Manuals, not tutorials
It’s quite obvious that a player can’t enjoy your game, if she doesn’t know how to play it. Most game designers recognize this problem and take steps to remedy it, but in my opinion, they often go too far.
Civilization is quite a complex game, but it’s still not hard to pick it up and play, even if you only fully understand its inner workings much later. The first Civilization barely had a tutorial; it only showed an occasional hint, and even those where few and far between. Still, most players were clear on what they could do, or at least on some of the things they could do and that was enough to get going. The fourth installment of Civilization has a tutorial that stands out in my mind as one of the most annoying gaming experiences I ever had. It’s slow, it’s dull, it goes into unnecessary detail and it takes a long, long time. I doubt it enhanced anyone’s gaming experience, regardless of they were already familiar with earlier versions of the game or not.
Just because your game has complex rules, doesn’t mean you need to dump all of them on the player at once. As long as the player can have fun in the first few minutes of play, it doesn’t matter one bit whether she already knows all the rules or not. You can always introduce the more intricate rules later on, or let the player find them out for herself, as Civilization 1 does.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should hide the rules. As Soren Johnson points out in his article about game design mistakes:
I have noticed a discernible trend to hide game mechanics from the player. Age of Kings shipped in 1999 with an incredible reference card listing every cost, value, and modifier in the game. With most modern RTS’s, however, you’re lucky if the manual actually contains numbers.
With that in mind, my suggestion is to describe the more complex aspects of your game in the game’s manual. Yes, I know: nobody reads the manual, but that’s mostly because it only contains trivial information, like how to install the game. If you fill the manual with interesting, game related, hard-to-find-out-on-your-own information, then players are bound to at least browse through it at some point. When they do, they will discover new things about your game and will be enthousiastic about playing the game again.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a physical manual; that would be especially cumbersome for games that are distributed digitally only. You could include it in the game itself: Civilization’s Civilopedia goes a long way to providing the player with information on the inner workings of the game. If you give it some thought, you might be able to come up with something that’s even more apprioprate for your game.
Don’t fill your tutorials with information the player doesn’t really need at the start of the game. A manual is a good thing. Honest, it is.
(20 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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chettinger said,
Comment • September 20, 2007 @ 18:06
New to the site, found it through your posts about the base game engine in July of 05. Anyway, on this topics I had to add that I found the introduction / tutorial for Super Paper Mario to be my worst tutorial experience to date. The shear amount of dialog that you had wade through, injected with just a few and brief moments of actually controlling Mario between more lengthy instructions was very tiring. I believe it took nearly an hour before you were free to run the levels of the game without further conversation road blocks.
On the other hand I enjoyed the tutorial method in both EVE Online and the more recent Bioshock.
EVE started you in the game with full control of your interface but provided you with a tutorial assistant. The instruction was easily skipped if you had been through it before. Easily restarted if you needed look back for information, even modular so you could jump to the section in question. The overall tutorial was brief giving you the basic instruction of flying your ship and the basics of star bases. Education then continued during your early experience with the game as necessary, when you encountered a new feature.
In contrast this was one short coming I felt for Everquest 2 and to some extend Guild Wars. Their tutorials were set on Noobie islands/zones and were rather lengthy dialog and covered the real basics.
Bioshock employed the NPC on the short wave radio educating you about your environment as you approached new areas.
To wrap this up, I like the idea of providing more of a reference manual, with abbreviated basics. Perhaps providing those as part of game play, or like more games are doing launching the documentation in the browser.
Yehuda Berlinger said,
Comment • October 15, 2007 @ 12:14
On a similar topic, I remember endless games of Nethack without a clue as to how to play. And I never reached the end.
Nowadays we have millions of dollars spent on games like Halo 3, where teams of researchers monitor how many seconds it takes players to figure out how to pass an obstacle or accomplish a task, and then redesign the game if it takes too long.
You’re talking more about discovering the rules, while I’m talking about discovering the gameplay, but they amount to the same thing. Everyone wants to dumb down everything in order to appeal to the mass market. The joy of discovery is not attractive. Only the power to overawe with graphics.
Yehuda
How to teach player how to play your Flash game : Emanuele Feronato - italian geek and PROgrammer said,
Pingback • November 8, 2007 @ 14:30
[…] There are some interesting thoughts in Casual Game Design blog: Civilization is quite a complex game, but it’s still not hard to pick it up and play, even if you only fully understand its inner workings much later […]
Deceth said,
Comment • November 12, 2007 @ 18:52
Yeah, teaching players how to play the game is an important part of getting them to keep playing. If it’s too complicated right off the bat, people will drop it.
You need to design the game so the learning curve is gradual not steep and in such a way that complexity is fun to learn, not frustrating. Of course, saying that and then programming can be a whole other story 
Björn said,
Comment • April 6, 2008 @ 0:35
Come on, that is complete nonsense, unless you target the control freak gamers who enjoy complicated games. You have a point with the annoying tutorials, but please don’t require a manual for modern games.
Archbob said,
Comment • August 29, 2008 @ 8:25
I never read the tutorials, its much easier and more fun to go figure out the game yourself. Usually the easy mode on a game has tips built in every now and then.
TeMPOraL said,
Comment • September 5, 2008 @ 9:31
Altar Interactive’s RTS game “Original War” has a detailed in-game help that reveals and explains much of the game’s techtree and mechanics. I enjoyed sole reading of it, and it made me even more keen on playing this game .
A good example of tutorial+manual combination is StarCraft. The tutorial covers just basic RTS mechanics (movement, attack, role of some buildings), while electronic help (not in-game) contains detailed information about armour and weapon classes and other stats and advanced game mechanics. StarCraft has also an in-game help covering controls in detail (shortcuts, etc.) and a paper manual, covering story and units .
Now the examples here are not exactly casual but the same rule applies. ‘Qualities’ to tutorials - how to play, what’s it all about; ‘quantities’ like statistics - to manual / in-game help. It’s also important to make player at lest little aware of the fact that those manuals actualy exist 
(finding StarCraft help files took me a lot of being-bored-and-had-nothing-else-to-do time).
Alireza Yarmohamadi said,
Comment • April 8, 2010 @ 16:55
A good way is:
to have 2 type of how to play:
1- tutorial, player know how to can play, how to do in the game and how to start this game.
2- Manual (Help, Guide or etc…), Hardcore Players go to find more and more details of a game.
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eddies said,
Comment • September 11, 2007 @ 0:33
i am quite happy that you have talked on this topic because recently i have played a game called prince of persia revelation on psp …hopes that every one is
familiar with the tittle …i must say they game is insanley hard there arent much help or hint for the game that how to go through the level….but there are load of tutorial …though i have now completed the game but at on some point of the games i was so frustrated because of no clue where to go…now adays developers arent making user friendly games …thats why newbie gamers arent happy with recent new games ..
regards eddies
www.naturalgames.com