Crusade Against Tutorials

[Millennium]

Riachu said:

Millennium said:
Rule Number One of good game design: the player must be able to do something interesting within five minutes of pressing START to begin the game. If this is not possible in your game, then either your mechanics are too complex or your opening cutscene is too long.

Why can't they give the same advice for games as they do with books: read or in this case, play through the beginning part before judging the game.

That's frankly bad advice for books too. If something can't grab your interest very quickly, then that's a serious flaw in the way it was created. This is not necessarily an issue with content; it's an issue with structure. One of the first things a game, book, movie, or really any form of entertainment needs to do is make you actually want to keep going. If you can't stand to do what's necessary to get to the good part, you'll stop before you ever reach it, and that's OK. Judging a book by its cover is not a Good Thing, but early content is important. This is also not to say that tutorial levels don't have their place, or that a game's mechanics should never be anything more than what can be learned in five minutes. It only means that tutorials need to involve doing interesting things, and that the player should be able to figure out enough of the mechanics to do interesting things very, very early on.