This is partly why my enjoyment of video games went up exponentially once I stopped hitting up gamefaqs and buying strategy guides. Honestly. I used to buy strategy guides almost out of habit. They were fun, had pretty pictures and would help me get unstuck so I could get "through" a game and on to the next one. I don't have that attitude right now. If Mass Effect takes me into late January, so be it. If I don't touch Assassin's Creed until March, that's life. Until then I will definitely be trying to figure stuff out.

My "ah ha" moment in Mass Effect came when I figured out that it was an RPG. I know that sounds stupid, but I was playing it like a shooter just because the game didn't tell me otherwise. And I really disliked the combat. Then I began (I'd say about 3 or 4 hours in) to really pay attention to my equipment and in battles to frequently use my powers and direct my party members. Beautiful stuff happened after that. It's an RPG. Even when fighting it is. It's just that every weapon is ranged and you can use cover.

Its a thin line really. We complain when there isn't a tutorial but then we really b!tc# when there is too much tutorial (take Burnout Paradise and the DJ). I have to agree I do enjoy finding out things on my own and coming up with my own combination that works for me.

I couldnt agree more. Everytime I read how confusing Mass Effect was, I'd say to myself, 'Did everyone but me forget how to read a manual? Did they all forget how to press every button on the controller to see what it does? How did they survive the 90s and early 2000s?'

A good game tutorial is like lingerie, revealing but leaving just enough mystery to inspire you to find out more....

First hit's for free baby.

At least I helped you get a good enough job that you can afford it and you don't have to work the men's room anymore.

I don't get Mass Effect until it is released on PC, but I agree with the many who have said that discovery is more than half of the fun. ON the other hand, RPGs do walk a fine line when they hide important details from the player. I.e., when there is no way to tell that the Scimitar of Evisceration gives only 10 damage points, but has an 85% critical chance and completely ignores any armor or defensive spells and the L337 Epee gives 35 points of damage but no other bonuses. I HATE it when the only way to compare weapons is how much the trader will give for them. RPGs are stat driven games and to hide the stat modifiers is a sure way to kill the game.

*grumbles grumpily* OK, you go back to talking about yer fancy-lad console games now.

I think you have an excellent point when it comes to a specific kind of game. If the game is about exploration or its an RPG, it could be an interesting game play mechanic to have the player bumbling about in the beginning and learning new things about the way the game is played.

However in some games the joy or fun comes from the mechanic its self and learning new ways of combining things. Take Civilization for example, the game would not be improved if the method for construction improvements or units were ambiguous. Civilization is fun because you get to see the thing you built interact with other people. The game is more fun when you have a good understanding of how things work.

The same with chess, what if each game had a random number of pieces that moved in different ways that you had to experiment with to learn? The point of chess is not discovery about the game, but discovery of the way the mechanics work, and matching minds with another person.

I do agree that exploration was one of my favorite parts

I want to play the game, not figure out how the game is played.

The risk is that without any sort of teaching, the game can become more frustrating then fun. For most players - obviously some of the present company is excluded - a lack of guidance doesn't lead them to experiment: it leads them to put down the controller and stop playing. On the other hand, if you give too much, then there's nothing to learn, and then it's boring.

So the question is: what do you teach, and in what manner? I think Mass Effect could have used more guidance. I figured most everything out on my own, but I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, as is anyone who posts on a message board dedicated to gaming. Even so, there are members of the enthusiast press complaining. Personally I don't think learning how to move is a fun type of discovery, or how to navigate the UI. That should be obvious or taught. The interesting thing to learn is how to apply the mechanics the basic input exposes.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even though a manual is included, players have been trained to ignore it at this point. Gamers are much more mainstream now then even a few years ago, and aren't as likely to even think about picking up the manual, which was a requirement 10 years ago. Reading a manual is like work to many people, and they don't want to read how to play a game before playing, they just want to play it. I think that's fair.

This seems to be the overwhelming sentiment of the day -- with the transparency of games via the internet walk-throughs, the in-depth tutorials, and the overwhelming amount of data crunched and shoveled through in order to create efficient ways of beating or mastering games, most games I see coming out lately (last two or so years at least) are becoming simpler and really catering to the lowest common denominator. Its as if "No Child Left Behind" (or Nicklebee as it is so lovingly referred to in academic circles) has been the standard by which we hold the rest of our society accountable in some respects.

