{"id":719,"date":"2007-08-02T13:44:06","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T17:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/08\/02\/training-camp\/"},"modified":"2008-02-18T03:09:13","modified_gmt":"2008-02-18T07:09:13","slug":"training-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/08\/02\/training-camp\/","title":{"rendered":"Training Camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure we need a manifesto for tutorials and manuals, but Nayan Ramachandran has written one anyway<\/a>. And it has some solid points to make about the place and purpose of these training tools in contemporary game design. (Spotted at Game, Set, Watch<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Ramachandran diagnoses the problem thusly:<\/p>\n

For the most part, people seem to find tutorials intrusive and irritating if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re too structured not integrated into the game, but find the game intensely unapproachable and inaccessible if no help is provided at all. What is a developer to do?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the summary isn’t that far from the truth.<\/p>\n

Manuals and tutorials have, for too long, been redundant, intrusive, and sometimes completely useless. Considering both of these tools can make or break a player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s initial impression of a game\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s environment, one would think they could spend some more time on the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153first impression.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The meat of his post is his six point manifesto. Lots of good advice there (using visual cues, skipping simple movement, keep the tutorial on topic) but his view on manuals is so much at odds with contemporary game publishing that it’s almost a pipe dream.<\/p>\n

The best manuals, these days, are full color ones that not only provide reference material if a player forgets how to perform a specific action in the game, but also offer background information for characters, objects and the world as a whole. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s especially nice when a manual provides several pages of optional back story and mythology to read through, like Starcraft or Diablo II.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Provide large manuals that don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just offer redundant tutorial information, but also offer full color art, additional literature for the player, and some other extras.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Ramachandran cites two PC games as his models since consoles have rarely had color manuals filled with mythology and back story. The largest console manual I have is for MLB2k7 and it’s got a thousand commands for me to remember. The tutorials in many console games are terrible, but this is often because they want you to have seven fingers on each hand. Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia<\/a>\"\"<\/em> has this problem on the 360. But even in the PC realm, substantial manuals are a thing of the past, replaced by ingame tutorials or cutscenes to explain the backstory.<\/p>\n

There’s a little bit of nostalgia going on here, I think. Starcraft<\/em>‘s manual isn’t really large, at least in page length, though the paper size and font are huge. Backstory is one of those things that doesn’t interest me unless the mythology of the game captures my imagination and, trust me, no one would care about Protoss or Zerg history if Starcraft<\/em> wasn’t a Very Important Game.<\/p>\n

Ramachandran is right, though, that a manual should add value to the game whether it be through historical analysis (European Air War<\/a>\"\"<\/em> or Great Battles of History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>), charts (Dominions 3<\/a>\"\"<\/em>) or personality (Pirates!<\/a>\"\"<\/em>). But this sort of thing takes time and money and few game developers have time and money. The whole idea of the “manual” is to teach how to use a product, and writing down a series of commands and unit descriptions is much easier than say, including a designer’s note<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tutorials are another matter, and developers walk a fine line here. As much as I hate being taught to left select\/right move in every single RTS, I have to remind myself that every RTS could be somebody’s first. I am certain that this was overwhelmingly the case with Left Behind: Eternal Forces<\/a>\"\"<\/em>, a game whose slow and infuriating tutorial seemed aimed solely at the inexperienced. This basic training needs to be there, and is increasingly being well integrated into the open stages of story based campaigns. Of course, I have little use for story based campaigns in my RTS.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the strategy guide racket, of which the less said, the better.<\/p>\n

Fill the comments section with nostalgia free thoughts on teaching gamers what to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure we need a manifesto for tutorials and manuals, but Nayan Ramachandran has written one anyway. And it has some solid points to make about the place and purpose of these training tools in contemporary game design. (Spotted at Game, Set, Watch.) Ramachandran diagnoses the problem thusly: For the most part, people seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-bB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}