Why video game tutorials are a necessary evil
[ad_1]
In my time I have promised allegiance to many masters on this earth. Educated men and women: Buddhists, dissidents, Jedi. Their words — always measured — often resonate at critical moments. When I face an unexpected attack, every time my enemies reveal themselves, the wise advice of my best comes out of the deepest fold of my brain, reminding me to hit it off. [square] for a quick attack.
Of course, I need that information. I’m dead without that, and because of any game I’m playing, it won’t be so much fun if I have to die a dozen times out of knowledge. (Bright or not, Souls games offer the same fascination as hot wax.) A quick attack is not always the case [square]. Maybe it’s for you [Y]. Maybe you are playing in a hospital simulator and want to hire a nurse, there is no need for a quick attack. Of course, you need to know which button to press, but also when to press. Conditions, use cases you need. You need a tutorial.
Video game tutorials, as a category, are neither good nor bad; they are absolutely specific cases. They can be arts or underestimated. They function as a preface to amusement, and seem rarer than that; any novel opened with a family tree or any television program would use a warm-up comic to remind the viewer how to laugh and applaud. Basically, tutorials are just another stubborn convention of maturing support. Popular films and shows are made up of tropes of all kinds. Like flashbacks, cliffhangers, and open colds, the tutorials were subjected to natural selection.
In the arcade era, when the immediate and final goals of the game were completely aligned — destroying the invading ones, passing them along the Frogger road — didactic questions abound. They operated as a solitary joystick and a button or two as a single-numbered instrument; their roles were intuitively felt. Most of the games were more difficult at linear levels than at linear rates, which means that playing the first one is equipped for the next ones. The players took charge of their tutoring.
“Back then, no one needed an on-screen invitation to tell us how it works,” says Patrice Désilets, founder of the successful Ubisoft franchise Assassin’s Creed.
Compared to this laissez-faire model, today’s tutorials can be enjoyable. There is frankness in the constant progress of invasive spaces, the clock that marks them The crisis of time, the way ghosts always win in Pac-Man. These games are governed by sets of rules, but are fully represented on the screen at all times. Our immersion is immediate because there is no additional context, let alone subtext: just play.
What changed? Of course, the games became more sophisticated. Software makers added moves, hardware manufacturers added buttons. And more and more, the narrative — the oldest convention of humanity — appeared in things.
If you’ve played a game that depicts a never-cut scene, a star bowl, or a weapon with a name, you can argue that video game writing is responsible for a modern tutorial because it encompasses other narrative concepts than mechanics. and tends to circulate uncut exhibits. Blame the writers!
Bad writing can’t explain the friction of a frustrated initial level – an inappropriate gap between desire and outcome, a way to stumble upon equal deaths with the same rigid sequence. We start out as a newborn giraffe struggling to stand up to each game. a well-designed tutorial alleviates the time lost in non-production stumbles. Tutorials don’t exist to ruin narrative edges – they do exist to access unfamiliar 3D spaces.
“It’s about teaching the real story of a game to play,” Désilets says. “Everything else is noise.” It is a rigorous assertion of the creator of one of the most baroque plots in the game, and suggests that although tutorials can start the process, the best games provide a continuous learning curve. To play the power of progress. “We do story about it, character development and what we do, but deep down, it’s about teaching people to play with mechanics inside the loop and within systems.”
[ad_2]
Source link