What Video Games Have You Been Playing #15: Computer not on fire yet? Better add more mods!

[Takhisis]

Yeah, but, it's junk food. And they don't even get toothbrushes.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I dunno, Aimee. The animals look perfectly happy eating the people.

That's pretty much how I see it. Maybe this national organization's board needs to be invited out to see firsthand just how happy they all are.

 

[Takhisis]

that's rasist, tim

 

[Timsup2nothin]

that's rasist, tim

It is?

Please explain.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

In Witcher 3, I came across a quest where Geralt and a random mage get trapped inside a tower by a Defensive Regulatory Magicon and need to find a Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire to escape.

The Defensive Regulatory Magicon (or DRM for short) belongs to the above mentioned group of the longest-lasting, most effective and hardest to break defensive mechanisms. In order to recognize the individual administering it, it makes use of a portal mounted at the entrance of the area it is to defend. This portal passes streams of magical energy through the body of the person entering and can, in the blink of an eye, determine if this person has the corporeal signature (eyeball structure included) of the entitled administrator. As a result, the only unauthorized individuals that can possibly hope to enter are mimics.
DRM thus makes for an extremely effective and near-unbreakable security measure - but you are in luck, for you hold in your hands the key to bypassing it, namely the present tome, Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire, or GOG for short. In the pages to follow you will find innumerable methods for deactivating DRM, or, even better, bypassing it altogether....

 

[PPQ_Purple]

TLDR: 1. You DO need to teach the interface and basic operations, and concepts. But keep it brief.

That much we can agree on. The difference is just that I believe simply showing is not enough.

Put simply, a good teacher is one that makes you think on what he is teaching until you understand it on your own terms. A bad one simply dictates the answers and expects you to memorize them.

2. Experimentation (or as I prefer to think of it, "play") is better done in the game itself.

I disagree. In any game, but especially one where permadeath is a thing and consequences for failure can be high you want a safe sandbox to experiment in where you can't screw up too badly. Not just because you don't want your experimentation to hurt you in the long run (thus leaving a bad taste for the whole campaign) but because you don't want to be frustrated when you realize after the mission just how much it cost you.

3. Usability testing is rad. It lets you know your audience and gives perspective. Your audience is rarely who you think it is.

True. I guess. But that fails to address the fundamental issue at hand which boils down to me claiming Simon Says is not a valid educational method.

I mean, the thirds thing is almost by necessity true assuming average task and average group. Its similar to the idea that 50% of people are below average at any given thing.

There is bellow average and than there is extremely bad. And the gap is huge.

Your use of "moron" suggests a potentially toxic attitude. As a person with an extremely uneven skill profile I have been in all three groups simultaneously and decades ago in school this would cause a certain amount of expectation whiplash. Teachers who encountered me first in a high ability group wrote me up as having behavioural problems relating to some tasks when in fact I was simply struggling. In the reverse situation they would initially be suspicious and then would ignore me as being inexplicable. I'm saying this because I think being in the moron group a few times would give you a broader perspective.

I personally classify as a moron someone who can't understand situations such as:

Here are your controls. Play around with them until you feel you have grasped the concepts of left click, right click and camera rotation. And when you are done click on the yellow blinking tile to proceed. And instead need to be guided to that tile without being given the chance to tire their brains by experimenting.

Frankly, anyone who is not up to that admittedly huge level of complexity, difficulty and intellectual thinking probably hasn't learned how to open the game up either. After all, you need to click through the installation wizard and it's buttons aren't even highlighted.

And I am not being farcical and insulting here either. I am being absolutely genuine. The installation wizard for the game is more complex and educational than the first mission because it forces you to think and select between multiple options.

One problem here is you think noone could be that stupid, but it is a misconception that ability to game is (only) a function of intelligence. Games and interface usage are largely based on knowledge and experience and there are many good reasons relating to ability, cultural familiarity and convention that they may not be highly skilled with them. Its not unlike learning a foreign language. Heck, lets get super basic:
Young children have to be taught to take turns and to roll the dice. They are not morons for lacking this knowledge, and a person is not a moron for lacking the knowledge of what a movement point is.

How young are we talking about here? Because I seriously doubt XCOM is meant at 3 year olds. For all my harping on how the basic game mechanics are very simple, and they are, the actual game it self with the strategic thinking required to survive and win is not. I freely admit that I can't beat the game at higher difficulty levels. Someone who literally has not grown old enough to roll dice by hand probably can't either.

Another problem here is that you think you know the customer base, the "people who tend to pick up games of that style", which I'm sure you feel are people just like you and who you'd describe in words you'd like to apply to yourself. Unfortunately I don't have Firaxis dataset - what I have is the Global Steam achievements. 85% of players complete the tutorial, 57% of players get to the facility, 34% of players complete the game at any difficulty level, 6% of players have completed the game on difficulty 3/4.

As you said your self we don't have the actual Firaxis dataset. All we have are steam statistics which are fundamentally meaningless without additional information that would give us context to understand those numbers. And those are not going to be forthcoming from blind data gathering such as that steam does.

