What we can learn from video game tutorials

[KarmaBum]

@Tat said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

I never really got the sense that people did, or that it motivated them to play with new people, but it also arrived well into SL’s tenure so it may have just gone under the radar.

There were a lot of people who would monitor their LP on GH, and keep track to make sure they got the right amount from open vignettes and stuff. So I know people were paying attention to it, but I doubt it had any real impact on them seeking out new PCs.

I like the idea of starter quests on a MUSH. When you’re approved, NPC tells you about the Something Something at the center of town, which sets you up to go meet other PCs and ask questions.

[Third Eye]

@Tat said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

I never really got the sense that people did, or that it motivated them to play with new people, but it also arrived well into SL’s tenure so it may have just gone under the radar.

I actually did this on SL when Luck points because thinner and thinner to earn if you weren’t running non-GM events or writing IC theme info (things I never enjoyed because…I was an ST, I had a job, the game things I did when not doing my job were nice), and I definitely noticed when they became harder to come by just through RP. It wasn’t why I RP’d with new people but it was a nice benny and I noted how tough it was to scrape together a Luck point when it wasn’t viable because CG had been turned off for a certain amount of time.

[Tat]

@Third-Eye said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

I don’t think it’s fair to shove tutorializing on the shoulders of staff and players full-time.

I SUPER agree. I’m personally more interested in ways we can set up the GAME ITSELF to do some of this work - especially automation, but also in terms of documentation, etc. Anything else ends up a pretty heavy load, and it can get real weird with personality mishmashes in my personal opinion.

With that in mind, here are some of my thinky thoughts on specific points from the tutorial video.

Blend the tutorial into the game. Make the player think they’re playing the game, and not the tutorial.

It’s better to have the player DO than READ.

Use fewer words.

I’m big on documentation, but my experience is that players DO NOT READ large chunks of text. Almost none of them. I don’t, either. There are lots and lots of studies on this.

I’ve always been real big on simplifying helpfiles and bullet pointing the SHIT out of things for this reason, but watching this video made me also think about HOW we chunk the information.

Information should be discoverable, at your fingertips at the point of need, but also consumable in chunks. You should not need to wade through it all at the get go, or to read it all to get started.

Some games do a really great job of this in their wiki. They use visual cues like ‘cards’ to lay out information in a way that feels super intuitive, so it feels easy to find what you need. I seem to remember Gray Harbor having a really nice layout for their wiki that let you drill down to different degrees of information. The Network uses tabbed boxes to good effect a lot.

In general, though, we tend to REALLY load up the information per page. Thinking about how to chunk this up can be helpful, I think. Where can we use different pages, tabs, collapsible sections, etc to make getting to what players need at the time they need it easier?

Spread out the teaching of game mechanics. Let players play with their toys before introducing new ones.

Just get the player to do it once.

I do really like creating spaces and events for new players to actually PLAY with the more systemy aspects of the game on a regular basis in low-stakes instances. Run a combat BEFORE they’re in a major plot scene. Have something baked in early on that has them make a request, if requests are important.

Use unobtrusive messaging when possible - don’t break flow.

Use adaptive messaging (only show messages that are relevant to the thing a player is experiencing)

The example in the video is about teaching game mechanics, but I’ve thought about this a lot in terms of theme. Are there certain things we could template and ‘deliver’ to a player at certain points in their game experience?

On SL, we experimented with templated write-ups that went in jobs when we gave someone their first spell - it explained what the first experience and subsequent experiences would be, written in narrative form. I think this had better success than when it was in a wiki page FAQ type thing (though it continued to live there as well), both because it was delivered TO them and because it came at the point that it was relevant.

Are there other milestones that could be largely automated? What if, for example, you got a link to the damage chart the first time you took damage in combat? What if you got a certain theme write-up delivered to you at a week after creation, or 30 days, or after 10 scenes?

What other milestones or information could be automated (pretend this is easy - what would make sense)?

Don’t create noise. Players can only focus on one thing at a time - don’t distract them. Make sure what players are reading matters - it teaches them that the things you write are important.

