Why Do We STILL Hate Tutorials?

if there's one thing that can be said about video game tutorials it's that they've got kind of a bad reputation don't they in spite the fact that they're designed specifically to help us and without them we often wouldn't be able to enjoy our favorite games both players and developers alike seem to kind of resent the tutorial on one hand players can't help but roll their eyes when yet another game makes them do a bunch of chores before they run out to play for real and on the other developers seem to go out of their way to hide tutorials apologize for them or trick us into thinking they're not happening at all almost as if they're feeling weirdly guilty about the indignity of having to teach us how to enjoy this thing they made it's weird right these kinds of sentiments will be understandable maybe 15 years ago when tutorials consisted either of a labeled picture of a controller or you getting locked in the foam padded safety corridor until it had a jump for half an hour but tutorials nowadays are more or less pretty good the new Spider-Man games for example expertly teach you the ins and outs of web swinging and slinging without ever compromising the power fantasy that's key to all good superhero games God of War Ragnarok cleverly uses cinematic pacing and emotional beats to intuitively introduce mechanics like Spartan rage and tell you when to use them by having you bunch of Bear in the face and the normally very complicated total Warhammer 3 has a mostly linear mini campaign to show you how Base building Works while the units do and just how fun it is to get corrupted by chaos these are all fun ways of teaching you the basics in a way that's worth clear and reasonably engaging what can I say tutorials are basically fine now that of course begs the question though if tutorials are basically good and enjoyable and effective nowadays why has our resentment of them stuck around well I think while there's certainly some residual hatred for us having to sit through the intro to Twilight Princess I think a far more pressing reason is the tutorials as fun and educational as they might be often simply don't work look at card games like magic the Gathering for example a tutorial can get across what the rules are and how the structure of the game works but no amount of instruction can teach you the skills needed to analyze a broad state or to figure out what can't synergize is best with your draft deck life Sim games like stardew Valley do a great job of easing you into a nice chill wholesome experience but damn if playing with a million different Wikipedia windows open while you play isn't basically mandatory for understanding how cool Mechanics Work and how to gather crucial resources and don't even get me started on competitive games dota's quote-unquote tutorial lasts a measly five hours but in order to actually grasp the game let alone get good at it you need to play for hundreds all of these games have tutorials hell most of these games actually have quite good tutorials for what they are but even then they still fail to actually teach us how to play see tutorials are really really good at conveying a particular kind of information by directly communicating to the player seeing them down and teaching them a lesson tutorials are great for getting across objective discrete data so against controls its rules and its systems interactions anything that's direct and straightforward a tutorial is well suited to teach this is why platform was often respond so well to them there's often very little strategy or conceptual depth to a platformer everything you need to know is always on screen and it always functions in a predictable way all things that are very well suited to being explained by tutorials while tutorials are less good at though is conveying large volumes of data in an efficient way building on existing knowledge and conveying Concepts that require a more abstract or intuitive understanding in much the same way as watching a video essay on a movie or game is not the same thing as understanding or experiencing it for yourself tutorials alone can't teach us how to analyze what the most efficient gift is for Makoto how to properly handle a Zergling Rush all the techniques you need to decipher whatever the hell this is supposed to mean because these are problems that require a broader more nuanced or more intuitive understanding than tutorials can effectively give us in this way tutorials are kind of a victim of their own success because developers finally think figure out how to make good ones tutorials have become increasingly ubiquitous this is good but equally I think that the popularity and effectiveness of tutorials has meant that other equally valid and sometimes more effective teaching tools the games could be using instead have gone overshadowed leading to tutorials being used to teach Concepts and techniques that they're not well suited to explaining this has ended up with us presenting tutorials for trying to teach Concepts and games they weren't designed to teach and US failing to spot other means of player education because we're so used to tutorials being the only resource available this sort of thing is really clear in Dead Space the game tries all these increasingly obvious diegetic ways to tell you to cut the limbs off necrons but it's clear all the play testers never noticed So eventually the game just shrugs and gives you a big dumb tutorial anyway of course just encouraging this behavior in future it's a nasty feedback loop and one that can really only be fixed by learning what alternatives to tutorials are out there and how games can use them to teach us in cool new ways so what are those other methods of learning things from games that we need to be on the lookout for while our characterize them mostly into three main groups those being Discovery based learning research-based learning and acclimation-based