I'll give you a few questions that came to my mind immediately demonstrate this. There is no need to answer these individually because they are just examples. And they are not questions posed to you. But rhetorical tools to demonstrate my point.

1. How many of those people that complete the tutorial but don't get to the first objective quit because they feel the game is stupid because of the tutorial, get frustrated by their soldiers being forced to die like I almost did? We don't know.

2. How many of those people give up because they get bored of the repetitive nature of the random missions? We don't know. That aspect of the game is its biggest real failing though.

3. How many of those people are just picked up by the hype of the game or because it was on sale and than quit when they find it just does not fit their style? Or that it requires too much time commitment to play (which it really does).

4. How many players just picked the wrong difficulty level, found the game too easy or too hard and quit because of that? This happened to me a couple times with games that I only returned to years later to find them enjoyable.

etc.

(Aside: These player retention numbers are actually very good! Dropout would be higher from an overlong tutorial.) Firaxis brings gamers of all experience levels in house and just watches them play their game, a form of usability testing.

And you know this how exactly?

How do you know that a tutorial that actually taught you the basics of camera control, explosives, destructible terrain and cover in a proper way would not in fact have grabbed the attention of more players and made them bite into the game more in order to enjoy it in all its complexity? You don't. And I don't. We can only speculate.


The only thing we can't speculate on is the scientific facts of teaching people. And those facts are that simply demonstrating the correct solution to a problem and than forcing people to repeat it mechanically does not contain any educational benefit at all. It simply does not transfer knowledge that is useful in any way beyond that single identical scenario.

Firaxis knows their userbase and that is why the tutorial is the way it is.

Let us not appeal to the authoritative knowledge of game companies. Dawn of War 3, the recent Warcraft situation and frankly if you ask me some very questionable decisions in the Civilization series demonstrate that profoundly.

In a way it is charitable of you to assume that everyone is as smart and knowledgeable as you are, but there are hints that you would very quickly lose patience with those who can't learn as fast as you could teach.

The only people I ever lose patience with is those that absolutely refuse to try anything for them self and expect me to literally give them the correct answers every single time. Preferably just do it for them so that they don't even have to remember.

You know, like when 90 year old family members have a popup on their web browser for the 1000000th time and you have to walk over, give them a lecture about clicking X and than click X only for them to forget all about it the moment you turn around. In fact that is the only time I've ever had such an experience consistently.

But the answer to those people clearly isn't just demonstration. Because it demonstrably does not work. No matter how many times you tell them to click X and show them to click X they won't learn to click X. This is because their mindset isn't in the right place. They do not wish to engage with the subject matter. They just want the problem of the popup solved. And to them the solution is NOT to learn how to solve it but to call me in to click the magic button.

Now, I will question if that really is the mindset of people who enter into a tutorial for a product that they payed good money for. But even if it were the way to address it isn't to simply hold their hand and let them drown the moment you let go or to try and repeat the action until you hammer it into their brains, or worse yet to do it for them but to find some way of reaching them and pushing them into that comfort zone where they feel comfortable trying to learn and attempt things for them self and most importantly motivated to do so until they grasp what is expected of them.

I'm seeing a bunch of words and descriptors with emotional and value associated baggage here but not a lot to engage with.

The down side of posting very late at night unfortunately.

I don't think there is a huge gap in what Firaxis and Valve did. Portal 2 is in a genre that is able to do away with UI while nearly no strategy game is. The Portal 2 intro is an extremely tightly controlled environment with an additional layer of using Wheatley to distract you from bumping into the walls of your tiny fishtank. Its very effective but I cant imagine the resources that went into the creation and iteration of it, though I have no doubt they used similar observed playthroughs. I bet the commentary mode has some interesting insights.

Ignore Wheatley entirely. He come far far later than what I am talking about. Just focus on the very first things the game has you do.
1. Perform basic actions with the camera.
2. Perform basic movement actions.

In both those cases you are given button prompts for doing them. Than you are given time to play around with those controls for how ever long (or little) it takes to get used to them. And finally you are given a clear objective so that you can check out of that sandbox mode and enter the game proper.

A novice player that has literally not touched a video game in their life might well take hours running around that room looking at everything. Someone who's played many games before will just check out immediately, possibly taking the time to adjust mouse sensitivity or similar as he goes along. But neither one of them are going to come out of the experience without having grasped the basic skills of movement and camera control.

An aspect that you don't seem to have considered here is that in Portal 2 it is (usually) impossible to make a wrong choice, so the tutorial cannot be failed and experimentation is harmless. How would you allow this in your hypothetical strategy game tutorial. Its a tricky question. Maybe some kind of rewind button? (Into the Breach shoutout).

For a start I would not have had the tutorial narratively tie into the game at all like Fireaxis did. Instead I would have made several basic training missions that teach you the concepts separately and have no bearing on the plot. That way the player can enter those, train to their hearts content and come out when they feel like they are ready.

And this of course means starting the mission over when and if you feel like knowing that you can do things differently every single time and actually see for your self what happens.

