The tutorial is a lie

Or, how to help players learn your game

I'm sitting in a room with a guy who just spent several hours with our unfinished game. The conversation isn’t exactly pleasant. The playtester complains:

"I had no idea how to extract resources. It took me over half an hour just to figure out how to construct districts! And even now, I’m not sure how to expand them!"

Thoughts race through my mind. What went wrong? All of that is explained in the tutorial messages. Could there be a bug that made them disappear?

“Did you try checking the tutorials?” I ask, a bit anxious.

The playtester looks puzzled. He doesn’t seem to know what I mean. Then, suddenly, recognition lights up his face.

“Oh, you mean those pop-up messages?”

I nod, relieved.

“Yeah, after seeing the first one, I turned them off in settings. I hate tutorials.”

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This anecdote is just about one player, but I’m certain that this attitude is shared by a fair number of others. I’d bet money that if you’re a game creator, you have your own set of similar memories from watching people play your game.

So, what can we do about it?

Far Cry: Blood Dragon is a fantastic parody of video game tutorials.

The simplest solution is to make tutorials mandatory, forcing players to go through them. But there's a downside: players may end up avoiding your game altogether because of it.

We live in an age of digital abundance. When players are highly motivated, they might tolerate a dull, obstructive introduction. But in a world where they can:

• get a refund within the first 2 hours,

• buy your game on sale,

• or even play it for free through a subscription or F2P model,

you might just lose them in those early moments.

So, what’s the answer?

It doesn’t help that most of us don’t have good models to draw from when it comes to teaching methods. Traditional education relies on cramming large amounts of information into our brains, with the hope that a fraction of it will stick. The assumption is that whatever remains will be enough to call us “educated.”

In school, I learned about cell structures, conjugating German verbs, and hydrolysis reactions. I don’t remember any of it.

Let’s look for better inspiration. Take, for instance, a movie every geek on Earth knows: Star Wars.

Yoda might struggle to get hired as a teacher in a typical school, and not just because of his unique sentence structure or his tendency to use a stick for emphasis. Despite that, many people (myself included) would love a mentor like Yoda.

Why?

Instead of lecturing, he focuses on encouraging his students to ask the right questions and understand themselves better. Rather than speaking in theories, he places them in situations where they learn by doing.

If a fictional green gremlin doesn’t quite work as a role model, consider Socrates. He described himself not as a teacher but as an “ignorant inquirer.” His approach was to ask simple but powerful questions, encouraging others to think deeply about their answers.

This kind of teaching is also alive today in certain settings. My wife, who’s passionate about nature, introduced me to a method called "coyote teaching." This approach helps people understand nature by nurturing their curiosity—not just by asking questions but by encouraging them to seek answers on their own. It’s inspired by the way indigenous cultures guide children to explore the world around them.

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So what does all this have to do with games and tutorials?

When designing a tutorial, we should remember that learning is far more effective when we spark curiosity in players.

How can we do this? Ideally, by making the tutorial almost invisible—giving players the sense that they’re already playing and facing real challenges.

To see this in action, let’s look at the first few minutes of one of my favorite games: Portal.

In the first few missions of Portal, players learn the basics without an explicit tutorial. Aside from a few brief prompts about controls, the game relies on its design to teach.

Sequence 1:
Initially, the player character is confined to a small room. After a moment, a portal opens. The portal is positioned so that both ends are clearly visible to the player, making it easy to understand the concept of connecting two spaces.

All screenshot comes from this video

Lesson 1: How moving through portals works.

Sequence 2:
The player enters a room with a button on the floor. Stepping on the button opens a door.

But as the player moves toward the door, they notice it closes whenever nothing is on the button. 

At that moment, a cube is dropped into the room, and a small prompt appears on the right side of the screen: “E to pick up an object.”

Without any direct instruction, it’s easy to figure out that placing the cube on the button will keep the door open, allowing the player to pass through. The player connects the dots on their own, making this their first challenge in the game.

Lesson 2: To open a door, place a cube on a red button.

Sequence 3:

In this level, the cube, button, and door are positioned in three separate areas. A portal shifts locations periodically, allowing the player to access each of these elements.