I think this is REALLY hard in a M* environment. Especially with a new theme, there is SO MUCH going on. The OOC rules and expectations, the system, the staff, the details of the theme. Thinking very carefully about Must Haves to Start feels important.

So does what goes in a forum post or announcement. If these things are wordy and unclear, players learn not to read them.

Use visuals to teach. You should be able to tell what something does by looking at it.

A lot harder to do in M*s, but wiki or web portal integration helps here. We can’t really teaching what something does, but we CAN teach the ‘vibe’ of a game through good design. Glitch’s design is freaking brilliant at getting its vibe across. Keys has some cool rotating images of its setting that change with every refresh, giving players a feel for their location. Crystal Springs also has a website that just SCREAMS its theme. One of the first things I did when building Spirit Lake was to fill up pinterest boards that gave me the FEEL I wanted.

Are there other ways we can use images to communicate some aspect of theme?

Leverage what people already know from their everyday lives.

I actually think about this a lot in terms of what we name things. For example, what does ‘luck’ do and why? What about XP? What can you do with EXPERIENCE points?

It’s also important in building a theme, to me. Even if I’m adding dragons, I should be building on things people know about human nature, about consistent reactions, about fair play, etc.

Everything can be made better by adding dragons.

I mean. Yeah.

[farfalla]

@Tat Arx gives xp for playing with characters in their first two weeks. It is extremely motivating to people, but it’s a mixed blessing - yeah you have people lining up to play with you, but you end up drowning in 90% fluff because people are just checking the box and not actually… giving hooks.

[Snackness]

@farfalla Preach.

And after 2 weeks, no one wants you any more

[farfalla]

@Snackness Declining to validate newbie RS requests for people who didn’t give me anything valuable is one of my small pleasures in life.

[Snackness]

@farfalla whisper Me too.

[Solstice]

So I’ve completely forgotten what video this was, and I think I’m going to fail to pull it up, but I saw a wonderful analysis about specifically the tutorials that are not actually spoken.

The example, I believe, was Mega Man X.

Basically, the idea is that by presenting people with obstacles that are very simple to start, and introducing them to concepts that they’ll see later on in the stage playing out in a non-threatening way for the first time, without even mentioning the mechanics, you can give people an idea of what to expect when the stakes actually matter.

I think this could be translated beautifully into a muck tutorial, where instead of being jettisoned out into an OOC lounge or onto the grid, you’re taken through a character creation process that teaches you the common commands by forcing you to execute them before you can leave the room.

This is especially easy to do with some things like posing or looking at a room or looking at descriptions. If you can find a way to make that fun and engaging the first time through, you can prepare people for all of the commands that are going to come on down the line and hopefully decrease some of the confusion and overwhelmingness for a new player.

Turning the tutorial into a sort of escape-the-room situation would be amazing. Obviously, you can put a skip command in there if someone really truly doesn’t want to do it, such as with an alt, but gosh what a cool experience that would be to help acclimate to a new game.

[eye8urcake]

@Solstice said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

Turning the tutorial into a sort of escape-the-room situation would be amazing. Obviously, you can put a skip command in there if someone really truly doesn’t want to do it, such as with an alt, but gosh what a cool experience that would be to help acclimate to a new game.

I wanted to run people through Mr. Anderson’s life before Neo from his perspective to teach people the basic game mechanics, progression and emote-based combat of the Matrix game stuck in my head. At the end of the tutorial, you’d choose red pill, blue pill, or a machine-to-be-decided and be funneled into the appropriate character generation and lore primer for your chosen faction.

I love it when the tutorial is actually part of the game.

[Roadspike]

As someone who has written tutorials for casual games before, this is a fascinating idea to me. Tutorials for MU*s are sort of difficult because as currently put together, they can’t be immediate sorts of things that players can get into right away.

I agree with @YetiBeard’s notion of a mission statement – I think every game should have one front and center: tell players what they’ll be playing and what they’ll be doing and what they can expect out of the game.

I love the idea of Session Zero that @Third-Eye mentioned, but again, it’s hard to do unless it’s a Waking Up vignette like on The Network. In some searching around a while back I found a very interesting Social Contract that I think could help with some of that, and adapted it for a project Blu and I were working on: https://emptynight.aresmush.com/wiki/policy#social-contract

I think that on an original theme game, having an Overview page that new players get sent to can help, especially if it’s a super-light summary of the setting and the themes of the game, and then leads to a handful of places that they could go next to learn more (a literal handful, I think 5 is plenty).

