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One of the hardest things to do when it comes to playing games is learning a new genre. As it forces the person to return to square one again and that can be frustrating for players. When you add up each genre with all the different quirks, this time can add up. This period of "learning time" has been dubbed around message boards as "gamer-tax" and is an important part of building (or diminishing) a fan-base.
When we talk about gamer tax, we're focusing on the time it takes someone to understand the basics of a game. Or in other words: How long it takes for a player to be able to make informed choices when playing. We're not talking about game mastery or beating the game, as by that point the player knows how to play the game.
As an example of real life gamer tax: someone buying a new barbeque grill. The gamer tax would be the person setting it up and figuring out how to cook some burgers. What wouldn't be a part of gamer tax is if the person decides to learn how to create their own barbeque sauce or dry rub for ribs.
What makes gamer tax an important concept is how it repels new gamers from a genre. If someone would have to spend several hours reading manuals or watching tutorials just to figure out what is going on when they're playing, chances are they aren't going to stick around. Gamer tax also has an effect on game popularity, as the most popular games have the least amount of gamer tax.
Someone learning the basics of Call of Duty for the first time may have to spend at most 5 minutes figuring out how to move and shoot. Action games by design have very little gamer tax, as the player is learning the basics of the game very quickly over the scope of a few minutes of playing. On the other side of the equation, strategy games due to their complexity and multiple systems, have a much larger amount of gamer tax before someone can understand the basics.
Call of Duty Black Ops
Doing Some Accounting:
The amount of gamer tax a game has is correlated to how well the designer explains the game through tutorials and avoids cumbersome design. The easier it is for someone to follow the game, the less gamer tax there is.
If you look at any of PopCap's games, each one is designed for someone new to comprehend the mechanics very quickly. At the last GDC, the lead designer behind Plants vs. Zombies gave an excellent presentation on how the team used very subtle techniques to make the game easy to understand, without simplifying it for strategy game experts.
For example, sunflowers which are important for getting sunshine (in game resources) are always the first plant available to be planted. For a tower defense expert, they know that resource producers are always the first thing to build, but someone who never played a tower defense game wouldn't know that.
By making them the first ones available, a player would know that they should be planting one before anything else to make sure that they'll have a source of sunshine coming in. While Plants vs. Zombies is an example of streamlining the tutorial to reduce gamer-tax, Final Fantasy 13 is an example of an enormous amount of forced gamer tax.
What the designers did was over the course of the first twenty or so hours of gameplay, they stretch out the tutorial by slowly introducing the basic mechanics of the game. The positive behind this technique is that it made sure that the player would fully understand the game by the time the designers finish holding their hands.
The negative is that it created so much gamer tax, that it turned away a lot of people. If your game has a period of time that the player has to play before "the real game begins" all you're doing is piling on gamer tax before the player can start experiencing the game as you intended.
Plants vs. Zombies
Portal for instance, even with the physics based puzzles had next to zero in terms of gamer tax. The reason is that Valve integrated the tutorial into the starting levels. Testing the player on one concept and giving them something new if they pass. They didn't try to cram everything into one puzzle, or bloat out the tutorial to make sure that the mechanic was understood. They did just enough to keep the game moving at a steady pace.
Valve introduced the base mechanics that all the puzzles stem from within the first few minutes. Meaning that the player understood them early on, allowing them to build on those mechanics while making sure that the player knows what to do. In Portal 2, when they introduced the concepts of the gels, they once again went back to the basics with a few simple puzzles. Then after a few puzzles, they integrated gel and portal based mechanics into the same puzzles.
The point of this post isn't that you can't have complex games. But that complexity should be avoided when someone is learning a game. As a recent example: I've been trying to learn Crusader Kings 2 from Paradox for the last few weeks.
Between reading the manual and watching tutorials and "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, I have about 3 hours of learning about what is going in the game. That is a lot of gamer tax and a less patient person would probably give up trying to learn Crusader Kings 2, and the best part? I still don't know a lot of how to play the game, as the in game tutorials are cumbersome.
When it comes to learning new concepts, the use of visual aids is one of the best ways to teach. As the majority of humans learn best through vision. Obviously video games are a visual activity which makes games that have poor tutorials even more troubling. There is no video game that should require lessons on par with a college accredited course. And for complex genres like strategy games, it's a lesson designers need to learn if they ever hope to expand their fan-base.
Josh Bycer
Reprinted from my blog: Mind's Eye
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Starcraft also comes to mind, where almost each mission introduces a new unit type, and your proper use of that unit's unique ability is required to win the day.
In contrast, you have stuff like strategy games where even if you've played hundreds of hours on other strategy games, learning a new game can still be a very time consuming experience. Like for me, I've played hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours on various Civilization games and I'm still a little scared to try playing Shogun 2 because I'm guessing it'll take several hours just to figure out the basics.
