The 1st of Mars last year, I wrote a post about MMOs and time-waste, where I – among other points – wrote: “For instance, you get a quest to kill some bears right outside town. Now, this town is on the top of a mountain, and the bears are down in the alley[sic], so you’ve got to get down that mountain to kill bears and then back up. Sure, this sounds like a small thing, and it is. It is when traveling includes flying all over the world back and forth taking several minutes for nothing that it, in my opinion, gets bigger. Or when I have to run down that same mountain the tenth time. Why can’t I just teleport around, moving to the target instantly? It’s not like I won’t have to know where I’m heading to make a precise estimation of where I’m about to teleport.” Sometimes, the world behaves in mysterious ways. Yesterday, Rock Paper Shotgun (RPS) posted an article asking why you can’t teleport in MMOs. Knowing I’ve asked the same, and during this year of education might have found a few answers, I feel I could make a post going a bit further into […]
Interaction Design
Tutorials are what make you initially learn how to play a certain game. Often they’re quite boring, and sometimes you don’t learn too much from them, either. My guess on these questions are: Tutorials are no fun because they present no challange or goal. Think that you’ve got the typical RTS-basics of selecting and moving. Normally, you’re just expected to select a peasant and move him to the flag, beacon or whatever. What if this peasant is attacked by a bear, and the peasant is terrified. You have ro select him before he gets slaughtered and flee to the village. You do the same thing, it’s just a bit more fun then before. Note that if you fail, there’s always another peasant. Another guess: You don’t learn from the tutorials because (apart from not being fun), they’re not very pedagogic. You’re not expected to know the multiplications tables by solving each pair only once, you have to repeat it a few times. Grind? Yes, but just a short one to make the knowledge stick. When you’re done with the basic tutorials it’s time to play. But what if you could return to more advanced tutorials, that teaches you a few […]