And I think that intro-combat-scenes are a great thing to do before any new player engages with a “big plot scene,” but again, the problem of timing/immediacy comes up with the format.

I would love to find a way to create a playable intro, like @Faraday has for the combat system on the Ares general website (https://www.aresmush.com/fs3/fs3-3/combat-walkthrough.html) – I think this would be a phenomenal way to bring people into theme, but it would have to be a lot smarter than Fara’s example to respond “appropriately” to anything the player could do.

[Tat]

@Roadspike said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

I love the idea of Session Zero that @Third-Eye mentioned, but again, it’s hard to do unless it’s a Waking Up vignette like on The Network. In some searching around a while back I found a very interesting Social Contract that I think could help with some of that, and adapted it for a project Blu and I were working on: https://emptynight.aresmush.com/wiki/policy#social-contract

I kind of want a whole thread just on this idea. I think there’s a lot of good stuff here.

Tutorials for MU*s are sort of difficult because as currently put together, they can’t be immediate sorts of things that players can get into right away.

I’m REALLY thinking a lot about whether that’s always true. I think a lot of things COULD be automated as part of a ‘you get this info when you do this thing’. The first time you enter combat? A link to the extensive guide we built in the wiki. The first time you’re KO’d? An emit telling you what you can do.

I think prompted vignettes could be a really neat way to pace theme tidbits, too. Writing one can hook you to the character and the theme. Reading the instructions or other people’s versions can teach you something valuable about the setting. I kind of love the idea of spacing these out over time to teach new things.

[Pavel]

I think a tutorial should be written by someone not involved in making the game. They should absolutely have input, answer questions, etc, but it should come from a player.

Why? They’re someone who is doing the things they’re trying to explain but without the bias or baggage of prior knowledge of how the system works. When one spends months (or even years) working on something, their ability to explain it to others just starting out is diminished by exposure.

[Duke Whisky]

Played before on a MUD that had a tutorial and a new person quest system. It was helpful to introduce the original theme, although was probably a little bit too light on the as it also wanted to keep an air of mystery and discovery via player-character interactions.

Basically the tutorial taught the very basic social and movement commands for the game via a ghost before they set the person off on a fetch quest to go to several locations on the grid to unlock a token. Then the person needed to talk to X number of org leader characters to also get a token. So was handy in 1 regard to having a new person explore the grid and meet people. After getting the required tokens, their character got a bedroom. (Yeah dunno where they slept before.)

The downside was it got a bit transactional in terms of the roleplay, plus put pressure on org leaders to go meet new characters. Additionally without an “I’ve played this game for 3 years, I don’t need the tutorial” option it meant older players had to go through the same process.

I don’t think it really retained many players since the tutorial hooks were very light touch.

OH! Also there was an in-character mentoring guild that would be on hand to help new characters. It sort of faded out after the tutorial bot was introduced but was still on hand. It had both fantastic mentors, really good quality RPers in it but also the occasional creeper to hunt new characters to sexy up. The game introduced an unofficial “no sexy until after 2 weeks” rule to sort of put them off.

[Tat]

@Whisky said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

Then the person needed to talk to X number of org leader characters to also get a token. So was handy in 1 regard to having a new person explore the grid and meet people. After getting the required tokens, their character got a bedroom. (Yeah dunno where they slept before.)
The downside was it got a bit transactional in terms of the roleplay, plus put pressure on org leaders to go meet new characters.

Yeah, this is always my concern with anything that requires or even requests individual connections from specific players. The newbie meet-and-greet remains a really important aspect of getting new players hooked into your game, but it should be fun for BOTH sides, and something many, many people should do. It’s easy for this type of RP to feel transactional and repetitive over time.

One of the points the PvZ video brings up is that a tutorial MUST be fun - the experience of learning should be engaging. I’m mulling over RP that could be engaging to BOTH players while still be newbie welcoming.

