Practical Game Design

Teaching game mechanics

One of the eternal dilemmas of every game designer is: How do I teach players how to play the game?

In the early days of video games, there was a physical instruction manual that players had to read in order to understand how to play a game. Most of them, of course, never bothered and just jumped into the gameplay figuring out that by themselves. That has been the standard for years.

With the video game audience growing larger and the medium spreading through more affordable and mainstream technology, the average video gamer is today pretty much anyone. It is therefore impossible to take for granted that he'd be able to learn a game just by immersing himself in it. On the other hand, video games themselves have become ...