learning each one providing a different way of conveying information that gives them different strengths and different weaknesses when compared with tutorials which when that is put on the end of This Acronym it spells drat a word that old tummy villains and nobody else used to say uh I just sort of wanted to point that out anyway with the intellectual bar firmly said let's take a look at that first one by which I mean Discovery learning through Discovery is probably the method of player education that people are most familiar with besides tutorials because it's a key part of the challenge and fun of quite a few games the active Discovery itself that being the process of asking a question and then finding out the answer is an inherently rewarding experience and has been since you people lived in caves with the psychological reward mechanisms involved in the discovery process serving to lock in whatever you learn and make it very easy to retain which is great for developing a deeper understanding of particular Concepts look at portal for example fittingly as a game anything around science it uses the fun of Discovery to excellently convey sophisticated information without giving the player any direct instruction in this test chamber all about flinging yourself across gaps glanos doesn't actually tell you the mechanics of how portals can serve your momentum until you've already figured it out for yourself asking the question hmm how do I get up there and then thinking oh what if I simply and then having your suspicions confirmed is a much more effective way to teach this fundamental lesson of portal physics than Simply Having GLaDOS explain it to you and this is a trick that both Portal Games repeat over and over again removing the need for much of any direct tutorialization in either game equally the great pen and paper puzzle game l-o-k which goes out of its way to have no rules explanations at all and teaches purely through Discovery very cleverly takes time to show you some impossible levels that you literally can't beat what for well it's because this way you can internalize The Mechanics for yourself by figuring out why they're unsolvable which is a much more memorable alternative than a simple bullet pointed list of rules Discovery is a learning method is something the games can often build specific obstacles around and that makes it a great way to strengthen a player's attachment to an affinity with the knowledge they gain metroidvanias for example can rely on players to know their Maps inside and out because each new discovery or new ability creates a psychological Landmark the players can use to orient themselves and know where to go next the moment you grab the Giga Dash in Hollow Knight for example it will immediately catalyze a realization of all the new ways you could navigate the map and all the new areas that you can now access at a very satisfying way however there is a downside to this because Discovery often constitutes a challenge it's possible for players to fail that challenge and as a result miss out on whatever the discovery was supposed to be a great case study of this is in Super Metroid it's incredibly frustrating Power Bomb with no obvious navigational use case and no hints of where to actually set off the damn thing the powerbomb often precipitates players getting completely lost because they fail to realize quite fairly that you're supposed to use it here on this glass tube if a tutorial had simply mentioned the powerbombs were work on glass then this probably wouldn't happen highlighting the inherent risk of discoveries as an abstracted teaching Aid this potential for miscommunication is why the best games that use Discovery as a teaching tool need to know when to occasionally just be direct using that info to support future discoveries Elder ring for example will never guide you directly through the world because navigating its environment is much easier and more fun when you can build a personal connection to the various landmarks however its bonfire Replacements will gently nudge you in the rough direction of the critical path to ensure that you're at least exploring in the right direction and aren't getting lost this is also something that tunic does really well for the most part tunic is a game with very minimal direct tutorialization instead doing almost all of its teaching through deciphering a cryptic virtual manual because each page in essence constitutes a puzzle that must be solved to learn what information it hides things you learn in tunic are rarely forgotten and build on each other in a very natural way but also in order to ensure players don't get completely lost the manual makes fairly liberal use of straightforward English to convey information that's either a bit unintuitive and you probably wouldn't figure out through play although the game can't risk you not knowing tunic tells you fairly directly that you'll need a lantern to explore the Crypt because not knowing that would just be kind of frustrating but working out where the lantern is that requires a bit of exploration and detective work and that can be really satisfying and will also help you remember an important room for much later of course not all of tunic's Discovery moments work I totally missed out on learning how to level up and ended up getting creamed by the first boss for like two hours in a row which wasn't very fun and that leads me onto research as another method of learning a big problem with both tutorials and Discovery challenges run into is that they deal mostly with individual bits of important information not how an entire game fits together to learn the workings of a whole game via these more specific methods we'll eat up an insane amount of Dev time to make and probably wouldn't work either because we just get bored at a certain point and stop paying attention what this means is that in order to fully learn some games