Designing Learning

Learning is an adaptive process in which the tendency to

perform a particular behavior is changed by experience. As
conditions change, we learn new behaviors and eliminate old
ones. This process is important from the moment player’s
start playing the game until they reach the point at which
there is nothing new to learn in the game (which is
hopefully at the very end!). You never want to force players
to learn too many things at the same time, and you always
want them to be able to learn the next new game-play element
fully enough to be able to utilize it in play. What's
implied by this? Well, players should learn one new thing at
a time; hopefully, the new thing they are learning is
related to the concept they just learned.

For example, if you start by teaching players how to walk,

next you should probably teach them how to run, then how to
jump, and then do other parts of movement before you teach
them how to shoot. And you definitely would teach players
how to run and how to shoot before you teach them how to run
and shoot at the same time. Players need to be taught in a
logical progression, building skills and reinforcing mastery
of skills as they go.

For more details on the theories of learning, I suggest you

read: An Introduction to Theories of Learning, by B.R.
Hergenhahn (Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0130167355).

Some designers follow the philosophy of putting the

instructions for the game in the manual, and that if the
player can't figure out something, they can always read the
manual. Because most players don't like to read manuals,
this solution is not acceptable for broad market games.
Also, it's sloppy if your game requires players to read the
manual just to play it, then the game design is at fault.
Players do much better if they are slowly taught a skill in
the game and are slowly shown how to use that skill than if
they are just given something and expected to figure it out.
This doesn't mean that you can't have puzzles the player
needs to figure out. However, the core of the game play
needs to be apparent and easily understood and also taught
to players before they're required to use it. This process
is called ramping the player, which I talk about later in
detail.
Habituation
Many events cause us to react automatically. For example, a
sudden, unexpected noise causes an orientating response: We
become alert and turn our heads or move the camera toward
the source of the sound. However, if the noise occurs
repeatedly, we gradually cease to respond to it; we
eventually ignore it. So, an orientating response is a
reaction to some kind of stimulus that causes us to direct
ourselves toward the source of the stimulus. Habituation,
learning not to respond to an event that occurs repeatedly,
is the simplest form of learning.

This can be important for games because people will learn to

ignore things that are repeatedly shown, told, or heard.
It's the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. If the player is
constantly told something that turns out to be false but
then at one point is true, the player won't know whether to
believe it or not. This can also be true when the same audio
cue is given for the same or similar events. For instance,
in Age of Empires, a short sound is played whenever players
are under attack. If a player gathers a group of guys and
attacks the enemy, this sound plays. In a large and long
battle, the sound plays several times. Players begin to tune
out the noise, knowing that they are under attack, because
they're busy kicking the computer or other player's butt
(you hope). The problem occurs when players stop listening
to this audio alert when they are being attacked off-screen.
I've had this happen to me many times and have returned to
find my base half destroyed before I realized that it was
under attack.

Habituation is a simple but useful form of learning that

permits us to remain relatively free from distraction by
petty events and allows us to focus on more important
things. As game designers, we just need to be aware of
habituation and try to account for it. In the case of Age
of Empires, the solution might be to provide an additional
audio alert that is specific to a player's base being
attacked. Whatever the solution is, it's important to
identify points in our games at which we use the same thing
repeatedly. As Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be
made as simple as possible, but not simpler." This is true
for the way we design our games: Sometimes simplifying, say,
an audio cue too much, can cause players to develop bad
habits and ignore the alert altogether.
Operant Conditioning
We learn to ignore unimportant stimuli, and we learn to pay
attention to those that predict the occurrence of important
events. Operant conditioning teaches us the relationship
between environmental stimuli and our own behavior. The term
operant refers to the fact that a person learns something
through responding to or operating on the environment. In
other words, when a particular action has good consequences,
the action will tend to be repeated; if an action has bad
consequences, the action will tend to not be repeated.

Understanding that these learning conditions are also rules

for you to follow in your game designs is important. If the
player does something that has positive consequences one or
more times, that same action should never hurt the player
later unless there's ample warning that things have changed.
If you condition players to do something by rewarding them,
don't hurt or punish them later if they perform the same
action without first being taught the new rule.

Operant conditioning occurs throughout games. Later, you'll

learn how to develop players' operant conditioning into a
reinforcement schedule so that you'll know when it's
appropriate to give out good and bad rewards for player
actions.

Expertise
It's good to understand how players become experts at things
so that you can make the game's tutorials, training,
development, and ramping better. The more experts you have
playing your game, the better. An expert player isn't
necessarily a hard-core player. Experts are made, not born.
Making every player an expert at playing your game should be
a primary goal of your design because it will lead to a more
satisfying play experience for the player.

