I mean it’s not true that people react unfavorably to games that don’t include tutorials. (I’m assuming IFComp context here, where the “people react unfavorably to untested games” quote is from) Sure, there might be a handful of judges who do that (especially after this conversation) but saying that just to get people to add tutorials sounds a bit dishonest.
Ah, got it.
You’re absolutely right. Experienced parser players don’t react unfavorably to games without tutorials. (I never noticed the absence myself.)
My suggested stick approach was to start reacting unfavorably to games without tutorials, in order to encourage authors to put tutorials in their games.
Sorry if that was unclear.
So here’s a possible thought, possibly foolish.
There are companies that supply usability testing, in the form of hordes of people assigned to try your website and provide videos of use and various forms of feedback. This of course costs some money. (I don’t know exactly how much, but have worked with such a company in a commercial context before. Presumably we could find out and decide if the number is low enough for this community to be willing to collectively raise that sum. I did strongly have the impression that this was a lot cheaper than most other ways one could go about collecting testing data – certainly hosting user tests oneself in a physical location has a lot of associated overhead and might not even give as consistent a set of results.)
We could then have a tutorial-making contest, which could make use of existing or newly formed games; the requirement would be that the contestants submitted something ready to be played online, with the intent to run the variants past the usability testers. I suppose there might also need to be a preliminary elimination round if so many entries were submitted that it wouldn’t be feasible to pay for them all to be tested – or some kind of public comment and feedback round first, since it would be to the community’s advantage to present the best-quality experience to the paid novices. This would also give the participants in the contest the incentive of getting a kind of feedback that is otherwise quite rarely available, as well as some absolute ranking of results.
Yeah I don’t quite like that approach either because it’d be artificial punishment for not following an ideology that not everyone agrees to.
Outside comp context I do think it’s a good idea to at least remind authors that adding a tutorial could be wise. There have been multiple occasions when an author has been angry at new players for not getting how to play their game, without any effort towards making the game accessible to new players.
One review knocked off a few stars of Rayman Origins because it didn’t have multiplayer. Never mind the fact that multiplayer was totally alien to the concept at the time, never mind the fact it wasn’t supposed to have multiplayer. The reviewer had decided that every game needed a multiplayer option, and punished the game for not having it.
(of course, then Rayman Legends did include multiplayer. But I refuse to believe that that jackass reviewer’s “I’m punishing this because of what I wanted it to have and it doesn’t” helped bring about a shift in perception. I choose to believe that there were very many other factors, including the realisation that, indeed, multiplayer games are all the rage)
I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out, but I would have a knee-jerk negative reaction against a reviewer who had a knee-jerk negative reaction for a game just because it didn’t have a tutorial/pretty graphics/a killer soundtrack/real-time/a fully modelled 3d environment/.
Incidently, I never found it fair or pretty to judge a game by what it isn’t, and what it didn’t do. In technical terms and in terms of content. It’s one thing to imagine where a game might be made better by so-and-so; we all do that to an extent when we feel “Wow, this game JUST fell short of greatness!”. It’s quite another to bash it because of what it doesn’t do, or doesn’t say, of because of the gender it doesn’t represent or the colour that the characters don’t have.
I don’t want to steer off-topic - I’m saying that “This game doesn’t have a tutorial! BAAAD!” is just as wrong, for me, as a game that says “This game doesn’t have black characters! BAAAD!”.
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People pointed out that a carrot approach might be more acceptable/palatable/agreeable, and I’m on board with that.
I just wanted to clarify my original intent re: Juhana’s statement.
Has the IF Comp organizer expressed an opinion about any of this?
Also, I like this idea:
I think three people in this topic have said ‘I don’t like the menu navigation’, but I don’t know if they’re talking about not liking scrolling around with arrow keys, or about having to use menus at all.
I tended to a lot of the clunk (no scrolling, single key press controls, pagination mode, don’t lose your place when exiting menus, accessibility-friendly, works even if you have no ESC key) with my new Menus extension, but a week after I released it, the New-New Inform was released, and it broke.
