By this do you mean interactive tutorials? Maybe in general they are the best kind, or maybe not, I don’t know. But I don’t know if they’d suit every game or every player, at least not in isolation. People differ in their approaches to learning things. Some people do like to dive in, some may want to “read the manual” first, some people may want to type lots of different things instead of whatever the tutorial currently wants them to type. Some people may prefer to have something they can look back on, for reference.
It’d be good to make it as easy as possible for game authors to include tutorials. But I’m wondering, assuming game authors do want to include some kind of help, what are the reasons the existing extensions aren’t getting used (if they aren’t)? That would be helpful to know when putting together new ones. For example, Emily Short’s tutorial extension that matt w mentioned looks like it already does most of the things Dan recommended, as far as introducing the basic actions. Is it just that it’s not possible to have a plug-and-play tutorial that’s also interactive?