The UX of video game tutorials | Hacker News Reader

The UX of video game tutorials

uxdesign.cc

97 pointsadrian_mrd42 comments

Possibly the most famous video game tutorial of all time has got to be World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE&t=5s

And really, most of the later Mario games execute this fairly well, with some (sunny) exceptions here and there. Nintendo is unusually skilled at introducing a new mechanic in a way that feels like organic play, and slowly ramping up the complexity in a way that will leave most players feeling like natural masters by the end of the level, without realizing that the level was leading them by the nose the entire time.

Super Metroid is another game that did the 'invisible' tutorial thing well.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HugoBille/20120114/90903/The...

That's actually one thing Nintendo devs in general seem to be really good at. I don't think i've ever really played a first party Nintendo game that had an outright tutorial but they're always pretty easy to pick up and figure out.

Another great example is "A Dark Room" - a game in which the mechanics are introduced one by one in such a smooth way that no tutorial is ever needed.

edit to add a link: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com it's a very simple free game that (last I checked) can be completed in an hour or two.

That channel also has a video on Portal, which they describe as being "over 50% tutorial, but so much fun that nobody seemed to notice."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_AsF3Rfw8w

Portal has this cool directors commentary mode where they point all this out in detail as you play the levels.

As well as interesting discussions that got me reading up on Binary Space Partitioning [1] and other collision detection trickery. I just wish more UI developers cared that much about interaction latency.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning

1-1 is also overused and overpraised. Watching a bunch of kids playing it is pretty instructive. They do get it eventually but it’s by no means the simple linear set of steps and outcomes it’s often presented as. People get stuck in the most amusing ways that would be overcome more readily with more direct tutorialisation.

I agree 1-1 is great but I don't find it exceptional. Most of level-based games (at least during that time) are like that. You learn mechanics by playing easier levels, no direct verbal tutorials or whatsoever.

And it's not really perfect, for example I literally never knew Mario has acceleration in my childhood (granted, I didn't play on NES but in emulator on computers).

This guy[1] put his non game playing wife in front of a bunch of games, one of them being SMB. He noted that she never learned how to sprint, and that the game doesn't tell you how to do it either. If you can't figure it out on your own, you have to be told about it, or read the manual.

NES games (and other games of that era) were in general pretty bad at tutorials. Players back then were expected to figure things out for themselves, mostly by trial and error.

The video has a bunch of other interesting observations. A common theme is that games often assume that the player has some base understanding of game play that might not always be there.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw

It can be fun to figure this stuff out for yourself. Constantly catering to the first time player can bore or even alienate the experienced player. It’s a delicate balance.

Even for a new player. Learning the ins and outs without being spoon fed can be part of the journey. Of course that doesn’t excuse horrible and unintuitive UIs.

That's what the "skip tutorial" option is for. Many games also ask you to self-gauge your experience level at the start, and typically suggest a different tutorial variant or skip "noob" cues in the tutorial.

I don't think that video made a decent case. It's a hell of a lot of speculation that sounds credible thanks to good editing and the gift of hindsight.

The truth is that when you bought Super Mario Bros, you read the manual from cover to cover before you started the game, and you looked at the box art and the stuff on the back of the box. It'd tell you everything; the enemies, some description or backstory for them... the manual was an important part of the package.

And that was how pretty much every game worked for a good 30 years since.

I recently had a very frustrating time with the initial unskippable tutorial to Nintendo's new Game Builder Garage. It's not exactly a game, but I was expecting a much more game-like tutorial.

- Objects had to be placed and manipulated exactly as the instructions and on-screen guides say, even for arbitrary things like moving invisible Nodons for layout.

- Every step of UI manipulation was narrated every time, even if this is the third time you're copying and rotating a platform.

- All of this narrated with many short lines of dialog, often just for flavor, and each with a sound effect.

- Constant, distracting, meaningless animation of the narrator. Occasionally it would point at bits of UI, but mostly it just kept sweeping from side to side or in a circle, I guess following different "moods".

- The one decision you're allowed to make is the color of the platforms, this coming at the very end of the first tutorial, after maybe 30 minutes.

The tutorial has no faith in the player/user, despite the text constantly saying how good a programmer you are. It seemed like an afterthought, which is bad for the first thing the player has to deal with, at great length, in your product.

