Seven Habits of Highly Effective Video Game Tutorials

Have you ever played a game that felt like it was drawing you in from the very beginning? One that presented you with the things you needed to know in order to play without making you sit through dreary pauses, cut-scenes, and simple tasks? Very effective video game tutorials tend to be a rarity rather than the commonplace. A major factor that contributes to this is the fact that so many tutorials are just designed however the developer thinks they should be, without really caring to get a feel for their audience or for the skills they should be teaching. Unfortunately, this often leaves a lot to be desired, and a high-quality tutorial has to use solid principles of design rather than merely “guesswork” or a “gut feeling”.

Assessment is the first stage of any tutorial. Sadly, these days it’s often lacking or severely underdeveloped. A lot of games just drop the players into a level and tell every player the same thing, slowing down the players who know what they’re doing and offering too few opportunities to practice if a player is confused or uncertain. Tutorials that excel at assessment either react to player performance, telling them their perceived aptitude and encouraging them to continue with their learning or move on to the game, or come in many optional segments so that players can self-assess and look at only the things they need to know and skip those they don’t.

Accessibility is another major part of tutorials. They must be visibly available to the player, and must not be capable of being easily accidentally skipped or overlooked. Most games do this well, but games that follow the increasingly popular tutorial pop-ups system run the risk of having players click through something they meant to read (or later wish they had). In addition, tutorials must account for the control scheme being used; I’ve seen several PC games that run fine with a mouse-and-keyboard despite the fact that the developers only thought to include guides for 360 controllers, and this is one of those things that really will turn off an audience as they frantically search for keys to do what they need to do.

Clarity is also important. Tutorials should make it clear what skill they’re focusing on well and provide performance driven feedback. For instance, nobody would expect a military shooting range to be the locus of movement practice, and the obstacle course that precedes it to actually be the place to practice one’s aim. Yet tutorials often make it unclear what players are supposed to do and learn; frequent reminders and hints will remind players about what they’re supposed to be learning, and allow them to focus on the skills they are acquiring.

Multi-aspect tutorials include a variety of means of giving players advice and feedback. For instance, having a voice actor read commands while a text prompt comes up on the screen is great, as is demoing the appropriate controls on-screen. This means that the player has visual, written, and audio instructions to better help them figure out what they’re doing. If possible, try to include mathematics driven feedback as well-players should know roughly how well they did on the tutorial, and should be presented with this information in as many ways as possible so they can better understand how well they did. “Excellent” is a very vague term if you have eight higher ratings, and 80/250 can be the mean score on certain tests.

Scaffolding works on building up skills. Most games do this pretty well already, but I’ve seen some, especially games that assume unlikely amounts of prior player knowledge, that skip steps. It’s a term from pedagogy that involves the building of skills by adjusting content slightly above what is known. Tutorials’ learned content shouldn’t be easy, and should remain just beyond what the mainline incoming player should know at any given point; if you make the experience of your tutorial just a little challenging but not overwhelming it will encourage players to become better at the game and retain what they have learned, rather than skipping it out of boredom or frustration.

Review is a simple concept. At the end of the tutorial, you should have an assessment or practice of the skills contained within. Sometimes this doesn’t even look like a tutorial; you can move into a form of your normal gameplay and even start the narrative, but be sure to go through the steps you started in your tutorial. The exact execution of this is rather flexible; you can go through steps in order again, skip overly simple ones like “WASD” movement in most PC games, and/or rearrange the order entirely to create a more engaging experience. Just be sure that you have an idea of where players will be at the end of the tutorial, and make the review appropriate-it’s their chance to either practice their skills or build their self-competence regarding them, and if you have people who know what they’re doing but are forced to “do this three times” they’ll get frustrated and disengaged, while if you have people who pulled the move off once but are still shaky you should probably give them a couple more opportunities to study.

Finally, tutorials should be able to be returned to. Not many players will, but you should be sure that the information is available again in a simple and direct package. Sometimes you can just go through the tutorial again, or you could have a separate stripped-down version of the tutorial that skips any fluff in-between sections. If your tutorial is broken down into chunks it makes returning easier, so long as players can find the part that they feel like practicing again. Ideally, you’d also include a written help guide, for those who just need to review controls or gameplay principles they haven’t used in a while, and allow for a more rapid and direct access of concepts rather than forcing players to repeat the original learning process.

In short, good tutorials assess the player as they go through it, are accessible to beginners, are clear, provide various means of learning as well as feedback for players, teach more advanced concepts after training the skills necessary to carry them out, return to previously taught knowledge in a way that won’t frustrate players, and allow players to come back and rediscover skills they missed out on or need more practice in.