Everybody's old man voices were great. Patrick was spot on, Julian sounded hilariously bad as an old man, and Rob sounded exactly like the creepy merchant from Resident Evil 4. Lol right? Think back, "Hey stranger! Whata-ya buyin? Whata-ya sellin? Come back anytime, ye heh!". Rob was channeling his inner creepy merchant when he did his old man voice lol.
I agree with Julian on the excessive tutorials. Tutorials are necessary in games, but it's easy to let it become handholding and invasive or even disruptive (Jules brought up the Batman detective mode reference). Not long ago I was thinking in the shower (Some people sing in the shower, I think about game design lol) about how to do tutorials differently in sophisticated games. In a classic game like Super Mario a tutorial can be accomplished in a matter of moments because there's only a few mechanics and possibilities in the game They can pause the game, bring up a window, and give you notes to tell you how to jump and run. As sophistication increases and more mechanics are added to a game, teaching a player how to play becomes more intellectual or philosophical in a way, and less A= jump. I think Portal 2 did a perfect job of getting me to learn new mechanics and use them through observation, interpretation, and experimentation.
It's quite a marvel too because take a moment to think about the general mechanics that are implemented in the game, and then the physical properties or principles behind them. Momentum flinging uses gravity, velocity, increasing momentum, and as the difficulty increases you have to fling yourself while observing the environment and using quick timing to establish new portal sets that will keep you airborn until you get to a destination. It's not an easy game with easy concepts and mechanics yet kids and parents alike are capable of playing it together and learning fairly organically. The game just lets me watch and learn from the environment, interpret what I see, and most importantly experiment. It doesn't insult your intelligence, and it expects that the human beings of different ages playing the game will have the creativity, reasoning, and observational skills to understand and go experiment till they get to the end.
Valve employs designers and playtest analysts like Mike Abinder that not only study computer science but also study psychology, and it's for good reason. A "tutorial" is a simple teaching tool that can teach you to jump and crouch, which Portal 2 does as you move around in the beginning of the game. However the more sophisticated the game becomes the more you need a sophisticated design and philosophy as to how players will observe, interpret, and experiement with complex concepts. The learning of mechanics is more hands-on and organic in Portal 2 and as the difficulty increases the player learns and adapts without the game stopping, letting you read a text book, holding your hand, and letting that continue as more mechanics are introduced. We should absolultely give players more credit and challenge them while creating an environment in which they can organically learn the skills necessary to overcome the challenges we design. Everybody learns differently (hands-on, visual, verbal, etc) and a game should include some of each teaching technique, but I think in a video game, especially since it's interactive, the hands-on learning is the most important.
Organic and hands-on learning is more fascinating that anything because it comes naturally to humans, it's how we evolved. We didn't learn to hunt mammoths by opening a text book or waiting for somebody to hold our hands. We observed, interpreted, and experimented. Sometimes we died, sometimes we lived, sometimes it failed, sometimes it succeeded. Even the humans that can be classified as "stupid" or of low intelligence are still, in the grand scale of things and in comparison to other species, capable of extremely clever thought and abstract problem solving. This could be used in game design to challenge players and avoid excessive or ineffective learning techniques or tutorials.
Onto the other ranting, I try to be a green person, but I'm with Julian on the booklets. Since back in the day booklets were always the first part of the new game ritual. Back in the day I could buy the bare bones standard version of any game and it would come with a legit box, artwork, and an instruction booklet that was like 40 pages long and contained story, characters, pictures, description of weapons, vehicles, items, spells, skill trees, in addition to the configuration and credits list. Back in the day I could buy a new game, look at the final 2-4 pages of the book and see who the level designers, testers, audio guys, and everybody was. Nowadays it's all on the disc (to save paper, money, and time) and it's just a quiet lame film-esk scrolling list. It seems like the people who make games don't get to take as much pride in it anymore, it's shifted in favor of the business side and productivity side.
These days you have to pay extra money for collections editions just to get insight into the developer's culture, get some fan service, and feel connected. When I open up Assassins Creed 2 or Modern Warfare 3's standard case I just see an eco case, disc, and a like 11 page manual where there's more siezure warnings than anything else and I feel no connection to the product and culture at all.
My favorite new game ritual of all time was with Halo Reach's collectors edition because it was the best fan service I've ever had from start to finish. When I got the game I spent over an hour looking through all the cool shit Bungie put into the package like the fictional news reports, pictures, documents, and ultimately reading though Dr. Halsey's personal journal where she details her hypothesies and experiements behind her Spartan-II augmentations, her selection process of indoctrination candidates, her conceptualizing and manufacturing of Cortana, and the invasion of Reach all told from her perspective and all the beautiful hand-drawn pictures the Bungie artists put into the journal. Then at the end of Reach instead of just letting a boring text list go by, Bungie had a message to their fans (as they did in all the other Halos) in addition to funny pictures of the people on the development team and personal messages from all of them. I was so happy with Reach's collectors edition that it was no longer a simple product. It became passion, art, and the actual artists themselves that I could connect to and I just wanted to cry. It really meant a great deal to me not only artistically but most of all as being a fan of the universe they had been developing over the past 10 years.
Bungie went all out, connected with fans like me, and let me know that this experience I just had wasn't Microsoft's game. It was Bungie's game, they were proud of it, they hope I enjoyed it, and told me thank you. You don't get that often anymore. These days when I buy my games I often feel like I'm connecting with somebodies bank account and quarterly statement, not their art and imagination. A lot of people I know have played Halo only for the multiplayer and don't have the same connection with the franchise I do. I sometimes have a hard time explaining why Bungie, the Halo IP, novels, universe, and characters mean so much to me, but things like this are about as close as I come to being able to explain it. When I would buy Bungie games I would buy them to connect with people like Jason Jones, Joseph Staten, and Marty O'Donnell. When I buy Id games I want to connect with John Carmack. When I would buy Zeldas as a kid it was because I wanted to connect with Shigeru Miyamoto and his imagination.
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