To tutorial or not to tutorial, that is the question

First impressions are incredibly important. I think this is a principle we have drilled into us from birth in our western societies. If the first experience you have at a new restaurant, or with a new boss, or a new job is poor, you are more likely to allow it to rule the rest of your experience.

I think this is also true of video games. If the starting portion of a game is poorly crafted, it tends to rule the experience. In a recent lecture, we were talking about starting conditions for players, and how the introduction of gameplay mechanics and story are fundamental to the experience. This led the discussion to the use of tutorials at the start of a game being required to progress through the rest of the game. Different games have handled this different ways, and with mixed results in my experience.

Take Second Life for example. I realise that many will not recognise Second Life as a game, but... I disagree. It can't be denied that it be played for the sure pleasure of getting your character to fly, then dropping them from some obscene height. In this regard, I hold Second Life as a game. Call it a real-time simulation featuring human interaction and business if you want. At any rate, I recently had to do a project in Second Life, and this required me to start my own account so I could get to a set-aside island, an area where we could muck around and do whatever we wished. I thought I'd just be able to sign in, teleport there, and get started. But no, I was abruptly interrupted by not just one forced tutorial, but four. Fairly mediocre at that. It required a lot of reading of arbitrary text, a lot of finding things on the hud, and doing things that just weren't that interesting at all. One of my friends attempted the same thing and found himself stuck in these tutorials for several weeks, just cause the experience was so poorly designed.

Dawn Of War for PC takes a slightly different angle on this whole idea. When you create a new player account and try to start a new game, you are prompted with "This is the first time you're playing. Would you like to play the tutorial?" You can then either just jump into whatever match you've started (heaven help you) or play through a very basic mission, which has you getting used to some of the basic tasks of the game. This was a better solution (as I already knew how to play when I installed it). That said, if you choose to do the campaign for the first time, the first mission is incredibly basic and also seems to walk you through the same ideas covered in the tutorial. Might be a bit of redundant information.

The best solution I found was in the Metroid Prime series on Gamecube and Wii. The way Metroid does it is by starting off the game, but places things in your path that will make you learn to play without pushing you too far. In Prime 3, in the first area you arrive in, you are asked to "calibrate your weapon by shooting these targets", which subtlely teaches you how to aim. The game doesn't force you to learn how to do things before giving you a practical situation to use them in. Rather, it flashes a small tooltip the first area you need to double jump, or strafe, and roll into a morph ball. This has the advantage of allowing more experienced players to bypass the "noobie" sections, without impeding on gameplay.

The main issue with the use of a tutorial or the use of some other mechanism is that of flow. The reason I probably like the Metroid style better is because there is no disruption of the flow of the game, and allows the game to seamlessly transition from the "intro" into a grander story, rather than having the player segment their experience. This seems to be the way games are heading now, and rightly so. Keep it coming!