. Allowing the learner to partcipate rather than just read static text enables them to learn both visually and kinesthetically, And I am not talking about just reading about a task then completing a simple action. I am talking about actually engaging the player in a meaningful experience during the tutorial, as if they were really in the game. Especially for those of us who have the attention span of a two year old with a bottle of energy drink.
I never really noticed the City of Heroes 'wall of text', but then again, the first time I read it, I had played the game since long before they added the 'enhancement' part to the tutorial, so I was more just reading it to see how they were presenting it. The game itself is built around elaborate story-lines, which involve huge amounts of reading via the game 'contacts', so that extra bit didn't seem out of place to me.
It's going to be tough to get a decent shift towards balancing the learning styles in tutorials ....
For reasons you've already stated, the majority are explorers.
And they will bitch up a storm on game forums about how much 'xyz game sux !!!11one1'
They will bitch and whine, because they are selfish, they dont care about your enjoyment,
what's in it for them is paramount...
But then again I don't actually care how bored they are with repetition in a tutorial, I'm only interested in whats good for me.
Good article.
MMOs do tutorials very badly. CoH/V's tutorial isn't bad, but in-game explanations from that point are. Fallen Earth's original tutorial was awful because it was nothing like the game it represented.
The best MMO trial I played was Vangard because it gave a very solid overview of the title and its systems... right up until the final dungeon, which was a kick to the testicles in terms of making me want to subscribe. It's a separate area called Isle of Dawn iirc and was built specifically as a lengthy tutorial.
For too many MMOs who seem to think the end-game is everything, they really need to actually engage new players if they want to see their titles continue to grow.
If i remember correctly i really enjoyed the tutorial in The Chronicles of Spellborn. It started from the very basics and guided the player without giving too much freedom to keep the focus. Now this is really from a year back experience so i don't remember the details, but that tutorial really stuck with me as at least a step to the right direction. If you're interested in tutorials i recommend to try it out.
The only game designed with a "danger room" I can remember is Planetside... you could go in the training room, try every weapon, vehicle and item, test its effects and decide which ones suit you best to purchase with certification points... there were fake targets to test the stuff on and to learn distances, ballistics, damage at different distances and so on... i'd like to see that kind of concept more in the MMOs (often skills don't even have decent descriptions... so you need to go the trial&error way, but there often isn't an easy (and cheap) way to undo what you've done just to try out stuff...
My wife is the Explorative gamer in our house, happy to charge in guns blazing and then rant when she dies 5 seconds later. I am the Modeler who likes to watch mob pathing and understand the mobs aggro and social patterns before making a move.
That said, we don't group together very often.
Champions Online has bot rooms to try your new skills on. Not exactly a DANGER room, but you can see how the skill works and if you don't like it can choose something else before leaving .
I am a female gamer, and this makes SO much sense to me. The EQ reference brought back memories of a female friend of mine, completely lost in EQ due to fear of exploration. Needless to say, she didn't play for long.
ATM I am slogging my way through the beginning of Red Dead Redemption and getting nowhere fast. The " tutorial" is nothing but do this, get killed, try it again until you don't get killed. I would much rather know what's expected of me BEFORE I have 6 men with guns in my face.
Great article. I remember my first mmo, a f2p called Kalonline, and how absolutely lost I felt. I was a late starter (about 44/45 at the time) and if I hadn't been able to keep asking my son (much to his irritation) I think I would have given up on mmo's there and then.
Being a gamehopper, I also tend to set up my UI and keybinds first so that they are constant over games. It's hard to remember back now to not having a clue, but having just played the trial of Dark Age of Camelot and needing to ask questions like "how do I hide cloak/helm" it's kind of brought it all back. In fact, comparing the tutorial in DAOC with that of WoW or, more recently, Allods, there does seem to have been some improvement.
Another female player, I think I tend towards the modelling style of learning. Whenever I've installed a new cpu or gpu, I like to go online first and google what I'm doing until I get a set of instructions, with pictures. I really like to be sure that I'm not going to break something, or in gaming situations, die unecessarily. I'm another one who likes to watch the mobs behaviour carefully before making my move; strategy ftw ^^
I very much like the idea of the tutorial in a game being available later to refer back to and I believe some games (can't remember which atm) do offer this if you click the help button (finding that help button, of course, will also be a challenge in some games).
p.s. Has spellcheck for messages vanished or is it just me?
Anyone else remember Dungeon and Dragons Online's original tutorial area (before Korthos island). In that area the player was taught how to block, how to dodge, how to access their spells and learn new spells, about swimming, several things about NPC interraction and advancement, and many other basics of playing the game. I think it was very close to a balance between modeling and exploring. And dodging and blocking those golems was a lot of fun!
The new tutorial doesn't really do any of that... very explorative in its approach. A quick hand-holding dungeon that teaches only a couple basics with some chatty NPCs then the players are dumped into the starter zone ('snowy' Korthos).
Wtih the result that new players are constantly asking questions in chat while in the new starter zone the answers to which they would have learned in the old one.
Go figure.
While this may be all well and good, one thing that pops out at me is 'how much needs to be spoon fed?'.
I'm not outright opposing this article but I am saying that one needs to consider where the line between tutorial and teaching it's players not to think for themselves is. I have to be honest, there were parts in this article that I scoffed to myself about because I saw it discouraging the user from employing brain power.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving users more access and tools (danger room is a nice idea/ reacessing tutorials with ease is a great idea too) but there's a point where more is too much and starts hindering the game, players and community as a whole. Like the article said, tutorials need to be about how to use the interface(etc) and not how to level your character or think/strategize.
Yhea when you say Danger Room it means the X-men's training room where they could simulate ANYTHING, only a few game have training rooms so well defined, IE: Argentum (very old latin, local morpg), Smash Brothers (yhea not morpg but still DOES have a perfect Danger Room)
But just because the examples of games with perfect Danger Rooms are few and far between doesn't mean the feature isn't uber, every game should have an extremelly customisable Danger Room.
Being an online game fan for many many years, some controls/systems just come naturally to me. I don't need tutorials on how to move or interact with the game world.
With that said, I found that in the Asheron's Call closed beta...tutorials would have been a welcome relief. It was hard to be a Kinesthetic learner when the world was vast and nothing was explained. They improved this a slight (...slight...) bit before release but many players just wandered around with no clue what to do or where to do it. And many left the game for that reason.
I was reminded recently how people can forget how to play...even when they've played for years and years...if there is a time gap between gaming periods. I re-introduced my ex-girlfriend, whom I met in The Realm in 1996, to the current online gaming scene. We stayed in that game and moved to many others over the years. But she had to step away from gaming when it affected her life in negative ways. Now, she is re-introducing herself to online gaming starting with Free Realms. Free Realms has great tutorials for learning the systems...perfect for her since she is in essence just another NOOB again. I showed her a couple other games but she found the learning curve daunting...since they don't have "lead me by the nose" tutorials. Free Realms is perfect for her now.
I am of the mind that if a game's tutorials are too simple and "insult your gaming intelligence", then just skip through them. Tutorials should always be created to teach the absolutely total gaming NOOB... the well versed gaming player will just skip them anyway, in my humble opinion.
TQQdles™,
Dolnor Numbwit
Eternal Newbie