Monday, July 21, 2008

Game Tutorials & Instructions

In my ATITD rant follow-up, I mention the importance of explaining how to do stuff to players. Here I wanted to talk about what happens when you don't explain things -- beyond players just not playing.

I'm playing Travian (sign up and get me gold!) with some guild-mates. The rules and etiquette of Travian are hidden. They're not obvious. What is the game about? How do attacks work? There's competition, so according to the nomenclature I set forth in the previous post on Game Design Theory, it's a game. It has goals, but they're not clear. Evidently the goal is to build a Wonder of the World. I think maybe you need to be in an alliance that builds 4 of them; I'm not sure. There's no "How to Win" post somewhere that I could find that out; I'd have to chase down someone's stickied forum post -- on maybe the .com forums or the .us forums, who knows?

How does one get started playing the game? Just jump in and click and you'll find out. What do you do? Either find out the hard way, or spend a lot of time reading the forums and gleaning some idea that way. Let me be clear here: you don't go to the forums and, oh!, there's a post explaining everything! No, you go read a ton of posts and get a slightly less foggy idea of what the game is about. There's some early build orders posted, for example, but they kinda assume that you know what you're doing after that. Players have no goal given to them early on.

Learning the Game is Our Game Mechanic

There seems to be the idea that "figuring it out is part of the game." This is a common thread in several of the indie-ish games I've seen, whether it's something semi-well-known like ATITD or Travian or smaller single-player games or whatnot.

If learning how to play is one of your game mechanics, then your game is an Alternate Reality Game where you have to surf web pages and ask questions in forums -- but you get called a noob for a while. Do you enjoy being called a noob? I don't.

The 14-year-olds get called noobs because they haven't learned to use search features. I guess there's older kids that are just as annoying. In fact, there's probably decent folk that post questions in the forums just out of frustration. There's a pattern here that I've mentioned in previous posts: Hide stuff from your players and they wind up engaging in behaviors that piss off your elder players.

What Really Happens

When your game first comes out, no-one knows how to play (except the kids in beta). Since those kids in beta know their way around, they'll make posts on the forums to show off their knowledge. Don't think that "the players get to learn the game mechanics" is a feature. It's not. Trial-and-error isn't a fun, strategic, or rewarding way to learn something, so even that's not a great thing. Maybe a few dozen people 'learn' your game the hard way, the rest learn through some mix of hard knocks and forum browsing, and your "game mechanic" is now over.

New players aren't strictly forbidden from finding out how to play the game; they just have to get that knowledge from the elders. Some newbs will find out, others will just get frustrated and quit. The elder players are those that already know what's going on. Some of them (often highly regarded by the community) then pass that knowledge on. The lack of documentation means that some elders have to take on the role of mommy and teacher, and assuredly some of them really enjoy that role. But you're losing players just to make a few people warm and happy by providing the documentation that you should be providing anyway. Those knowledge-mavens will find something to write about; they always do. You wind up with a game structure where you have: a set of in-crowd elders that have learned everything the hard way; a set of up-and-coming players that are poring a lot of time into learning your game (when they could be playing it more, or otherwise enjoying their life); and a bunch of nubs that are getting frustrated, making stupid posts, bothering elder players, and either leaving or maybe becoming non-nubs.

If you gave the players good documentation, your nurturing elders would find something else to write about -- like good strategies. They'd participate in design and meta-game discussions. They'd build the community, rather than just stem the leaks produced by shoddy docs.

Good documentation helps to build your player base. Players like knowing what they're supposed to do. They enjoy games that have score-cards. Tell your players how to play and tell them the goal and then let them figure out how to win.

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