Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the educational excellence of videogame tutorials
The question of how ‘educational’ videogames are has long been contested. Some champions of the form have liked to point to how SimCity has been used in college courses on urban planning, for example, as a riposte to those who dismiss videogames as junk food for the mind. Others darkly invoke the use of custom videogame builds to train real soldiers by the US army and argue that educating people in the tactics of killing is not necessarily a wholesome good.
Certainly games are not necessarily reliable sources of real-world information. This was emphasised recently by the wonderful story of writer John Boyne, in whose novel, A Traveller At The Gates Of Wisdom, the narrator plans to poison Attila the Hun. Gathering the necessary ingredients for the potion, he makes sure to include an “Octorok eyeball” and “the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms”. As the writer Dana Schwartz alertly pointed out on Twitter, the novel is supposed to be realistic historical fiction, but these ingredients come from, er, Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. To his credit Boyne responded, admitting that he must have just briefly Googled a poison recipe and not noticed that the source was an interactive fiction about a pointy-eared hero.
One educational thing games are good at, on the other hand, is teaching you how to play them. Arguably modern games err on the side of too much education in this case, with the stereotypically lengthy tutorial mission that assumes you have never shot anyone in the face before, and need to be taught what a face is and how to point your gun at the face before pulling the right trigger. And yet, the game-like tutorial is an idea that could have useful applications beyond the realm of digital fantasy.
So I decided after my first few hours with the Roland MC-101 Groovebox, a beautiful little all-in-one drum machine, sequencer and synthesizer that is the size of a paperback book and has a front panel crammed with pads, knobs, faders, buttons and twinkly lights: the sort of joyously haptic cornucopia to delight anyone tired of mousing around desktop music software. The MC-101 is a brilliant and inspiring device for ‘couch composing,’ a phrase I was sure I couldn’t have made up, but a quick Google reveals it has only been used in stock photos such as that of a young woman sitting bizarrely cross-legged on the arm of a sofa while allegedly composing music, or a distressed leather armchair described as “vintage leather couch composing”, where perhaps they meant decomposing.
The problem was that during my first few hours of couch composing several riffs of synthwave nonsense with my MC-101, I ran into a few things that I was sure I must be able to do but couldn’t figure out how to, so instead I used elaborate workarounds or abandoned the plan. Of course I could have RTFM, but reader, I didn’t want to. Part of the joy of getting to know a device like this is the same kind of joy we experience in videogames: the fun of learning through experiment, trying out random things that have unexpectedly delightful consequences. (Plus, I should say, Roland Corporation’s manuals for its gear have long followed the tradition of being almost completely incomprehensible, with a prose style, in the English translations at least, that is extremely minimalist, technical, and boring, as though it were designed to teach you how to operate a miniature nuclear reactor rather than a musical instrument.)
What if, though, the Roland box had come with an optional videogame-style tutorial mode? It could walk you through a set of tasks: here’s how to program a beat; now here’s how to step-sequence a melodic bassline; now you’ll use the pads in chord mode for backing; and finally you’ll do a lead line with realtime recording. That way I would have learned all the basics much more quickly, and been more efficient in my subsequent fragmentary homages to 1980s sci-fi film scores.
In a way this is all Microsoft’s fault, because the much-despised Clippy assistant in Office harassed so many innocent workers at inopportune times (“It looks like you are trying to write a sarcastic book review; can I help?”) that the whole concept of a gamelike tutorial for software products was forever tainted by association. Which is a shame, because one thing we definitely can learn from games is their way of teaching us how to use complex systems like themselves.
The game-like tutorial is an idea that could have useful applications beyond the realm of digital fantasy