If Mario Was Designed in 2010
hiwiller.com
hiwiller.com
http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page4.jsp
"But if you avoid the first Goomba and then jump and hit a block above you, a mushroom will spring out and you'll get a shock. But then you'll see that it's going to the right so you'll think: "I'm safe! Something strange appeared but I'm okay!" But of course when it goes against a pipe up ahead, the mushroom will come back! (laughs)" ... "At that point, even if you panic and try to jump out of the way, you'll hit the block above you. Then just at the instant where you accept that you're done for, Mario will suddenly shake and grow bigger!"
It turns out they panned it so you cannot avoid picking up that first mushroom that makes you big. They expected the first players to see it as an enemy, so they wanted to trap you into picking it up and then showing you that it made you more powerful.
Barely anyone notices that this was forced, but now everyone takes it for granted that the the mushrooms are good!
the mushrooms are good
I think this is an important distinction, since they clearly could have put the player in a situation where the mushroom is both unavoidable and necessary to advance. They could even had done something as heavy-handed as tutorial shown in the article. Instead, they chose to put the player in a situation that was indistinguishable from regular gameplay, but biased to educate the player. This, I feel, is a more subtle approach to game design than forcing the player to a prescribed route.
Especially on college campuses.
I love having any excuse to share this link.
<quote>
the big question of level design - and i mean that every level design lesson i ever write will be a response to this question - is: how do i teach the player these rules? an unfortunate trend in contemporary games is to spell out every detail in a hand-holding “tutorial” session at the outset of a game - unfortunate because it shows both a great deal of contempt for the player’s intuition and a lack of confidence in the designer’s own design. but more than that, it’s a design failure because it tells the player the rules instead of allowing her to learn them.
what if the first level of the game were laid out in such a way that the player could learn the rules simply by playing through it, without needing to be told them outright?
</quote>
The article's a critique of World 1-1 being the perfect tutorial level for Super Mario Bros. Go read it.
Artistic intuitions of game designers have been measured in the crucible of conversion rates and been found wanting.
Does anyone here sell applications? Play the first five minutes of WoW. Notice how they guide you along by the nose and make it easy for you to succeed and feel awesome doing it. All applications should do that.
Valve's Portal is how game tutorials should be done in my opinion. It introduces an unfamiliar game element (the wormhole gun) gradually: first you walk through pre-made wormholes, then you get to shoot one of the two wormhole entrances, and only then both of them. Even when you have the full portal gun, you get taught the various tricks (like accelerating by falling into a portal) one at a time. None of this is explained by a wall of text, rather, the level design itself suggests the only possible solution. This is all done so subtly that it hardly feels like a tutorial at all. In fact, for the player, the levels just get gradually harder and require you to combine more and more of the skills and tricks you've figured out earlier.
It works brilliantly, and makes for a much stronger experience than any of the text or voice based game tutorials I've seen so far.
Related: playing through Portal with the developer commentary on is really interesting. For anyone who's interested in this stuff, it's a must-listen.
Hey now, text-based MUDs are not yet obsolete. There are quite a few folks out there playing them. Most often, they are free, they do not put viruses or DRM on your computer, and they work for the folks who are trying to play online computer games out in the boonies with low bandwidth.
"Oh, this is like NetHack-------++!"
Artistic intuitions aren't a factor. Game design is heavily playtested and even split tested.
Being led by the arm is fine and it makes people do things, but then they forget how to do them without guidance! They're learning that a feature exists, not how to do it and apply it for themselves.
That WoW example isn't there to make players learn how to use features. It's there to sell the game: "Some day, you'll be able to do all this"
That's kind of what you're saying but you're not making the distinction between teaching the player skills and selling the product. Miyamoto is talking about the former.
For more complex games, such as WoW, you obviously need another approach. The tell - show - try you describe sounds like a good way of doing that.
Don't get your hopes up though. Only mildy funny.
If Sony or Microsoft actually designed Mario the character would be overly muscled and bald like Gears of War or Infamous.
Facebook and all of this "achievements" bullshit spell the ruin of game design, which began its slouch toward infantilism in the big-budget 3-D era ("look, shiny!") and has been forced down our throats over the past few years ("Shove in the Time of Facebook").
Go is a game. Bridge is a game. Chess is a game. Poker is a game (despite the embarrassing flood of idiots into Texas Hold 'em who play only that and have no curiosity about other poker games). Ambition is a game. Settlers of Catan is a game. Tigris and Euphrates is a game. Apples to Apples is a game. Chrono Trigger is a game. Final Fantasy 6 is a game. World of Warcraft is a game.
"[Your roommate at bandcamp] Just Ate a Sandwich" is not a game.
Sloppy non-design. Blatant idiocy. Shitty ideas. Infantilism. Let the real game designers do the work and let's ignore these "social [X]" charlatans, ok?
How wouldn't it be considered Hacker News?
Yeah, the next submission should really about the Design Trends of Spam Sites in 2010 or How to Design a Online Streaming Porn Site using H.264 and HTML5
Rather than backseat moderating against topics people think are uninteresting, they should just focus on submitting good quality, interesting articles about whatever could pique the curiosity of the readership.
If you enjoyed a game which requires a Facebook login, you are doing it wrong.
If you don't like games, why not just comment in other threads? I don't shit all over threads about a Twitter app I don't care about with "lol web 2.0 another twitter app gj guys". I will admit I was tempted when there was a rash of weight-loss posts, though. ;-)