This was my experience on release day. Hopefully this has been improved, or will be soon, but it completely turned me off. I had hoped to learn something about a gamified game development environment, but I feel like game designers weren't involved, certainly not instructional designers.

(edited to fix formatting)

I had to buy a mouse for Tropico 6, because there was a tutorial step that required the middle mouse button… on a MacBook.

I experienced this, too. The forced adherence to pixel-perfection was rather annoying. At first, I thought the narrator animations were communicating something - "look at this thing" or "put your cursor here" while circling. It took about 10 seconds to work out that this was a character attribute and not communication.

Half Life Alyx was an interesting example of this.

I've played lots of games, so of course I am good at reading the "language" of games: when I can interact with something, when a door is openable vs a prop, when an NPC is important vs background character, etc.

But in VR, all my experience was thrown out the window.

When there's a door right there, right in front of you, 100% full sized and in high detail - your instinct screams "you can open this."

Valve painted anything you can interact with bright, vibrant red. But even the bright red wasn't always enough to distinguish between the life-sized 3D garbage can that you can open up, and the one that is simply a prop that is glued to the ground and totally inert.

I think there will be a strange dance between game designers and gamers when it comes to VR. Everything old is new again, and even veterans players of 2D games will need to learn the new language as it is being written.

We're certainly still in the early days of reinventing UI primitives here. AR is another example where UX in an unsolved problem.

That's where the devs have to decide whether they're willing to sacrifice some realness for the sake of gameplay. The game director for Doom Eternal has been streaming the game and providing commentary on it, and he talked about how for this game, everything took a backseat to gameplay, even if it doesn't look realistic. For example, if there's a surface the player can break, it glows neon green, but if there's a surface that can only be broken by something in the environment, it glows a dingy yellow color.

Yeah it throws you for a loop. I was initially playing with the teleport, but then changed to walking at the starting area where you circumnavigate the U shaped rooftop; after which you need to pull open a window/slider. Because I had just switched movement it threw me and I took extra long to find where to go next, even though it was extremely linear.

I think my favorite part of a tutorial, even though it was a super small piece, was an older open-world game. At the start of the game, someone in a helicopter tells you to look up at them. Based on the direction you move the thumbstick, it'll automatically set the controls as inverted. It was such a tiny thing, but it's the only time I've ever played a game that automatically changed it's controls in response to how the player expects them to work.

That's pretty clever!

The Halo games do this as well under the guise of suit calibrations.

Sometimes a game hands me camera control, I do my usual thing of instantly hunting in the options to invert the camera then shortly afterwards have to spend time doing the look up test anyway. It should skip it in that situation.

I found it ironic to stumble through this convoluted sentence on a UX site:

> What designers call an “invisible tutorial” is simply a tutorial section that fits perfectly in the flow zone, which values the preceding and succeeding events and respects player expectations. There will never be a situation where a player does not realise they are not participants of a tutorial, but an invisible tutorial will hardly be discernible from the game experience as it respects the pacing of all experiences around it.

An attempt to avoid the triple negative:

> What designers call an “invisible tutorial” is a tutorial section that fits perfectly in the flow zone, which values the preceding and succeeding events and respects player expectations. The player will always realise that they are not participating in a tutorial, but an invisible tutorial will hardly be discernible from the game experience as it respects the pacing of all experiences around it.

I still don't get what this is trying to say. Isn't it true that the player will usually (always?) realize they're in a tutorial, but an "invisible" one will just feel well-integrated with the surrounding experiences? Or is this passage arguing that a tutorial that is "invisible" will by definition NOT be noticed as a tutorial?

I'm 90% sure the second "not" is unintentional.

That makes so much sense! Thank you.

Editing to remove the "not" - There will never be a situation where a player does not realise they are participants of a tutorial, but an invisible tutorial will hardly be discernible from the game experience as it respects the pacing of all experiences around it.

Still doesn't make much sense as now they are saying that invisible tutorials can't exist because the player will always realize they are participants of a tutorial (fixing double negative).

UX design and UX writing are not necessarily the same skill set.

The classic example is the first level of Mario. It teaches you all the mechanics of jumps, blocks, battling enemies, whatnot, but never explicitly feeds you directions.

My favorite tutorial in a game is in BABA IS YOU. The (puzzle) game continually teaches you new mechanics/things by having them be integral to the unique solution to the current stage.

