@thw0rted - Games with tons of features can have a good tutorial without breaking the development bank. Instead of showing new players ALL of the features over the course of the tutorial, show them just enough of the core features to be able to survive and enjoy the game enough to want to stick with it. If players can experience a little success early on in their experience, more of them will stick around and learn the more detailed and powerful mechanics not covered in the tutorial.
Now, in Dwarf Fortress’s case, there may still be too many things that a player must know just to get a basic fortress going to put in a tutorial, but Dwarf Fortress is on the extreme end of the steep learning curve scale, and is so intentionally.
Egoraptor + Coding Horror… I never expected those two parts of my world to collide!
I love the part where he talks about conveyance. It’s so incredibly important. Remember the first time you opened a development IDE? Back in the day of baby’s first Hello World?
In addition to the point @mouseasw made, they should be observing this stuff happen (watching other people exercise these abilities) and realize they will be able to do that at some point. Like Megaman X and Xero:
You’re strong, but you’re not as strong as I am. But someday you will be as strong as I am.
There’s also this, though it is more of a tutorial, it is very well done:
Good luck getting people to click through to it and read it, as usual… it is linked from a giant banner at the top of the page when you visit Stack Overflow in incognito / anonymous / inprivate / new user mode.
From Dwarf Fortress, [Notch] wanted to bring the exciting feeling of depth and life that Tarn Adams’s cult game was so good at conveying. His own game would feel more like a world to explore and to try to survive in than a narrative, segmented into ready-made challenges.
Meanwhile, the smash success of the world-building game Minecraft, which is in many ways a more user-friendly version of Dwarf Fortress (and which has earned its Dwarf Fortress-loving creator millions of dollars), has only been good for Tarn, driving curious new players his way. Still, in the only moment I heard him speak with anything like bitterness, Tarn called Minecraft a “depressing distillation of our own stuff.” He paused, adding more magnanimously that the game “has its own things going for it.” The problem, he concluded, “isn’t with Minecraft so much as it’s with society.”
I completely agree with your assertions here. The general catalyst for learning to do something is from a desire to engage. Users, players, customers, etc learn best by action… Instructions and manuals detract from user interaction. Instructions should be like road signs not road blocks. Excellent post.
I’d love to tag this with “agile” and “read the fuck manual”, though I still haven’t “tagged” the the second one with more posts nor I think the name is simple enough yet!
1.5) Maybe also a discourse feature request: add links to posts found within the embeded site which are linking dicourse itself. In this case, the mmorpg topic.
I’d love to see that nsfw guy talking about Mario and Zelda!
Do you happen to have stats on how many people click on it?
How would you apply this to piloting a 747 for instance? Games are an interactive story - they’re very linear, so it’s much easier. Even open world games limit your options by starting you off in a dungeon and have various fictitious stories to push you along a path. I find it difficult to apply this “Intro Stage” to a business and task oriented app. What are some popular complex business and task oriented apps that really do intro stages well?
For a 747 the intro stage is a flight sim, that’s time spent training for real life. For me, the question is how do I make my users want to spend time in the flight sim? And this is accounting software, what is a simulator in this context? An overlay of cartoon people pretending to buy goods, fictitious suppliers… Even Clippy was created with good intentions of making MS Word easier to use as it got more complicated.
For vi the intro stage is figuring out how to quit the program! But there’s also http://vim-adventures.com/
I agree with your point and analogy generally, but would say that docs still have a role. They’re like an “in-app purchase” after you’ve already been hooked by the intro stage and want to go beyond the basics. I think Kathy Sierra made similar points in her blog years ago. You need to give the user a serotonin/dopamine rush early on by making them feel like they kick ass.
Thank you for sharing this! I wish more people got it.
Also, not only are intro levels the new manuals, they’re also spread throughout the entire game – learning happens anytime there’s a gap between the player’s current proficiency and their potential.
…I do. I am the one guy in the whole world who reads the manual, yes the game manual, cover to cover before I do so much as insert the optical disk in the reader. Just last week I did when I bought Phantom Hourglass or WarCraft: Orc and Humans (though admittedly in these cases there is a game history aspect to it). My favorite was in the Rayman 3 manual when it starts getting familiar with the reader and mentions tips that it explicitly mentions are not given by the in-game trainer (“You will not have read this manual for nothing”). In fact, I was disappointed when I bought Ocarina of Time on the Virtual Console or Chrono Trigger on iPhone and there was no manual.
Jeff, I imagine you could make the same argument for developer tools, frameworks, programming languages, etc. Yet I can’t help notice how much the documentation for some of those things has improved in the last few years. There are similar “intro stages” of various forms and plenty of interactive tutorials, but there are some useful things that I would probably never find without reading the documentation. I actually think there are some cases where you can get a lot more out of a couple hours of reading than you can by watching a Pluralsight course or just hacking away on your own. But everyone’s different, of course.
Trello is an app that does just one thing very well. So keeping an app focused on one task is a way to avoid requiring a manual and training. That seems like a different thing to an intro level though. That’s putting effort into what not to add and probably even removing new features because the “complexity cost” wasn’t worth it. (In fact surprising since that’s where they could monetise it, like a Dev specific version on top with story points etc) And how to measure the gut feel of complexity cost against sales & marketing demanding X features? Requires a hero product owner, and when they depart you get massive phones and computer jewellery.
Slack is more obvious in its intro mode, proactively encouraging you to turn down notifications once it gets noisy. But the bigger factor is less is more.
Think I get it now though. Intro Stage idea is keeping the app easy to get started and use. Boss Stage is making sure it works when they depend on it.
It is so interesting how game developers are all learning from each other when it comes to tutorials. I totally agree with the video when people over explain how to do something and how it gets annoying. I think that the future of things that involve technology will be bright with the “intro stage” method of teaching rather than boring the user by explaining in great detail.
