Two Universes | Hacker News Reader

Two Universes

randsinrepose.com

84 pointsfilament24 comments

Something not really mentioned in the article is that Portal is very funny.

The voice of Glados is constantly messing with you: asking you to bring your daughter to work with you for testing over the acid pits, lying to you about obvious things, etc.

This personality and sense of humor helps drive things forward and keeps you entertained while you're fiddling with what are essentially logic puzzles.

I've never really seen a website or app pull off humor to the level that Portal achieves.

The closest thing I can think of would be something like the "You Suck at Photoshop" tutorials on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M

One thing the author never mentions is how Portal teaches you how to play the game. Yes, the player has to play, as the author points out, but Portal's designers created very deliberate sandboxes in which to play. They created rooms with distinct features that make it likely that if you play enough, you'll discover the correct thing to do - even if it's just by accident.

That is the design part: understanding the rules of the environment you've created, understanding how people are likely to behave based on prior knowledge when put into that environment, and creating scenarios which lead them down certain paths without telling them about those paths. It's a probabilistic thing. You have to create a scenario where the most likely outcome is that the user learns what you want them to learn.

Another neat thing about Portal that may apply to applications is that the spoken lesson doesn't come until after you've discovered it on your own. The explicit tutorial doesn't so much teach as reinforce.

And of course the designers of Portals did extensive testing to get feedback on what worked! Those brilliant designs weren't plucked out of thin air, but came from watching how real players interacted with them.

How could the designers of Photoshop actually apply this criticism? This is what has always bothered me about gameification, even the "good" kind of gameification this article espouses. When I launch Photoshop, I already have a goal in mind, and it isn't a goal that the designers of Photoshop have any control over. In Portal, the goals, and thus the tools necessary to achieve them, are small and additive and picked by the game designers. When I launch Photoshop, I'm usually thinking something like "I want to make a button that means add a song to a playlist". Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

This kind of analogy usually leads me toward thinking that an app like Photoshop should provide an extensive tutorial where they could teach you how to use the app by asking you to create increasingly complex images with increasingly complex tools. That has the potential to directly apply the lessons gleaned here from Portal, but doesn't actually affect the end design of the product. And it doesn't help me because I have not yet said to myself, "I should put many hours in to learn how to use Photoshop properly" I always come to it with a specific goal in mind. Plus, how is that so different than how things are now? All I see here are guidelines for how to make a great Photoshop tutorial, not design principles to guide the making of a more accessible Photoshop, which for me seems to be what the OP is trying to get at.

Another random thought: a paintbrush is the same tool more or less that a beginner and a master use to create very different qualities of painting. How can that tool be so simple and yet allow for such complex mastery?

> Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

Not if everything was locked from the beginning with no recourse--but then, that's bad game design, too. Nobody wants to come over to play a friend's fighting game (or Photoshop) and find that their favorite characters/tools aren't available. Instead, well-designed games have a "story" or "campaign" mode, where things are slowly unlocked, and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

> and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

Games like Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl seem to do well with the the `open play' mode that doesn't have everything unlocked from the start.

They seem to, but that's really one of the main reasons you won't see those games as much in professional competitive-gaming. As it is, a lot of players have trouble setting up tournaments just because you have to input a password to unlock certain characters; imagine if, say, there were better characters (strictly better, as in "everyone is playing them right now until someone can devise a counter using another character") which were only available as DLC--such a game would probably never get tournament play at all.

Maybe. The games of the Smash Bros. series are party games. Nintendo doesn't care about professional competitive gaming for them, and designed them for a casual audience. Mario Kart Wii is similar, though surprisingly hard for such a seemingly casual game.

This. Games have it easy because they can manipulate the user's goals and artificially create a linear progression.

Most applications have a userbase that is interested in different subsets of functionality. If you tried to lead them through all the tools in order, some will stop early when they've found the tools they need, and others will get frustrated being forced to learn tools they have no use for.

Game designers have known this for years. For a (hilarious) examination of how Mega Man X employed the same philosophy, check out Egoraptor's video on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM

Super Mario Brothers also did this. SMB was one of the first games that scrolled, so very soon after starting, a goomba appears from the right to tell you that you can move to the right. If you don't jump over or on it, you die, learning that lesson. Once you learn that lesson, you are under some blocks, and another goomba appears. You jump over it, but in doing so, you are forced to hit one of the blocks above you, which causes a mushroom powerup to appear and flow above you in the same direction. It falls down, hits a pipe in the way, and comes in your direction. This is timed so that it's unlikely that you will avoid touching it - which you have so far been taught to do, since it's quite similar to a goomba.

The first two screens of SMB are deliberately designed to teach you the basic rules of the game without actually explaining them to you.

Anna Anthropy has an older blog article about exactly that:

http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=465

Hah, I was going to post the same link. It’s an excellent analysis, though: show without telling, make mechanics simple and environments rich, and teach the player without “bloop MEGAMAN MEGAMAN!”

Yeah, Roll popping up and explaining shit was one thing I hated about Megaman Legends. Pretty good game otherwise, though.

A great article, and Valve does this so very well.

On a related note, Valve launched the 'Perpetual Testing Initiative' for Portal 2 yesterday ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/620 ) , which is an amazingly easy-to-use level editor and shared content community, which should add much longevity to the game.

People learn to build levels, and get feedback votes from players. The options are slightly limited, but you can take your level over to the full hammer editor after.

An interesting move in the context of the article, essentially teaching their community to be makers.

It's on sale today for $7 if anyone is interested.

It's an interesting take but I don't buy the relationship between Portal and Photoshop. Portal has a defined end point to each level, the routes you take are often limited as well. Photoshop has no predetermined end, it's in the mind of the user sat in front of it. I am guessing (haven't played it) that Minecraft may be a better example in that is offers creative freedom.

Not necessarily. I haven't played since before the Adventuring update, but back then I had to keep the minecraft wiki open on my other monitor to get anywhere with redstone.

You still have to do this. Minecraft is a bad example.

I think it's a great example of a game with a bad learning experience. Something you can do in Minecraft to improve the learning experience could be applicable to productivity applications.

The problem with comparing Portal to Photoshop is that Portal has a fixed goal for the user: Get to the end of the level. How is the designer supposed to teach the new Photoshop user in the same manner?

A possible answer is to provide a simulated training ground that with only a few Photoshop tools "unlocked". By completing tasks you unlock more tools. The problem still exists in that it's still difficult to determine what mastery the user will require. And let's face it - in and of itself, using Photoshop isn't very fun.

Minecraft's hand holding and difficulty curve are still pretty bad. They tried to help the situation with achievements that are like little tutorials, but the wiki is still required for anything other than the basics.

One of the most cunning ways I've ever seen of getting someone to read about how much Photoshop sucks - by making them think they're reading about how much Portal rocks.

The obvious example of this philosophy in action is the iPhone. Remember the first time you played with one? You start out knowing just a few basic facts like that you can touch things and pinch to zoom, then you find yourself poking around looking for other nifty interactions you've never tried before (because you're actually curious), and before long the entire interface is second-nature.

Designer like myself have been thinking about this for decades literally.

The problem is not photoshop. The problem is that playing a game is not the same as using photoshop.

Why?

Think about it it like this.

I could in theory create every possible frame of portal in photoshop sans the interaction.

I can't create photoshop in portal in any shape or form.

One is a world the other creates worlds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com