Teaching Your Players: Video Game Edition

Anytime you play a new game, you will have to learn the rules, objectives, and tools at their disposal for that game.  In video games, this generally means figuring out which action is performed with which button on the controller, what causes a game over, and what your objective is.  In board games, this generally means figuring out what purpose each game component serves, how they operate together, how the game ends, and how a winner is determined.  This learning process is the first major hurdle players have to get over in order to enjoy your game.  So it's very important that you make this process as painless and enjoyable as possible.

Video Game Education

In video games, you have two extremes for how to teach your player: experimentation and exposition.  Experimentation is where you don't tell the player anything and instead you let them figure out everything on their own.  Exposition is where you explicitly tell the player how to play the game through visual prompts and tutorials.  These lessons aren't just for teaching the controls, but also if players are free to explore (Will an invisible barrier keep them from jumping off cliffs or will you let them fall to their death?  When they fall off a cliff do they die or do they reappear on the cliff's edge possibly with some health gone?  When they do die, how much of the game do they have to replay?), what the terminology of the game is, what actions can the player perform, how does the player distinguish between something that aids the player and something that hurts the player, etc.

Experimentation

First party Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Metroid, etc) are very heavy on the experimentation.  The games rarely tell you how to play and instead just put you in situations where you need to figure out the rules of the game yourself.  For example, in Super Mario Bros. 1 opens with Mario on the left side of the screen and nothing else on screen.  The game does not need to tell the player to press right on the + Control Pad to move forward.  It assumes you'll try the various buttons (granted there are only 8 buttons to try on the original NES controller) and find out that moving to the right moves the screen to the right.  Suddenly you're presented with a ? block and a Goomba walking towards you.  You either continue using the one thing you've learned so far and press right, thus walking into the Goomba and dying (and learning about death in the game) or you try other buttons and learn you can jump by pushing A.  If you got killed by the Goomba, the level restarts with the same scene, so maybe this time you'll try jumping over the Goomba since touching it kills you.  If you time it poorly and land on top of the Goomba, the Goomba is squished, a 100 appears where it was, and a pleasing sound plays.  All that is a lot of small rewards to indicate to the player that's a good thing.  Super Mario Bros. 3 continued this style of teaching.  The risk with this method is that a player may never learn about some aspect of the game and possibly blame the game when they don't understand something.

Exposition

The other extreme is exposition.  If you do this too much, you will inevitably make your player feel stupid or feel that you think they're stupid (which is essentially the same thing) and this never goes down well.  I'm amazed at how many modern games force me to move my player and the camera around with explicit instructions before I'm allowed to do anything else.  Even if you haven't played any other video games in your life, if you start up a game, are given a controller with two thumbsticks on it, then chances are good you can figure out how they work.

Balance

The ideal balance is in between, but closer to experimentation rather than exposition.  As many game lessons as possible should be taught by requiring the player to figure it out.  If you just got a new item, there should be a barrier you couldn't pass previously that requires you to use that new item and figure out how it works.  This lets the player feel smart and it also eliminates the need for illogical barriers to guide the player.  For example, say the player gets some sort of hookshot/grappling hook/whip/etc, then there should have been a cliff they needed to cross with some sort of obvious protrusion above the other side.  For more advanced tools (button combos, complicated combat or crafting systems, etc.), you will need to display text prompts or force the player through a tutorial to teach them how to use those systems.  If this happens, try to make it flow as naturally as possible.