She was able to follow me around, but it wasn't natural for her. And her reaction time in combat wasn't natural.
Almost any game that someone new to games tries out is going to require learning. But FPSs and Third-person games have the largest learning curve because it is teaching someone a new way to walk around and view a world. Then they have to learn the combat systems on top of that.
Once they get the hang of it and practice, practice, practice, it's easier to go to the next 3rd person or 1st person game. But the learning curve and then the abhorrent online community in those games where my girlfriend was called a slut, bitch, etc. Makes it so she will never play those games again.
Even if it's just me and her :(
Actually, I'm not wild about that term. Like "save scumming," it's a use of language that prevents considering a design choice in an objective way. What about the gamers who like games that start out with plenty of options?
Consider Star Fleet Battles. In one of its more complete configurations, it presented you with several big thick manuals full of rules... and I loved it at first sight. Daunting? Sure, like learning a new computer language. But the opportunity that presents to quickly grasp the key patterns of a complex system and apply them effectively -- that's fun!
Of course it's not fun for everyone, or even most gamers. For most commercial games, a well-integrated tutorial that gently eases players into a small set of verbs is a good idea. Who could oppose that?
But there ought to be some room as well for games that drop the player into a richly-textured system and say, "Here you go -- show me how well you can figure things out!"
Some of my favorite games fall into the "drop you into the world and cut you loose" variety. My problem is that there are so many interesting games out there that are quickly abandoned by gamers because the second they load it up, they have no idea how to even begin playing.
I'm in the same position as Robert above with Shogun 2. I read the manual, tried the tutorial and the second I load up a new game, I'm dumbstruck as to what to do next.
I'm not looking for a ten hour tutorial that walks me through every single detail about playing the game. Just something that tells me the general rules of the game and gives me a small push as to where to focus on to begin learning the game on my own.
- As in the game neither treats you like one of it's devs nor like a 5 year old child playing his first game? :) Ya there are some extremes either way.
If someone wanted to, they could perform the same techniques before they reach the puzzle where it was tested. To me, the gamer tax in Portal ends after the player receives the second portal function as it is the last mechanic given to the player.
Another example would be Spacechem. The game is very complex, but the mechanics themselves are simple to learn, which the player is taught over the course of the first few planets. As the player develops their understanding of the rules of the game, they can find new solutions that they didn't think of at the time using the same mechanics throughout.
If you go back to something like Megaman-X, knowing how to press jump is all well and could, but not if you don't know you can wall/double jump with that button click. Surely that would come under gamer-tax?
With the Mega Max X and Portal examples, both are taking mechanics and figuring out advanced uses of them. Depending on the game, it may or may not be considered gamer tax depending on what the designer is using them for. If the dynamic is something that the designer wants to explicitly test the player on through the game, than that would be a part of gamer tax. So you would be correct about the physics in-physics out puzzle
But if the dynamic is used more as a bonus or another option that the designer isn't forcing the player to use, than it is not.With the wall jump example, the player is trained to use that within the very first level. But an advanced form would be the dash, jump than wall jump to reach some of the tricker areas.
Another example would be in the 3d Mario games. The use of the sideways jump is never tested by the game's design, but is presented as an option. In that regard, learning to use it is not a form of gamer tax as it isn't required by the player to understand the game. But the use of wall jumping or the long jump would be as the game tests the player to use them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=141bkOPKhrg&t=03m54s
So, there is a sense that you never stop learning, you are constantly challenged to improve your skills and utilise more of the deep control scheme as you encounter more fantastic level designs, but what you learn is in some part based upon what the game knows you must have mastered to unlock this current level.
Therefore, it isn't so much a one-off tax like the Stamp Duty paid in the UK when you move house, but one tied to your consumption of luxuries spread out over time like VAT.
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Day 1: Learn that punching trees and dirt results in wood and dirt cubes.
Night 1: DIE HORRIBLY A LOT.
Day 2: Walk a long ways and realize that the trees and dirt go for a very, very long way.
Night 2: DIE HORRIBLY. Respawn back where you started
Day 3: Google why people like this game so much. I mean wtf? This is weird, boring, and hard.
Discover wiki page. OOOOOHHHH, there's an INVENTORY?! And COMBINING?!
Night 3: They will never get me in my wooden hut.
Day 4: Let the games begin!
Personally, I hate this approach and prefer the method that Terraria used to tell you in-game what you could make with materials and what other resources were required.
But in Minecraft the high tax seems to have worked in the game's favour as the wiki scene has exploded (not to mention all of the minecraft youtube videos).
I believe Pokemon has one of the best gamer taxes created. It starts with the basics of learning weaknesses and resistances of pokemon, and upgrades as you learn about held items and then into breeding. When the player finishes the game they have the option to return to learn the more complex areas of the game such as STAB, EV training, and various competitive strategies.
Great article all and all.