I did work on a tutorial game a few years ago, but to be frank I never really believed a separate game to teach how to play other games would be very useful and I’ve pretty much reversed my opinion on tutorials since then. (I’ve even had a presentation at a conference on the subject.)
In my personal opinion the first faulty assumption is that playing IF is so hard that you need a complex tutorial. The second faulty assumption is that the problem stems uniquely or primarily from the parser. The third faulty assumption is overestimating the actual scope of the problem. (To clarify: these are things that have generally come up during the years when tutorials are discussed, not in this particular thread.)
This is the basic pattern of commands understood by a parser:
- Move around using compass directions (NORTH, SOUTH, SOUTHWEST…) and IN, OUT, UP, DOWN, ENTER, EXIT
- Interact with the world using commands with only a verb (JUMP, LISTEN), with one noun (TAKE KEY, OPEN DOOR, PUSH BUTTON) or with two nouns (PUT CAT IN BOX, UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY)
- Type INVENTORY to see what you’re carrying, LOOK to see the room description again and remember to EXAMINE things
That’s it. The rest are minor details (abbreviations, pronouns, UNDO, saving/restoring) and story-specific things (custom verbs, conversation system, commanding NPCs). Does anyone here actually remember having to struggle with learning the verb-noun[-preposition-noun] pattern when first playing IF? Did anyone really, after reading or being told how to play, still try to command >WHAT’S INSIDE THE BOX YOU MENTIONED?
The real problem is not the parser but genre conventions that lead to game design that’s opaque to new players. By that I mean that it’s extremely common for a story to start with a short exploratory segment before the player’s immediate goals become obvious. The player is expected to walk around a bit and get to know the surroundings and the actual plot after a timer or after entering a certain location. The intro might give the long term goal (“save kingdom from the orc horde”) but there is no indication what the very first step to get there is (“pick up your backpack and your walking stick”).
Seasoned players start examining things and picking them up and wandering about, but that’s only because they already know that you usually have to poke around to find the trigger that gets the story going. This is all good and well for people who know these conventions, but when a new player types >WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO, they’re not asking how the parser works. They literally don’t know what their goals are and what the story expects from them.
Ideally you’d have a short segment that makes the immediate goals always crystal clear, reaching them is trivial, and the game holds the player’s hand all the way through.
If the player still types >I WOULD LIKE TO PULL THE LEVER PLEASE after all this, I’m not sure that a more detailed tutorial would be of any more help. In fact if you do something like this:
…and the player doesn’t get how the game is supposed to be played, I’m pretty sure that they don’t want to play the game in the first place.
After this the following puzzles should be in the order of difficulty, starting with a very simple non-puzzle (a door is locked and the key is on the table in the same room) and gradually getting harder. This is something that’s very common in other games but traditionally not done in adventure games, other than perhaps having the most complex puzzle last.
Finally, when tutorials or improving the parser is discussed, it’s often silently implied that a lot more people would play IF if they only knew how. That I’ve never believed: enjoying parser IF requires a rather specific intersection of interests (literature, games, computers, puzzles) that, even with a best-case scenario where the parser is tuned to perfection and playing IF is taught to everyone in elementary schools, people who enjoy playing IF will still be in the minority. So even when you observe someone trying a game and immediately putting it down, it’s not necessarily the parser’s, the game’s, or the author’s fault. (This is of course equally true of all types of games.)
If a game grabs someone’s interest they’ll learn how to play it if the game itself doesn’t put hurdles on their way. This is why games like Lost Pig and Violet are quite universally praised even by people who have never played and might never play another parser game again, and comments like “would have wanted to play, but didn’t know how” are conspicuously missing.
(This is not to say that the parser couldn’t be improved. It certainly could be, in many ways, but that’s another discussion.)