BigWhiteTailBuck-Hand Carved Wildlife…

The best animal deer tips may take a bit of time to locate….

Each newbie character starts in a *small area* where they can kill defenseless animals for the first 4-5 levels (which last less than an hour if they get the hang of it quickly). But this small area is embedded in a low-level zone which players spend at least the first few hours in. There are also player cities near all such zones, giving high-level players reason to run or fly through them every now and then.

This means there are both other newbies *and* experienced players around during the crucial first hours of the newbie experience. It means you can discover things together with the people who start a few hours before (or a few hours after) you did, even if you are in different areas you are still in the same zone and therefore on the same chat channels.

I think a great many WoW players had positive experiences in their first two hours in the game, and that probably had a long-term influence on their attitude towards other WoW players.

[...] I just found it refreshing that New Zealand actually asks someone who works with games to analyze these things, instead of handing it off to the CDC (and thus, by implication, assert that video games a disease to be controlled). As Raph recently pointed out, there is a lot of assumed knowledge about video games that you can’t just pick up in a few hours. [...]

Tide talks about metaphors, but the concept of reference points is probably a better perspective. This goes to explain why cards were great for Raph’s game design.

So with so many unique UI or customizable UI designs for various games, there is another addition to the ’tissue test’, the intuitive ‘click test’: observing how people learn by clicking on things to get a feel on how the UI works.

That’s what I remembered doing when I got Warcraft (or was it Human vs. Orcs, I don’t remember). Instead of reading the manual, I just clicked away until I figured out how things worked.

Clicking was my reference point. The RL ‘desktop’ was the reference point for early virtual desktop; the RL ‘window’ was the reference point for, ummm, windows (could have been called pages).

As to Paul’s question, I think that the closer the video game is linked intuitively to some common RL reference point, the better acceptance the game. For example, many people have grown up with game consoles and their UI, so those particular UIs become common RL reference points to build on.

My 2 cents,

Frank

Chat and commands have evolved heavily from the days of the old text adventures such as Zork.

Go East
Open Mailbox
Get Mail
Read Mail.

This basic functionality carried over into Envy, and Diku Muds, and then to some extent into the vast majority of the mainstream MMO’s, (eq, swg, daoc, eq2, wow, etc.)
We’ve seen the addition of a graphical interface, and real time gameplay, which necessitated the mouse support and left and right click context menus. Certainly nothing complex there for the average windows user.

Chat hasn’t changed much since the days of mudding either. /chat , /say , /group , /guild etc

Again, with more complex ui’s, there are seperate chat windows, various chat colors, loads of customizations that we can play with, but that basic text/communication mechanic is similar to old mechanics from the muds and/or bbs chat boards (major bbs, etc)

While the core mmo gamer of 5-10 years ago had experience in these systems, (or was a more adventurous computer user looking for more interactive gaming – ie, someone willing to learn a steeper curve than minesweeper or solitaire had to offer) that core mmo gamer has become a smaller percentage of the player base. No, we’re not going anywhere, we’re still playing mmo’s daily, but the mainstreaming of mmo’s has brought in a new class of newbie. They aren’t the college aged geeks sitting in a computer lab telnetting on unix machines to a mud. They are the grandmothers of those geeks. They are the children of them. They never played Zork or Wizardry. These ‘new’ mmo gamers might not have ever used win 3.1, or even 98. Maybe not even Mario Brothers or Pokemon.

With this in mind, a new character experience needs to become more in depth, and teach the basics. Give the advanced players the ability to skip thru sections. (or avoid it entirely)

personally, I found the learning curve of FFXI much tougher than swg, or eq2. Most likely thats due to 2 factors – first, ffxi had NO new player tutorial, and secondly, it was clearly developed by a different core group of developers than those behind Daoc, Uo, Eq/2, SWG, etc (who mostly did come from similar backgrounds of gaming history…)

Why don’t you just add a “test” you can take at any time to prove your proficiency and graduate from newbiehood? Doesn’t always work, of course, but it does in a lot of cases. Something like “Do X in Y amount of time”, where X requires that you know a number of required things, would be fine.

Most people hate tests… they make them nervous, they feel like they have to accomplish something before they are allowed to play. Not to forget, a computer guided test can easily be manipulated. And most people tend to learn the answer to a question – and not the… knowledge behind it. (I just noticed that I have to polish my english skills, I hope you can understand what I mean )
The problem is that there can’t be the one tutorial. That doesn’t work. In my courses, the participants have to use a software called “Tutorwin”. It basically simulates the different programs (Windows, Word etc), explains something and then the perticipants have to repeat the explained steps.
Most of the time, it’s useless. They tend to click and type the things they were told to do, but ask them after one lesson what they have learned and all you hear is the sound of crickets…

I think a tutorial is for someone who already knows a bit about what you want to show him, just not everything – it’s more or less for the “aha effect”. Newbies tend to click their way through the tutorial and are still clueless afterwards.

Re people who can’t figure out chat interfaces, and the much-vaunted “simplicity” of WOW’s interface: WOW was very far from being my first computer game, or even my first MMO, and I had great difficulty figuring out how to use its chat interface. I think my first character was about level 15 before I finally found the trick. (The problem with being unable to figure out how to chat is that you can’t ask anyone for help.)

That may be just me, though. Even though I play a lot of games, it’s not unusual for me to find that something the designers though was obvious has me baffled; maybe I just think a different way to most people. (I figure most people aren’t baffled by these things because I don’t see any questions about them on forums.) A few times I’ve given up on a game because I can’t even get through the tutorial without getting stuck (Civ IV was one of those).

I’ve played through the Oblivion tutorial three times so far, and although I had no trouble reaching the outside world, I’ve yet to figure out how to open my inventory or map.

I see this same trend in all sorts of art forms. Someone who is really into paintings may find themselves seeing ever more obvious reasons to dismiss certain works that I think are just peachy. At the same time, they will tend to enjoy other works that I simply don’t ‘get.’

In other words, there seems to be a newbie/veteran dichotomy in other art forms as well, not just in games. I think it takes freaky genius and perhaps a lot of luck to produce really good literature that also has a chance to be a best-seller.

Likewise for games. In spite of Sid Meier’s years of experience and recognized design genius, Civilization IV can get high ratings in reviews, and yet still be outsold by games like Who Wants to be a Millionaire or Deer Hunter. Perhaps this is because Civ IV is game literature and the masses prefer pulp.

I guess what I amy wondering is this: Is it legitimate to simply admit at some point that your game play may be too complex for newbies, but that’s OK? And can you do so without being an elitist?

–Phin