In a sob story, I asked for help with it in a topic here but I didn’t get any. But then, in the feel-good story of the year, I got it working again today.
If you want to present help content a person can page through instead of stuff that is arranged in menus and submenus fashion, you can also use this extension. That’s not the same as sticking the content in another window per se… really, I’m just trying to say that I just fixed the bloody thing again! And I will somehow make it available again tomorrow.
-Wade
The more I think about it, the more I think that having some UI separation between the parser and story content and out-of-game help and options is a good idea. Maybe this should be a goal for future versions of Glulx, the ability to integrate an out-of-game menu that can be rendered in an interpreter-appropriate way, ideally as a native UI widget rather than the old text menu.
Well, I don’t think we should exaggerate how hard it is. I gave an illustration of how it didn’t plug and play smoothly with one of my games–but that was more a reaction to what I felt was an exaggerated view of how easy it is to get a tutorial working just by plugging in the extension–but that was a somewhat odd game, where the only takeable object doesn’t even start on screen, and the only exit was through a locked door. Also I was discovering some fixable bugs in the extension.
I just tried the extension on another game (not mine) and it wasn’t that hard to get it running with decent performance; it was odd in that there wasn’t anything takeable in the first location, and there were a few tweaks to make it run smoothly, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as getting enough syntaxes for a complicated action. How well it works is another question.
As Juhana and some others have said, this seems like too much stick. How about an all-carrot approach like “If you are writing a parser game, please keep in mind it could be some players’ first exposure to parser IF. You may want to include a tutorial or other help for new players, and many established players also appreciate such tutorials. For more on adding tutorials please see [some discussion on how to do it, including links to the IF card and the new spiffy I7 tutorial mode extension that we’ll have].”
I read the discusssion as more like “The way to do it is to use keywords and highlighting.” “But some people don’t like making games that way!” “There’s also this old extension nobody uses.” “Hey it’s actually really good!” “It’s not perfect though.” Still a lot of room for improvement and experimentation.
I like the help text better than the help menu here. Having text pop up in tooltips or something to keep it separate from the main text window sounds pretty great. Having it accessed through a menu, which you mouse around to, sounds… less great. I worry about Anna Anthropy’s point about getting the player’s fingers where you want them; if we want them to interact by typing then having pulldown menus for the help seems bad to me. (Word processors have lots of pulldown stuff besides the typing–but I always use keyboard shortcuts in them.) Mileage may vary though, I’m certainly not a UI tester.
It might be different if all the action out of world, like saving and restoring, happened through application menus rather than the command line–as it is I basically don’t interact with the interpreter application at all until I have to quit it. (Of course novices won’t be using those interpreters anyway.)
I like this idea.
I like Emily’s idea as well, but - it’s an idea that requires significant resources (time, effort, money).
If someone steps forward to organize this, and there’s sufficient financial support, I think that would be fantastic, and I’d eagerly await the results. But I’m not in a place right now where I can help make this happen.
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I’d say this is only true of certain games, mostly because of the evolution of their development. Minecraft, of course, comes to mind. I can imagine Notch continuously putting the tutorial off until, at some point, the community was large enough and self-directing enough that it was no longer needed. Minecraft does, however, provide explicit goals for the player in the form of achievements. If the player attempts to achieve the goals in order, she will master the fundamentals of the game, even though the game itself does not provide explicit instructions for how to achieve the goals.
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For other games, like Dwarf Fortress, arcana is part of their appeal. One thing that video games offer is skill-reward, the idea that you become skilled at something by playing. (Even if the skill has no applicability outside the particular game.) Arcane games allow the gamer to feel skilled because they’ve mastered a system that is deliberately obscure to newcomers. Zachtronics just released a (very fun) game called TIS-100, which is a game that requires you to program an array of concurrently operating microprocessors using very RISC assembly code. (I think it’s Turing complete, but it’s shaved down to about 15 total instructions.) To play the game you really do need to be at least somewhat familiar with microprocessor architecture and writing in assembly, as well as print out the 14 page 80’s style datasheet/manual for the machine. There’s no attempt to explain programming concepts to potential players, and I assume the developers just expect that anyone who wants to play a game about assembly programming will have the requisite knowledge already, and they (we) get to feel smart for knowing it.