particularly ones with a lot of different systems the mechanics working in parallel sometimes we're just going to have to seek out information and figure out what it means all by ourselves and unfortunately a lot of games don't make this very easy take The Binding of Isaac for example according to its creator the worst thing in the game is the fact that you can't see what a particular item does until after you've picked it up and even then the descriptions are usually pretty unhelpful picking up what you thought was an upgrade can and will completely ruin your build and your run without warning and until you've learned every single item this turns the game into a really frustrating exercise in Randomness with little in the way of skill or strategy by modding the game to provide this information beforehand however you can make a much more strategic deductions and start thinking about each run on a more sophisticated level not just making the game more interesting but making it way easier to learn how the various systems and synergies fit together it's simply empowering players to gather and utilize important information by ourselves can be an incredibly powerful teaching tool and it can also go a long way towards smoothing over the rough edges left by gaps in tutorials and Discovery I love basically any game with a practice mode or training dummies or Bots because they let you poke around and try interesting things out without the pressure of a live fire environment like how Splatoon 3 lets you practice mechanics in your aim with various weapons and its loading screens and how armored Core 6 lets you learn how a new Mech build handles and feels to move around on a Sandbox before you get faced with somebody like this bastard even in games without dedicated practice modes just having transparent access to information can also drastically improve our ability to learn games Minecraft's eventual edition of a recipe browser made its crafting system way less opaque and allow players to figure out for themselves where they wanted to go next and also let them play with a bunch of new toys and materials they otherwise wouldn't have known existed making this process of research easier also means cutting down on junk information though we to be honest don't really need to learn at all stuff like Quest logs and map markers really help to cut down on mental overhead and let us focus on remembering and understanding the actually important stuff outer Wilds is a pretty unforgiving and mentally taxing game but it goes a long way towards amazing frustration by being really quite generous with helpful reminders of where it is go next where you were previously and what you found there giving you a nice easy repository of information to refer back to rather than having to schlep all the way to the end between caves just to look at a few wall carvings competitive games are also starting to make use of this philosophy Street Fighter 6 is way easier to get into than his predecessors thanks to the modern control scheme which means you no longer have to remember a bunch of combo inputs by Road I can just research what the moves actually do speaking of someone who originally learned and still uses the classic system I'm pretty jealous of all the people who don't have to remember all girls stupid fiddly combos anymore research is a teaching tool is all well and good but it does run into problems many games are rely on not on you learning a broad spread of information but instead having an intimate and intuitive familiarity with the game's low level systems the reading and practice alone just can't teach you this is why manuals fill out a favor to begin with an academic understanding of the game is all well and good but it does nothing to teach you how a game actually works and no fundamental skills to actually support it I think the best way to gain this sort of intuitive understanding of games is through acclimation rather than directly informing players of anything but instead by gradually introducing new Concepts and slowly iterating on existing mechanics and strategies games could encourage us to develop an intuitive understanding of their systems entirely passively as we build up layer upon layer of smaller more foundational lessons the most obvious example of using acclimation to sneakily build a player's confidence and set them up to handle whatever new stuff comes their way is in the case of Mario's classic four-step level design based on the four-part narrative form of key show 10 ketsu wherein a new mechanic is introduced elaborated upon Twisted in some way and then brought to a conclusion like how there's this consistent through line in Mario Odyssey sand Kingdom all about capturing and steering bullet bills through successively more devious obstacles so that by the time you reach this boss guy you actually already know how to beat him without needing to be told because his fists work just like bullet bills it's excellent by gradually climbing in players not just on what they need to do but how to think about and perceive the game titles can continue to help players long after a distinct tutorial will have outlived its welcome in canov wormholes for example a tricky puzzle game involving uh worms and cans the game cleverly avoids the comprehension brick wall puzzle games are known for by including optional mini puddles designed to serve as stepping stones often subtly teaching you important mechanics that you can then take with you onto more difficult challenges that you're now prepared for the same goes for starcraft's campaign it's not just a fun time it's also a sneaky training mode that teaches you what all the units do and how to perform fundamental strategies as each faction like building an economy defense and countering various enemies going a long way towards preparing you for multiplayer if you pay close attention you can even spot games doing this same gradual