Importance of Tutorials in Gaming
Hello there, friends!
You know how Youtube channels ask you to like and subscribe. They usually include a small visual subscribe button and a cursor animation that slowly moves in and clicks it. That’s a tutorial. It doesn’t just ask you to do something, they also show you how to do it. Seeing how something is done fires a command to our brains to try it ourselves. While it’s rather easy to say “yeah right” and keep on watching as a non-subscriber, telling someone how to do something is still one of the best ways to get them to do it.
Not everyone is a gamer, and new people are brought to our planet from out of nowhere everyday. So everyday is someone’s first day of gaming. While as gamers our brains are wired into recognizing gaming patterns, someone who is new to games needs to be instructed on how to use a mouse and keyboard or parts of a controller in sync to play the game.
When you’re a person doing something for the better part of your life, the idea of not being able to do that thing or not having any idea on that subject seems very alien. Which is also why it takes a different set of skills to pretend that you’re bad at something you’re actually good at. Meanwhile, not being able to perform simple tasks while others are excelling at advanced versions of it is very off-putting. Like watching John Petrucci when you just began learning to play the guitar. So, just like your guitar teacher, the tutorials encourage you to learn the basics so you can be better later.
Some tutorials completely integrate into your gameplay, making you do the things to learn them personally and some of them tell you what to do and expect you to get better at it yourself. But what’s important is the fact that these tutorials should be accessible and repeatable later. This also goes for lore-related information but that’s a subject for a different article. A lot of games, sadly, assume you already know what you’re doing. Some even have tutorials that appear once and then gone forever. Genshin Impact is a big offender on that matter, but they are fixing it on 1.1 so I’m giving it a pass.
Teaching your player how to access the video game you created is usually regarded as a smaller part of the process but failing at that can literally turn newer players away from the door. Video games should consider not only drawing in new players, but also encouraging “new” players to pick up their game and maybe become a gamer themselves. AAA games can’t rely on “gateway” games to have players. This is a subject where everyone needs to step up. Putting great intro cinematics aside, tutorials are the part where the game presents itself to the players for a first impression.
Having simpler and more beginner-friendly tutorials would only add to the player experience. Making your players feel unskilled or worse, bored, is quite easily avoidable. Personally, I hope the tutorial sections become more fun and comprehensive in the future.