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The trend, however, is not towards ‘fuck-it’, but toward initial walled gardens. You put the player in a situation where they can’t do much and have one concrete goal. They get to use limited tools to solve the goal, and in the process start to discover how the game’s systems work. Then you slowly expand their range of options, while still motivating the player using concrete linear goals until they can escape the garden and interact with the full range of systems the game offers. This is very very standard game design methodology these days. Every major studio game uses it, most indie games use it, mobile games use it, puzzle games have always used it. You don’t make the player read the manual, and you don’t interrupt their play with descriptions of what to do (which is my issue with The Dreamhold or the Tutorial extension), you let them discover how to play by playing.
So, that’s pretty rambling, but I’d argue that parser games can’t do 1), at least not now. I could imagine Kerkerkruip maybe being one game that would work with it, but even that game has neither systems that are complex enough to need it nor a big enough community to enable it. 2) is perfectly viable, particularly for parser IF that’s more literary or avant garde or puzzly. (Like, say, everything ever written by Adam Cadre.) I think requiring a tutorial there takes away some of that skill-reward rush. But 3), there’s not much parser stuff that really attempts this; there’s a tendency to drop the player into an environment and trust them to explore, which ability to explore is parser games’ #1 strength, but if you want to ease the player in, it’s best give them fewer options to start. I think Hadean Lands’s first couple of puzzles are great because they do present single concrete goals and constrain the player until they’re achieved. Gun Mute is fantastic precisely because of the constraints it places on the player’s actions. Incidentally, and I haven’t tried this, but Gun Mute is the game I would show a newbie first, particularly if they already know non-text-based video games. Gun Mute makes no bones about having a very limited verb set, so there’s no illusion of freedom presented to the player.
That’s the only type of in-game-learning that doesn’t completely interrupt the flow of things I can find myself in.
I’m completely on board with this idea although I view the contest as a mostly user interface mock-up contest, not really anything to do with a functioning IF story. So we should have people making what are called wire frames and graphic design paper samples. This is where I would start and instead of hiring usability testers, I’d hire an Information Architect, someone who can help improve usability.
I honestly don’t think that any IF authoring skills relate to usability in and of itself. I’m a programmer of 30+ years and I know I am not an expert on usability. There are people that get paid really good salaries and hourly rates that do this work and only this work.
What is up to “us” is to define the problem and direct solutions. Provide a list of requirements we can all agree on (ahem) and then hire one or two UX designers to take on the challenge of creating a UX based on those requirements.
UX designers can run anywhere from $75 to $150/hr and will probably want a minimum of 40 to 80 hours to discuss, mock, present a number of times. My estimate is this would run around $5,000 to $10,000.
Emily’s idea; to have authors come up with UX ideas (when there’s zero evidence any author can do that well because if they could, they would have) and then test those ideas leaves out the possibility that the winning idea still falls short of true high quality usability.
The IF Comp organizer is currently on his way to YAPC (yapcna.org/yn2015/talk/6058) and I don’t know if he’ll be checking the forum this week.
Adding to Juhana’s reaction… for IFComp, we should be straightforward about the intent. E.g.:
"Parser IF authors: You are strongly encouraged to include an in-game tutorial or other information for parser-IF newcomers. IFComp is widely publicized outside the IF community, and so your game is likely to be played and judged by people who are not familiar with the parser interface. We recommend the following libraries as effective and easy to add to your game: […]
Similarly, if your game uses any other unconventional interface, we encourage you to make it as learnable as possible.