clueing in of our understanding on a psychological level too survival horror games like Resident Evil 4 love ramping up the difficulty early on to get you to realize that feeling like you're on the back foot and having to scrounge for ammo and health doesn't mean you're losing and is actually totally normal equally XCOM goes out of its way to kill most of your work keys in the tutorial but makes Replacements very cheap to show you that a couple of dead Chumps is nothing to be too upset about reducing this thing of what can be a very demoralizing part of the game still though while acclimation's indirect nature does allow games to invisibly and gradually make players more comfortable with Advanced strategies and situations over time some games simply can't be dumbed down in this way dota's beginner mode has all the best intentions with it limiting you to just the 20 simplest of its 100-ish Heroes but given that the items and game mechanics are still just as complex as normal it doesn't end up doing all that much to reduce the difficulty cliff and Paradox games trying to give you little isolated enclaves so you're not under threat as training modes but as well intentioned as these areas are you still get basically every mechanic in the game dumped on you from minute one because the systems literally aren't designed to work as anything other than a complete hole now I know what you're thinking if all of these supposed alternatives to tutorials also have massive gay big flaws then by switching to them wood games as a whole really be fixing anything sure tutorials might be good covering the basics and bad at teaching Nuance but equally Discovery is unreliable and can't apply to broader understanding research can't actually teach the fundamental skills needed to put your knowledge into practice and acclimation can't teach games at the level of depth and sophistication required to understand the more complex systems all of these methods are flawed some deeply so and that's why I'm not claiming that we should repeat the same mistakes games are currently walking into with tutorials and make them the only source of knowledge I'm saying that in order to truly learn a game effectively we need to take Knowledge from multiple sources it's only by using all of these techniques together the games can actually give us a comprehensive education basically all the games I've mentioned that teach players efficiently use multiple methods in order to do so tutorials set the foundations Discovery secure important lessons research empowers players to progress on their own and acclimation means that players never feel out of their depth but even more so it's also crucial for us as players to seek out Knowledge from multiple sources too even when that means reaching out beyond the limits of an individual game how do you learn to play those infamously tricky hardcore games that can't teach you themselves it's simple you play other more accessible Games first building up a bank of knowledge and lessons that you can then use to master those more complex titles Magic the Gathering is a very complicated game and no first time card gamer should be expected to get it right away that's why games like Hearthstone Marvel snap and slay the Spire exist their entry-level experiences that allow you to get right into the fun all the while picking up on the ins and outs of how to play a trading card game like card Advantage Tempo and synergies Concepts that you could then take with you into more advanced games hell I love RTS games but even a Genius Like Me didn't get their start with the likes of Starcraft an off-world Trading Company as a kid I fell in love with the genre through Lego Rock Raiders and Pikmin much more beginner friendly and straightforward games that nevertheless teach you the Strategic principles and mindset that you need to get your head around more complex games actually Pikmin 4 in particular really makes a point of hammering home the concept of Dan Dory or efficient planning as you play encouraging you to build up Pikmin reserves have a plan ahead of time I never let any resources go to waste a set of lessons that can easily be applied to any strategic game in fact the same goes for almost any quadrant quote hardcore genre even right down to the quite obscure ones want to get up to speed with the typically quite difficult genre that is ultra fast to Boomer Shooters while then play Chomp goblins a mini Boomer shooter designed by David shamansky creator of dusk that's really short and covers all the Doom clone Basics like non-linear levels and the delicate interplay between the bits of your toolkit what about survival horror games well then the recently released my friendly neighborhood coincidentally released by Jon and Evan shamansky yes Brothers of David is a very faithful Resident Evil Style game but with a lighter touch when it comes to Resource Management and basically nothing in the way of Gore or horror also making it the only mascot horror game ever made to play the concept straight and for another perspective you might recall that at the beginning I mentioned having to play stardew Valley with a Wiki open right well since when was that always a bad thing while wikis can't spoil you on stuff and while they shouldn't be used to lack games with bad player education Systems off the hook looking at you Warframe there are loads of games out there practically designed to be played with a browser Widow open serving as a dedicated digital encyclopedia for developers that can't afford to maintain one themselves allowing you to check what kind of gifts Alex likes whenever you want because he's a picky bastard Community Resources can also serve as a kind of accessibility setting don't want to poke around in Dark Souls 3 for hours just to learn how to get to the cool nameless King fight cool you don't have to just check the wiki and enjoy the cool area it's a dampside better