Opinion

A Cake For Teacher

N'Gai Croal looks back to his school days and considers what developers could learn from their own when it comes to tutorial levels.

If you think about all of the teachers that you had growing up – throughout elementary school, high school, college, etc – which ones did you like the best? The ones that were strict, or the ones that were forgiving? The ones who nurtured you or the ones who pushed you? I had reason to think about this recently while sitting onstage at a client’s offices, answering a variety of questions that the game’s executive producer had solicited from his team, all of whom were seated in the audience. While responding to a query about important trends in the videogame industry, I took the opportunity to suggest that the relationship between a developer and a player should not be adversarial; that the primary goal of the developer should be not to punish the player, nor even to challenge the player, but rather to teach the player. And, furthermore, that the developer should be invested not in the player’s failure, but in the player’s success.
 
The game that drove this point home for me was Portal. For months before its release, at various EA events, I had seen the game being demoed out of the corner of my eye. And while it looked interesting, each time I drifted by the demo station, I’d say to myself: “It looks cool, but I have no idea what’s going on or what I’m supposed to do.” The reason I didn’t understand, of course, is that the slice of the game that was being presented didn’t begin the way the game eventually would. Instead, Valve showed a level that was located farther on in the game, which forced its staff to verbally explain Portal’s mechanics. But as eloquent as Valve’s demo ninjas may be, they weren’t as eloquent as the finished game. In its final incarnation, Portal is a masterclass on how to take difficult-to-articulate gameplay concepts and properly educate the player on their use.
 
It opens by automatically placing portals in the environment, then lets players lay down blue portals so that they can emerge from the pre-placed orange portals, before finally allowing players to fire both blue and orange portals; by carefully parcelling out abilities and challenges, Valve ensures that players will grasp its mechanics more easily than if the player were immediately given a fully functional Portal Gun. And where many games rush players through the tutorial levels – it’s almost as if developers are ashamed of their professorial function – there’s a case to be made that in Portal, Rooms 00 through 19 are an extended, entertaining tutorial for the game’s mindbending, behind-the-curtain final level and boss battle.
 
To insist that the primary goal of a game developer is to teach us is not to say that game developers shouldn’t challenge us. As students, teachers call on us, give us quizzes, tests and essays. But quizzes, tests and essays aren’t the ultimate goal. Nor is the score or the grade. These tools are part of a learning process that will hopefully lead us to master the material. And even though, especially in our younger years, this process may seem adversarial, anyone who has befriended a former teacher as an adult soon, err, learns that their teacher was rooting for them to succeed all along.
 
So what would it mean for developers to see themselves as teachers? In my ideal world, they wouldn’t treat the tutorial function of a game’s starting levels as a necessary evil, to be rushed through as quickly and as dutifully as possible. Instead, they would accept that the game begins as soon as the logos fade away, and make sure that the opening moments are as carefully and richly imagined as those that will follow. They would treat their tutorials like a lecture (BioShock), an assessment (Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) or a mystery (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves) that make players want to go deeper. They wouldn’t throw a ton of new concepts out right off the bat and expect the player to retain them all; rather, they would dispense them at a manageable pace. And whenever new mechanics were introduced – no matter how late in the game – they would teach players how to use them rather than just tossing them into the deep end.
 
The challenge, as any teacher will tell you, is that different students learn differently. I may have described my ideal game instructional experience, but it may not be yours. Some of us respond well to sink-or-swim. Some of us prefer drill sergeants to kindly professors. Some of us learn best from explicit instruction, others learn better from trial and error. So if a typical elementary school teacher is challenged by having to teach a class of 30, pity the poor developer who must teach three million ‘students’ without the benefit of personal contact that a real teacher can make use of. There is research to be done, but my hunch is that developers could probably learn a lot from talking to teachers, if only to learn the educational tools and teacher personalities that are most appropriate to the games they’re working on. And if I’m correct? Huge success.
 
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com