Last week I was on a short international flight. At 1am. For whatever reason, the passengers were comprised almost entirely of a very distinctive religious group. There were about three other people dressed “normally” on the completely full flight.
After the amazing airplane food I was playing Sky Force on my iPad, trying to get my “No Damage” medal on level 8.
While I lucked out with the window, to my left was a 17 year old who was watching intently. After I crashed and burned I offered him to give it a try. He refused, but continued watching as I switched to level 1. Since I had all the power-ups, this was ridiculously easy. After completing the level at 100%, I got a thumbs up from the kid. We did not speak the same language, we communicated only by gestures. I offered him again, he again refused. I went through level one once more and careened into an enemy missile. This time he accepted.
This was probably the first time he had played a real video game. Watching him fly frantically around the screen made me realize how much we as designers rely on our players having some sort of history with the medium, if not the language. Some things we do well, some things we don’t.
The kid was completely oblivious that he should be avoiding the enemy bullets, or perhaps that there even were bullets. He knew enough to dodge the enemy planes, but about half-way through the level when the larger planes began shooting these tiny purple dots, he flew right into them every time. Perhaps he just lacked practice keeping track of so much visual information, while everything on the screen was shiny.
He did figure out that if he kept his plane above the stranded pilots until the green bar filled up, he would earn some bonus points, or at least that it was a good thing to do. This was someone less abstract, I suppose.
After a while we switched to Rovio’s Amazing Alex. I consider this to have a pretty great tutorial. And indeed he was able to follow along with the first few steps, but it didn’t catch. We tried Jet Pack Joyride, but he was completely opposed to the slot machine bonus round.
Finally we switched to 2048. This was clearly his jam and he had no trouble figuring out what to do. Despite the minimalism, the rules of the game were clear and it let him play at his own pace. Before long he worked his way up to 256 and the stewardess insisted again that we put the game away to prepare for landing.
As strange as this may seem, I’ve been thinking about this a bit as well. I’ve been trying to get Christina to try out MMORPG’s for awhile now as an additional way for us to spend some time together. As we sat there while she began the first few steps of LoTRO, I was trying very hard to remember that I would need to patiently explain WASD, mouse-look, right clicking on NPC’s and the whole concept of hitting number keys to perform skills would be completely foreign to her, but which is standard fair for anyone in the genre.
Admirably, while it was difficult to some degree, she is willing to give it a second try. Sometimes, even tutorials which are well designed, leave out the basics that first-time players may not immediately know.
Great insights.
Yes, that’s definitely true. I cut my teeth on Mario Bros. Back then it was just left, right, jump and run. I was able to figure it out myself, and then spent years practicing that through various iterations.
Now day’s you’re really thrown into the deep end, especially with an MMO. wasd, mouse to look, left click, right click, skill bar. It’s interesting to wonder if I would be able to pick it up today if I hadn’t eased into it so.