Wall of Tutorial Text crits for over 9000.

I’m what you’d call an MMO tourist. I love the feel of new MMOs and trying them out for a little while is fun. When I think about how the experience of trying an MMO for the first time can be, however, I sometimes wonder if too much complexity or explanation can kill a mood.

Now, I’m not talking about newbies to the MMO world, as they can be taught how to play well enough if they have some sort of gaming skill. What got me thinking about the mechanics of tutorials was the idea that my father still doesn’t understand my passion for gaming and refuses to try out MMORPGs. He is the type of person who has never played a game that required WSAD movement or quick reflexes.

Yep, I’m talking about people who don’t normally play non-casual games.

While probably not economical to do in the real world of games development, I find imagining ways to make teaching people how to play games to be a sort of productive thought experiment.  How would one go about creating a game that allows for people to play the game however they see fit, without forcing everyone to go through the same type of tutorial?

From my point of view, the answer is clear: make an option to begin the game in a sort of super-newbie mode right along side the regular tutorial zone.

How would this work?

Well, much like starting a game with varying difficulty levels and choosing one of them, an MMORPG would essentially ask a player how comfortable he is playing MMORPGs. If he’s alright with it, he can go through a regular tutorial that explains the basics in gamer terminology. If he’s not comfortable playing these games, like my dad would be, then he can go to the same area with additional training steps involved.

For instance, imagine the idea of movement. WSAD movement is natural to us, but for my father, who has never touched an FPS, it’s going to be tough to get used to. So instead of simply telling him that the button does so-and-such and leaving him to his devices or giving him an extremely long block of text that explains but doesn’t show, we ask him to move accordingly and follow a guided path, adding new layers of complexity with each step completed.

In the movement scenario, Step 1 would be forward-backward movement. Step 2 would be sideways movement. Step 3 would be using the mouse to view your surroundings. Step 4 would be moving and using mouse viewing. Step 5, the final step, would be tasking the player to walk in a Figure 8, using the buttons to move forward and the mouse to adjust his bearing.

Apply the same sort of reasoning to targeting, combat, looting, and other immediately needed systems and you can , hopefully, train someone who has never played an MMO into mastering the finer points of basic gameplay.

While doing something like that for a small subsection of one’s potential player base seems like folly, it’s a nice dream to have, at least for me. I’d love it if my father could understand why I love playing games and why I find them so appealing.

Welcome to EGAD! This is the first in what’ll probably a very rare occurrence on the site from my end, which will be game design ideas that come to my head while I’m in my bed half-asleep.

As the title states and as you all probably well know, I play games extensively and have only very minor aspirations for making my own games so much as writing my own stories. As such this idea that came to mind in bed actually is more of a plot device for a short story but could be adapted for the purpose of an adventure game or RPG.

The idea of the subtitle, “Memory as Currency for Hope,” can best be explained as such:

Imagine that you were given the power to create a change in the outcome of events that will occur in your life, but at a cost. What price would you pay for hope? Would you pay money? Would you sell your soul? Would you trade memories?

The premise for Memory as Currency for Hope  is that a person is given that power to alter personal events, but can only use the power when he sacrifices some of his memories to create a favorable outcome in his personal existence. A mundane setting for this would be a date: would you trade the memory of your first kiss to your previous girlfriend for the increased (or possibly assured) chance that the upcoming date with this new girl leads to romance?

I say possibly assured because we can ascribe certain rules to this power, with some ideas outlined below:

1. You can trade as many memories as you want for a greater chance at success in an upcoming event. Longer stretches of memory or memories with greater emotional impact (which, in turn is deemed arbitrarily by some higher power, such as computing code) will create greater increases up to the point where success is guaranteed. Since these are memories, there is obviously no buyback, and also no “spare change” for trading in more than is needed to assure success.

2. Memories traded are always in chronological order, beginning with what the mind remembers after birth up until the present day.

3. The user can trade both good memories and bad memories for whatever reason one so chooses.

4. The user can choose to not use the power at all and play the game with whatever chance offers him.

5. The user can use the power at almost every opportunity and create a mental wreck of himself.

As you can see, this sort of game idea seems horrendously difficult to put into a computer game, but as a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it’d be ideal.

In fact, you can give different people this power just to test the limits of the system. For instance, placing the power in the hands of a soldier in a war who trades memories of his childhood birthdays and the memories of his mother to have bullets always miss him in the middle of a firefight so he can come back to the mother he barely remembers so they can have one more birthday together. Obviously, this would not work well for suicide bombers, but again, limitations to the system.

Anyway, feel free to come up with additional thoughts or corollaries to this idea, as I’m hoping it might stir your brains a bit as well so I can flesh out the idea a bit more. Cheers!