Additionally without an “I’ve played this game for 3 years, I don’t need the tutorial” option it meant older players had to go through the same process.

Yeaaaaah, for anything that’s specifically systemy, I think you need an opt-out unless it’s REAL unobtrusive.

@Pavel

I think a tutorial should be written by someone not involved in making the game. They should absolutely have input, answer questions, etc, but it should come from a player.

This is a really interesting point! I think at the very least it needs to be written in cooperation with players. With a M*, it’s harder to do UX playtesting like video games do - but also, we can iterate constantly. As questions continue to pop up, we can implement something to answer them.

[Pavel]

@Tat said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

With a M*, it’s harder to do UX playtesting like video games do

Yes and no. Many games these days are opening in limited-run alphas and betas, which is the ideal time to make “create tutorials and introductory information packages” a part of the culture.

The other reason I’d say get either a player or dedicated part-time staffer/consultant to do it is that running a game takes time and effort, not to mention you’d want to RP too around your own life going on. So it’s harder for people already loaded with responsibility to do it on a constant basis.

[Third Eye]

@Tat said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

This is a really interesting point! I think at the very least it needs to be written in cooperation with players. With a M*, it’s harder to do UX playtesting like video games do - but also, we can iterate constantly. As questions continue to pop up, we can implement something to answer them.

Probably SL’s best combat tutorial was written by @deadscribe though that was at the mid-point of the game’s life. Agree with @Pavel someone doing it after an alpha period would be interesting.

[Pavel]

@Third-Eye I’m the kind of guy that can’t keep a character wiki page updated, so I’m absolutely the wrong person to get to write documentation.

This is especially the case if you’re trying to on-board someone to a game’s theme when the game has been running for a year. Like Arx, for instance, is SO MUCH different to how it was when I played. I’d need an actual textbook to get caught up on everything that has happened since then.

[KarmaBum]

@Tat said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

The newbie meet-and-greet remains a really important aspect of getting new players hooked into your game, but it should be fun for BOTH sides, and something many, many people should do. It’s easy for this type of RP to feel transactional and repetitive over time.

I think that’s where the real struggle with integrating new people comes into play.

We all want the deeper connections that lead to meaningful RP. You’re almost definitely not going to get that from a brand new PC - not even just because your PCs don’t know each other yet, but because that player is probably still figuring out that character.

Integrating new characters is always going to be work to some extent. It’s like bringing in a new party member in a later chapter of the game: you can see they’re going to be awesome when they level up, but goddamn those first few levels are a grind.

[Jumpscare]

@Solstice said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:

I think this could be translated beautifully into a muck tutorial, where instead of being jettisoned out into an OOC lounge or onto the grid, you’re taken through a character creation process that teaches you the common commands by forcing you to execute them before you can leave the room.

I have a funny story about this. I got a few friends who don’t play MU*s to try out the chargen/tutorial of Silent Heaven. The results were staggering.

First test: The screen says that there’s “a way to the North.” Friend #1 has no idea that she needs to type N. I had to tell her what to do, so that’s no good. Let’s try again with a new friend…

Second test: The screen says that there’s “a way to the North” and in brighter text, “Type ‘N’ to go north.” Friend #2 tells me that N isn’t doing anything. Somehow he had unfocused the input box before typing anything. After I told him that he needed to click on the input box, he expressed with surprise that he hadn’t even noticed the input box.

Third test: Now it says “Type ‘N’ in the box below to go north.” Friend #3 tells me that typing N just makes the letter N appear and that nothing else happens. I sighed so hard and told him to press enter. Yay.

Fourth test: “To go north, type ‘N’ in the box below, then press enter.” Friend #4 types apostrophe, N, apostrophe. I cry inside.

Fifth test: I’m starting to run out of friends who are willing and available to blindly try this. It now says, “To go north, type the letter N in the box below, then press enter.” Friend #5 does it successfully! We did it! Confetti and streamers rain from the skies!

It was like this for every section of chargen. I had to edit the phrasing of sentences, add explanations for things MU* players tend to assume are common knowledge, and so on. I learned a whole lot and it was very beneficial in the long run.

[IoleRae]

@Jumpscare

That’s incredible. NICELY DONE.