This reminds me of something I heard once... that the first half of Portal (the video game) is basically a giant playable tutorial, and that a lot of video games start off with a tutorial disguised as gameplay, and that this is actually pretty pleasant.
The world's gotten pretty good at crafting tutorials disguised as gameplay. Could we do this with dev tools? Has anyone tried to make "VSCode: the game"?
Maybe "tip of the day" popups could be restructured as minigames?
Possible hurdles I can think of off the top of my head:
- a fancy tutorial probably runs into exactly what the author mentions on the next few lines: that adding more documentation doesn't fix things, because most people don't go to the documentation.
- In a game it's very easy to tune the tutorial to what you'll later encounter. A dev tool tutorial... every dev's needs are different. I imagine you'd have to structure it as a tutorial for "core functionality", plus separate tutorials for each extension.
- In the game context, I'm expecting to do certain actions repetitively. This has the side-effect of refining those skills. In a dev context, repetition is often considered a smell (though, I'd argue even in dev work we pick up a lot of little katas without thinking about it).
- Harping on repetition some more... what about the debugging tools that I only need to use once in a blue moon?