than never finding it at all and for the people about to complain in the comments I hereby congratulate you on being one of the seven people in the universe to get to this stupid obscure area without looking it up beforehand it's also worth mentioning that the community aspect of sharing cool discoveries Easter eggs and just plain what the hell is going on is also the reason why the likes of Minecraft and fortnite are some of the most successful games ever sometimes being obtuse is actually very sensible from a business perspective at the very least learning is a tricky thing it's more than the simple conveyance of information it's skill that has to be cultivated and built up all on its own and that means that different people are going to respond to it in different ways by increasingly emphasizing just one form of communication not only are games leaving out people who don't have the patience or comprehension skills for tutorials they're also ironically not teaching us how to learn and making us present tutorials as a result the only way to fix this issue is to look Beyond direct instruction and spot all the other ways that we can potentially learn from games deliberately or not for obvious reasons I've mostly covered intentional ways the games teach us but there's nothing to say that we can't move towards better educating ourselves on how games work entirely independently install mods to make your decision making and planning easier ignore the main quest for a bit and go practice your fundamental skills and gameplay knowledge so you'll always be able to handle whatever comes your way and always be sure to interrogate things that you find interesting and ask questions of a game's environment and mechanics because sometimes games simply won't tell you when there's an important lesson to learn and also as a closing note why not give tutorials a bit of slack there's some stuff that is actually way easier to learn when taught once directly and the classic gamer opinion of wanting to learn everything organically and feeling insulted when a game tries to help you is actually just as close-minded and just as ineffective and attitude to learning as expecting everything to be spoon fed to you now open wide and say ah because there's a knowledge plane coming in for a landing do you want to know how world one one teach you how to jump yeah you do come on open wide [Music] there we go well uh that was upsetting wasn't it anyway with hopefully your attention refocused and alert let's get right down to that fan favorite part of the video which is the after the video segment that part of each and every episode where I talk for a little bit about some cool internet things and this one is more relevant than ever because I was just on a podcast it's the video gems podcast a little thing where some cool YouTubers interview some other cool YouTubers and also me about various topics relating to what it's like to make silly internet content uh on my appearance I generally make a full out of myself and talk about some interesting things so it's well worth watching also although she wasn't available for my appearance I'd be remiss not to give a small bonus shout out to aronok the only host of video gems I've yet to promote on this channel they're an excellent video essayist specializing in queer representation in media with a video all about the quite frankly incredibly on the nose trans symbolism in The Matrix being a real highlight that made me feel very very stupid both times I watched it please check her and the rest of the video gems crew out of course that's not all I've also got to talk about my crew which is to say my patrons do you want this segment to be me Shilling some random [ __ ] like raid Shadow Legends or nordvpn are you glad I don't have to do that well if you are get down on your goddamn knees and thank my patrons like the generous Souls they are supporting the channel on patreon is by far the best way to ensure the production of more videos with one dollar for one month being equivalent to more ad views than you could ever possibly accumulate alone and in exchange you can get such cool stuff as behind the scenes content bonus video game analysis that I couldn't fit into this video Early Access to stuff and of course a very special shout out right at the end want to get on the side boom that'll be five dollars want to get in the exclusive VIP Zone that'll be eight and if you want a voice shout out well then by gum that'll be 10 of your hard-earned dollars putting you among the company of These Fine people who are agent Maxwell Ali Wright Andrew lebrano asaran alner 94 bardik Dragoon Brennan Spalding Brian notariani buy more Skyrim for Todd Constantine amend Corey Gerard cosmics 360. Daniel menges Das kangaroo David Setzer Dirk Jan Karen belt diglettier Exxon Edward Franklin Woods Eugene balkin Gaskell ifr93 isaw Dano Jacob Dylan riddle jinkeloid John Gallie a Jordan gear Justin Dent Kevin help us Luke kakoran mace window 54 Marika vladalina alter Mark valent Max felipov Michael C Nate Graf nwdd Oliver mahofa Patrick Romberg Peter D thomasic mind me pronouncing that one wrong the whole time Reddit X Regal regex Rey's dad Sean Mattox Steve Riley Tyler Duncan Uprising Whimsical wisp Zach brandtmeyer and ciao okay that's it that's all and I will see you around bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 179,694

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, New Games, Tutorials, Best Tutorials, Annoying tutorials, Undertale, Celeste, Pikmin 4, Far Cry, Far Cry Blood Dragon, Portal, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Tunic, Runescape, Metroid, The Binding of Isaac, Minecraft, Terraria, Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil 4, DUSK, Chop Goblins, My Friendly Neighbourhood, Stardew Valley, LOK, Dead Space, Training, DOTA, God of War

Id: Mjsbftew1wA

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023