Lesson 3:  This sequence reinforces and combines previous skills (moving through portals, placing a cube on a button) and shows players they can carry the cube through a portal.

Sequence 4:

In the next level, the player first sees a portal gun mounted on a rotating stand through a window. Watching, they observe the gun firing at the wall and creating portals.

So when players enter the room, they already know how the gun works. All they need to do is pick it up and press a mouse button to shoot a portal. The other end is pre-placed, so they don’t need to worry about that yet.

Lesson 4: How to use the portal gun to create a portal.

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This is a masterful way to do tutorials. A portal gun could be a confusing tool for many players—it’s not something commonly seen in other games. But instead of handing it over with a load of instructions, Portal’s developers crafted a series of simple challenges that gradually introduce players to the portal mechanics.

Players feel they’re progressing on their own, with no one explicitly telling them how to solve each puzzle. In reality, every level is carefully designed to develop players’ abilities and deepen their understanding of the game.

Portal proves that the tutorial is a lie. Instead, it’s about designing a learning process within the game so players naturally pick up new concepts at a steady pace.

Because playing is learning. Evolutionarily speaking, play is how humans—and animals—learn new skills and experiment with strategies for overcoming obstacles. So game itself is a learning process, even long after the “tutorial” is over.

And learning is something that gives us pleasure. Our brains release dopamine when we’re learning new things, which also makes evolutionary sense: more knowledge means a higher chance of survival.

So why, then, are we sometimes so reluctant to learn? I remember how tough it was to motivate myself to study for school exams.

The learning process happens with the help of two ancient parts of our brain: the amygdala and hippocampus, structures that existed even in organisms that predate mammals! But we also have the prefrontal cortex, which constantly evaluates whether something is worth learning.

Our brains are constantly analyzing risk, weighing the cost (like time or effort) against usefulness. Let’s look at a few examples:

• Task: Studying for an exam
  COST: High
  USEFULNESS: Debatable (consequences aren’t immediate, and it’s unclear if the knowledge will be useful)

• Task: Learning how to drive
  COST: High
  USEFULNESS: High (You wouldn’t question the value of learning to drive while on a busy road!)

• Task: Learning how to use a parachute just before jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet
  COST: Small
  USEFULNESS: Very High (obviously!)

Why does this matter to you as a game creator?

It’s about convincing the player’s mind to accept the effort of learning your game.

One approach is to lower the cost of learning: reduce the complexity of mechanics, improve information presentation, or break knowledge into smaller chunks.

Another approach is to increase the perceived usefulness of the information by appealing to the player’s motivation.

It’s often easier to explain how to do something than to make clear why it’s worth doing. 

Before teaching a mechanic, show players why it’s valuable to learn.

Games often ask too much of players early on, where there’s more to learn than actual fun to be had. To ensure players stay motivated, make sure they understand why it’s worth learning a new skill or mechanic.

Consider another example from Valve (they’re great at this!). 

In Half-Life 2, when the developers want players to learn how to use the gravity gun to launch saw blades, they start by presenting this situation:

(Screenshots and HF2 example are from a great video by Game Maker’s Toolkit on creating invisible tutorials: watch here)

Players encounter a zombie split in half by a saw blade—a clear hint that saw blades are powerful weapons. 

Next, saw blades are placed in the player’s path, blocking the way forward. When players use the gravity gun to pull one of the blades to clear their path, an enemy appears in their line of sight.

The natural instinct is to press the shoot button, which launches the saw blade at the enemy, using the gravity gun. This creates a nearly effortless learning experience where players understand how to weaponize saw blades—first by observing, then by doing.

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Teaching effectively is a complex challenge. It’s not just for game creators but for entire industries, societies, and educational systems.

There’s no universal method, but a few principles can make a huge difference:

1. Set challenges for players instead of step-by-step instructions.

2. Act as an invisible mentor, guiding the learning process subtly.

3. Focus on sparking curiosity and providing motivation to learn.

And this is just the beginning! Our brains have more complexities that impact learning, and each game genre has its unique challenges. Teaching complex strategies, for instance, requires different approaches than teaching platformer mechanics.