But the best part is that many of the things it teaches you, rather than game mechanics or buttons or rules, are assumptions that you may have been making that were unfounded.

Saying more would honestly spoil the game if you haven't played it, so I'll just say it was an amazing experience and so brilliantly designed that even when I figured out solutions quickly I was still left in awe.

I'm personally a fan of games that sprinkle tiny tutorials throughout the game rather than 1 large tutorial at the beginning. The early levels will only require 1-2 mechanics so there's little point in introducing everything and hope the player will remember to use all of them.

I like it when the tutorial is part of the “story” beyond a simple “learn how to jump” training session.

Something akin to an interactive cutscene that also tutorials. Either way you may want a way to skip for those who have played before. (Even more fun are tutorials that instruct you on using basic systems to complete but allow you to use advanced techniques if you know them.)

I really liked the Codec system from the original Metal Gear Solid, for PS1. It made almost perfect sense in-game, with your tactical team monitoring your movements and able to see what you were doing, and it was done in a clever way. When a codec sequence is unskippable for story reasons, the designers will sneak some tips in that way, but more importantly, if the player takes a long time moving through an area, they might get an optional call. Answering the call will usually explain some new mechanic in the area, and additionally provides some fun side-lore and comic relief, so it can double as a tiny reward.

Laid out all at once, these conversations would be an overwhelming amount of information to absorb and exposition to follow, but the game generally nails the pacing. Provided you don't repeatedly call like a goof, the calls all seem like reasonable radio chatter, and hardly break immersion. Experienced players will move through the level quickly enough to miss the more tutorial-like prompts, and can ignore optional calls if they'd rather get on with the gameplay.

I mean I'm a fan, but about 50% of MGS is being absolutely harangued, at inordinate length, by the codec characters smashing at the 4th wall with a sledgehammer.... so no it doesn't break the immersion when they give you control tips ;) but it isn't subtle and doesn't need to be.

I like how they directly tell you what to do knowing that you're someone playing on a console instead of trying to awkwardly not say directly things like "use this button". I find that this breaks immersion less than some game that think they can make you forget they are games telling you to do something.

Rimworld (and Dwarf Fortress, for that matter) desperately need a better onboarding experience. In Dwarf Fortress' case, the best tutorial you'll find is the one online, because lord knows you'll die immediately if you waste time messing with the wrong stuff. Rimworld has a fairly good documentation system and a decent tutorial scenario to accompany it, but the "first game" experience is still crushingly brutal: new players will often lose their first few colonies, which can be a pretty soul-sucking penalty.

Rimworld is all about losing though, remember that the game is a story generator, not a simulation made to be played to perfection. The first times are rough, but still way easier than Factorio or Dwarf Fortress in my experience, and the story generator aspect ties this all up to make for really good moments.

If you're interested in this, you should also check out this GDC talk[1] by Asher Vollmer, creator of indie mobile game Threes (2014), that got a lot of credit when it came out for having a very smooth tutorial.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf7xLHUpKHE

GMTK recently did one about tutorial too, worth watching : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GV814cWiAw

(GMTK was already mentioned in the article, but for a different video.)

One of the better tutorials I remember was for the Blood Dragon Far Cry 3 expansion. It’s a tongue in cheek riff on 80’s action movies and games and the tutorial is silly fun because of it.

Not the first game to make a joke of its tutorial but it was memorable!

the Blood Dragon tutorial could only had been made better if it was optional on subsequent playthrough. True, it's not a game people are likely to replay, but having to go through it again is a chore. I think the same could also be said for all "signposted" tutorials. Or maybe split the tutorials in optional categories, so that any players can tailor their experience "I've never played a video game", "I've never played a game in this genre", "I'm new to the series", "just show me the new stuff"; of course such design would prevent from doing any story integration within the tutorial, so it might not be a good fit for all genres

Regarding the Half Life vs Dead Space example; I was recently watching a streamer play HL2 for the first time, and that area where you first encounter the saw blades they totally missed the (subtle tutorial) idea. As a result they struggled with ammunition for quite a while.

It was only by accident quite a bit later on that they discovered it. Unfortunately that is the downside of soft tutorials, not everyone gets it, or they're distracted during that moment or they already have an idea of what they want to try, which causes them to ignore the hint.

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