What if I take this gamble and try to flank but leave my soldier out of cover? The prompt said flanking gives me extra damage. But it also said it was dangerous to not use cover. What if I throw a grenade to see if I can kick this guy off the building he is on? The tutorial prompt said I could. Well, it's a tutorial with randomly rolled NPC's. I'll just go for it and see what happens!

Strong disagree. This is not the tutorial - this is the tutorial + the first few hours of the game.

That I feel is one of the fundamental cruxes of our disagreement. I strongly believe that a tutorial should give you all the tools you need to bite into the game and get a running start. It definitively should not give you the answers to the more complex strategic questions of how to actually win. But it has to give you all the tools you need to approach those questions in a way that is productive and meaningful or at the very least to recognize they exist and be able to approach them at all.

Dark Souls is sort of the exception that proves the rule in terms of accessibility, but is a useful example in this case. Possibly because (nearly) everyone approached the game as novices. The Asylum was essentially a long corridor where messages primed you with a response, then you encountered a situation where you could trust that that response would help you. Its a mini-rehearsal for the Undead Burg which is the chance to employ your learned skills and yet, importantly, is most definitely within the game and outwith the tutorial. DS1 even accommodates experimental overachievers with the lockpick and sequence breaking, but only after making the "correct" path of the aqueduct clear.

I would argue that actually the entire Undead Asylum is something called a tutorial level. The game proper only starts after you leave that area.

I thought DS1 was much more effective in this structure than DS3. The graveyard was both too wide and too small compared to the asylum, and Iudex Gundyr was too hard for a first boss.

This is a tangent, I know, but personally I did not enjoy DS3 much. It just felt like a big dip in terms of both controls and overall gameplay compared to DS2 and DS1 remastered. It just didn't gel with me.

I'd consider XCOM2 as fitting this structure in the form of Tutorial Mission / Early Missions / Early Plot Mission that gates the Midgame. Tutorials should be brief and teach the essentials. Experimentation is play and should be in the game, not the tutorial.

That is where I disagree. Again, see my response a few moments ago. I believe that by the time you exit the tutorial you should be fully ready to approach the problems of the real game, even if you will take practice to actually start solving them.

And again, I am not saying that the tutorial should actually teach you the answer to the game. Absolutely not. And it should not give you mastery of the skills you need to master in order to beat it either. But it absolutely needs to impart the basic seed of each of those skills in a way that both allows you and more importantly motivates you to continue on to actually master them.

You are damning the virtues of brevity, clarity and simplicity here. Lets consider your very first example that started this all - that you were being grumpy about being forced to make a wrong choice. Ever hear of show, don't tell? When is the appropriate time to teach a player what an HP bar is if they went through the tutorial without getting hit?

Show don't tell is meaningless in the context of teaching something. It's a literally tool used to approach non interactive media like writing or movies. When you have a situation in which you wish to actually impart skills there is much more to it than just blind demonstration.

To use an example of a cooking show, because to me these get it wrong extremely often. A bad cooking show merely demonstrates the recipe taking you step by step through it so that you can follow along like a good little kitchen zombie. A good cooking show gets you interested in cooking, so that even if you don't like the recipe at hand for some reason (like maybe you just don't enjoy fish) you have still picked up cooking skills and will go on to want to keep cooking and trying to cook. And if you do enjoy the dish you will have picked up and remembered all those little tricks and tips and techniques that ensure next time you read that recipe out of your cookbook you can make it on your own WITHOUT having to turn on the VCR and follow along like a zombie.


Simply put the teaching method of "Shut up and do as I tell you" is neither productive nor motivational. It gets the job done if you want to demonstrate the exact solution to an extremely exact problem (example: this is how you change a bulb or close a popup). And even in those cases it has the effect of discouraging learning and the desire to learn by imparting the mental idea that the expert knows best and you should just follow along with the magic incantation he gave you.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

How long is this tutorial argument going to go on?

 

[Senethro]

How long is this tutorial argument going to go on?

I'm done with it. I've presented my case as well as I feel able to.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm done with it. I've presented my case as well as I feel able to.

I agree with your argument fwiw

 

[Timsup2nothin]

In Witcher 3, I came across a quest where Geralt and a random mage get trapped inside a tower by a Defensive Regulatory Magicon and need to find a Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire to escape.

I love those guys.

 

[Takhisis]

How long is this tutorial argument going to go on?

I'm not allowed to discuss yung.carl.jung's broccoli tutorial for Real Life 1.0 so I'm not following anything related to tutorials. Just scroll down.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I just installed my first mod for the Witcher 3.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I just installed my first mod for the Witcher 3.

How much of the land caught fire?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

How much of the land caught fire?

It actually started raining in-game...

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It actually started raining in-game...

Like, regular rain? Or raining fire?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Uh, I guess I'll just put a heavy book on my keyboard for a while.

 

[Takhisis]

Like, regular rain? Or raining fire?

Or brimstone? Rocks? Tears?

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Aimee, is there any game you can't destroy?

 

[AdamCrock]

Aimee destroyed them all , Your resistance is futile !

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Aimee, is there any game you can't destroy?

See my signature