“We want to make this year’s IFComp the most accessible ever. We want as many people as possible to try IF for the first time. Thanks for helping!”
If I have misunderstood this thread and my post is not relevant, I wish to apologize in advance.
I’m pretty new to this stuff and I might be nothing more than an annoying idiot,
but as far as I’m keeping up (and I might not realize I’m not able to keep up) I believe that there is an already present solution to this question.
[rant=“The Cruelty Scale”]
If I’m not mistaken, it’s also referenced to as the Zarfian Scale. That’s how I found it on the Google.[/rant]This, but for help.
The Bystander’s Scale*
- Benevolent: Failure is not an option. The game is constructed in such a way that help is never far off, be it via a menu, helpful error messages, or the game detecting after a few missed opportunities you’re struggling.
- Evident: The game won’t check up on you but if you want it, there’s a lot of helpful information at the beck and call of your fingertips.
- Prevalent: The common option. There’s help, but no more or less than the average story out there.
- Pertinent: Anything that’s specific to the game is explained (at least once), but aside from that you’re expected to know how to IF.
- Malevolent: You’re playing the game, you figure it out. It’s your problem.
*I feel if I come up with this solution and it’s used I’d get to name it, maybe please? So it is a reference to the Benevolent Bystander, a fictional character that I’ve even included in this mod
That way, for those who want to play a game, they’ll know how to go about it. If they want something that holds their hand, and tells them they’ve been a good boy and will get a sweet if they behave, they can pick something Benevolent or Evident. If they want to see their loved ones ripped from them as they will be forced to perform a HALO hump wearing only a parachute and a pair of boots and maybe a bowie knife clenched between the b… teeth, then they can look for something Malevolent.
This would indicate that reviews of a malevolent game that deduct points for “being so damn unhelpful” are reduced in value.
I believe we can all agree nobody takes a person seriously when they see “this contains nuts” and they eat it anyway, and then complain “You should have warned me this had nuts in it./How was I supposed to know it had nuts in it?”
Because people are what they eat. They’re nuts.
So let’s bring order to the nuttiness, and (maybe) introduce a new scale?
It’s a creative approach, but I have three concerns.
- External documentation for a game is less accessible (by nature) than documentation within a game. The IFDB or IFWiki may not be updated. And a new player won’t necessarily know where to look for external documentation, or even that it exists.
- If one of our goals is to bring up the overall new player friendliness of parser IF being produced - this scale won’t help with that. It just provides an opt out.
- I see your reasoning around the name, but using an unintuitive name for a feature intended to help new players is not super helpful. (See the cruelty scale - it’s accurately named, yet people still routinely mistake it for a measure of difficulty rather than forgivingness.)
[rant]
[/rant]
It may limit frustration and the desire to give up IF if you’re going to try one that in the cruelty scale is a pushover but has few helpful hints for n3wbz.
I’m a big fan of internal documentation. yes, olden times it was fun to have a booklet of sorts but this is the internet so if it’s one file, included into the game, that’s a big plus. just type “menu” and go for “special commands” or something. like my old teacher said: “document the ungodly f*** out of everything. This cup? document it. this computer? document it. my lunch? hands off it’s mine but you should still document it.” if you make something new, document it. for science, the future, and yourself. and of course, the player.
Benevolent - it kinda pushes it into your lap. the game is benevolent in the sense that it doesn’t really give you a window to not know what to do next or what your options are. Evident - it makes sense but it’s not being shoved down your throat. it’s evident what you should do and can do. Prevalent - it’s everywhere it should be. assistance is prevalent. Pertinent - only the unique stuff is where it should be and the rest you should know. only pertinent information. Malevolent - … I’m pretty sure you catch my drift. And the Bystander… the Bystander is someone who assists, like the Help function. Or what that paperclip in office used to try. And a tutorial is like a person walking you through the steps, like the Bystander does.
This is a traditional approach (or “help” / “how to play this game”) but I’ve always felt that it’s too deeply buried to be helpful to a genuine newbie.