I certainly remember MK and SF being games about learning how to win through heavy trial and error. Showing off at the end (in MK) certainly meant a lot more time spent at the machine; but some of this was certainly because the arcades wanted your quarters and the internet had yet to really blossom into what it has become. Now, if I want to find out all the moves, I spend five minutes on the internet and have them; at the time these games came out, it wasn't so simple.

RPGs for the computer and puzzle games were also notoriously short on real walk-throughs. While there were certainly published materials you could purchase to help you, even some of those weren't all that helpful in certain areas, leaving much to the gamer to work through on their own.

I think the real shift occured when games really began catering to the multiplayer community which only continue to grows with the output of games such as Halo, Gears, WoW, BF, Sports games, and a bevy of other games that most game companies seem to understand that complexity for these games, unlike the earlier single-player games, really detracts from the experience, which in turn lowers the player base and their profits. Take one look at the attempt to make a 'hardcore' online game (though I would certainly question that definition, but that was what is was marketed as) Vanguard and I'm pretty sure we can all see the spectacular flames still reaching for the sky where the entire mess crashed and burned.

To be honest, it has gone a bit overboard. Simply reading the forums on CIV IV or COH makes my head spin as people mathematically break down the game into its smallest pieces in order to find any advantage at all within it. In a way, it kind of saddens me when I see this sort of thing. I understand it and I understand why people do this, but at the same time, its as if we lost sight of the fact that it is simply a game, an impressive extension of board games come to virtual life. I never really liked rule-mongers in my D&D, nor did I enjoy playing with people who would find cracks in wargames such as ASL (Advanced Squad Leader for the uninitiated).

To me, its seems that the spirit of the games were being questioned when people took advantage of these cracks, just as if someone took advantage of some obscure bug in a computer game to gain an advantage and justify it by simply saying, 'it is here, so I can do it.' Perhaps games these days really lack their original spirits and have been replaced by social cameraderie and 'interaction' between players to foster something that took its place.

The fact that printed manuals have become essentially non-existent necessitates the addition of tutorials these days. Personally I love big thick manuals with lots of diagrams and information. I feel like I'm receiving something of substance when I crack open the box and find a nice, well-written 150 page tome.
Nowadays even a beast of a game like Medieval II comes with a teensy tiny manual designed to fit in a DVD-sized box. Back in the day every unit in the game would have been listed, with pictures, at the end of the manual.

It's not just that I miss the warm fuzzy feeling I get from a big paper manual, though. I don't like tutorials as they remind me of the artifice of the world I'm entering. It's far more jarring to me to hear some villager say "Hey, press B to swing your sword!" than it is to read "Press B to swing your sword" in a manual. I love many Nintendo games but that is one crime they are particularly guilty of. If there must be a tutorial, please (PLEASE!) put it as an option separate from the main game.

Looking over the responses there seems to be two separate (at least I see them as separate) lines of discourse here.

First is the tutorial aspect that I already touched on a bit in my previous post.

Second is an argument as to whether games should keep information hidden from the player, and whether games should let the players discover the deeper content rather than be shown. Gaming min-maxers have been around since the dawn of RPGs, and even before that. Look how good computers have gotten at Chess.

Having played a lot of role-playing games in the past, I'd say there's nothing inherently bad about providing lots and lots of data that a player can use to maximize their efficiency. In the environment of a single player game, it shouldn't matter whether or not you personally discovered the Portable Black Hole Generator or Amulet of Destruction is the game was enjoyable without that discovery. The problem arises when the hardcore data miners and the laid back folks mix. This clash is currently obvious with the explosion of online multiplayer games. Folks who don't put in the time to calculate the precise velocity of a rocket will generally get walloped by those who do, and the enjoyment of those more relaxed types will likely suffer as they sit on the sidelines waiting to respawn, or have their base overrun in a matter of minutes.

This is almost what I was going to say. I want the game puzzles to be GAME puzzles, not INTERFACE puzzles.

I would agree that there is some need to allow the gamer to discover the game and how it's played.

However, this should be reserved for the more nuanced aspects of play, rather than basic gaming mechanics.

In Mass Effect, for example, there should be NO confusion on how to sell items. This was consistently pointed out as a sticking point for some gamers.

On the other hand, in Mass Effect, learning what combination of upgrades and biotic skills with weapons works best for your strategy of play should be something left to player discovery. If you suck at tossing lift on an enemy and shooting them down, but can pull off Carnage shots like nobody's business, that's something for you to discover.

I am actually ready to not buy Burnout Paradise thanks to the damned tutorial DJ butting into gameplay every three minutes.