Random thoughts on Tutorials

I was writing a Reddit post and thought "y'know what, this sounds like the kind of thing I should be putting on my blog," so here it is with zero editing, as usual.

As a player slash sometimes-designer, I'm not shocked in the slightest. Games that do tell you what to do are so much easier to pick up and get right into. I want to learn how to move, jump, shoot, interact, one button at a time. I don't want to look up what the buttons do beforehand and hope I remember it all with zero context for my actions. Flash games are an extremely good way to get a lot of intro sequences very quickly, and the good ones very seamlessly get you quickly into the game itself.
But, I do agree that having that optional screen is much better than having nothing at all. And having an optional screen of "advanced tactics" can be helpful. I'd say there's a heirarchy of good-design with respect to tutorials. From best to worst:

• No-text subtle nudges and level design that guarantees players pick up on the mechanics
• Seamless integration of textual instructions that don't take control from the player so advanced players can speed right through
• Obvious, optional tutorials so that people who can figure it out on their own can do so, but people who get stuck can get help
• Mandatory tutorials that explain how to do something and don't let you through without you first showing you understood the mechanic
• Mandatory tutorials that explain how to do something once without letting you try it out and there's no way to get another explanation if you missed it the first time
• Tutorials that explain how everything in the game works all at once in excruciating detail, before you have any real context for how the game plays
• "Eh, they'll figure it out"

Demons' Souls is an interesting case study. It has two tutorial levels, the first of which is the official tutorial level, the second is the "first real level". Level 0 has a bunch of floor messages that explain the controls of the game, but the enemy damage is scaled down to the degree that all it teaches you is the base-level mechanics; how to move, how to use items, etc. The second tutorial is where the game teaches you how to play Demons' Souls for real, it knows at this point that you know the inputs, now it teaches you the flow of the game; cautiously approaching problems, how to effectively kill enemies, that you should be blocking constantly, how to time healing items so you don't get mauled mid-heal, etc. However the difficulty of Level 1 is so severe that it's hard to immediately see what the correct action was for a new player who isn't fluent in the game's philosophy about difficulty. The level is also long enough that iteration is very protracted. There are shortcuts, but the level design doesn't encourage players to find them.
So, Demons' Souls actually has a pretty crappy tutorial. Dark Souls, however, has a brilliant tutorial, all because it has better-tuned difficulty, along with a more-educational structure. It does still have a fairly lethal tutorial, in that you can go from full health to none in a single poorly-understood encounter, which is good because it means players need to wrap their heads around how that fight works before they can succeed at the level as a whole.
So yeah, Dark Souls teaches a very complicated game with a very straightforward and transparent tutorial.