Skill learning occurs in three stages:

1. In the cognitive stage, a description of the 
procedure is learned.

2. In the associative stage, a method for performing 
the skill is worked out.

3. In the autonomous stage, the skill becomes more 
rapid and automatic.
The first step in learning a new skill is the cognitive
stage. This stage relies on the player committing to memory
a set of facts relevant to the skill. Skills performed by
players in this first stage can be considered as done in an
inadequate or unskilled manner. Initially, players rehearse
or visualize the new skill before they do it, until they can
become familiar enough to move the skill into the
associative stage. Think about how you learned to drive.
Most likely, you took a driver's education class, in which
you first were taught the rules of the road and how to
operate a car intellectually rather than experientially.
Perhaps you then practiced on a simulator. You understood
what you needed to do conceptually to drive, but you had no
experience in actually doing so.

During the associative stage, errors in the initial

understanding of the skill are gradually detected and
eliminated. Players therefore are perfecting their abilities
to perform the skill during the second phase. To continue
with our driving example, at some point you actually got
behind the wheel of a car and were able to drive in a
parking lot or some other "safe" environment. Eventually,
you gained a learners permit and could drive with someone
else in the car.

In the third stage, players become experts in the skill, and

the actions become autonomous that is, they are becoming
more and more automated and rapid. Players who have reached
the third stage are often unable to verbalize what they did
because it is now happening without conscious thought. By
the time you've been on the road for a couple of months,
driving largely becomes automatic. You no longer need to
think about shifting, braking, or making minor steering
corrections.

Experts see things at a much higher level than novices. Just

as much effort is being put forth by both novices and
experts, but the difference lies in where those efforts are
going. Whereas novices are bogged down in the details,
experts are able to focus on higher-level issues.

Think about the first time you played a racing game. Things
that you were trying to learn included using the controller,
locating the brake, locating the throttle, and changing your
views. The first time you drove on a track, you were mainly
worried about learning where the turns were, among other
things. Experts have all those details learned already and
can focus on higher-level issues such as how to decrease the
amount of skid and how to optimize their turns. Another good
example is that of RTS players. Have you ever watched an
expert play Age of Empires? The player's hands and eyes seem
to move a million miles an hour because he is focusing on
higher-level tasks, such as managing resources. A novice
playing Age is just trying to learn what key or icon to use
to create a villager.

One of the surprising discoveries about expertise is that

experts seem to display a special enhanced memory for
information about problems they are an expert in. This was
first discovered in 1965 while studying chess players. It
was shown that chess masters aren't necessarily more
intelligent than weaker players they just choose better
moves. Chess masters actually tend to consider fewer moves
and choices before acting than beginners. The difference
lies in their ability to quickly evaluate the playing board
and all its pieces.

In fact, expert and beginning chess players were shown chess

boards with various layouts of pieces for around 5 seconds.
On average, a chess master on average could re-create more
than 20 pieces on the chess board, whereas a beginner could
re-create only around 4 pieces. It was found that chess
experts were able to recognize chess patterns or familiar
groupings of pieces and therefore were memorizing only a few
patterns instead of all 32 pieces. When more random patterns
were chosen, the number of pieces became more similar for
beginners and experts.

This basic phenomenon of superior expert memory for familiar

problems has been demonstrated on a wide variety of
different types of games and puzzles. So, experts are able
to store not only a vast number of patterns in their memory,
but also the responses to those patterns. An expert has the
ability to recognize and respond to problems automatically
that someone else has to think through.

Time to perform a task has been shown to be a powerful

function of the amount of practice on the task. Such a
function implies that continued practice is of continued but
ever-diminishing benefit to the task performance.

A number of factors modulate the effects of practice:

spacing of practice increases learning; skills can be
learned better if independent parts are taught separately;
players learn more rapidly if they are given immediate
feedback. Players must know whether their skill attempts are
correct and where they are in error, while feedback for
errors is best if it occurs while the error is still in the
player's active memory. In other words, don't let players
finish a level (especially early in the game or in the
tutorials) or a section of the game before giving them
feedback on what they did right or wrong. Give feedback as
soon as possible to the player.

Training in a particular skill transfers to another skill,

to the extent that the second skill involves use of the same
facts, productions, and patterns. It is difficult to find
any transfer between totally different cognitive skills. In
other words, if a player is playing a fighting game and is
learning lots of moves for one character, the combinations
learned for one character can be applied to help that player
learn the next character. However, this wouldn't be of any
use to the player while learning a driving game or another
type of game.

Expert game players are also often called hard-core players.

These are people who tend to play one type of game a lot or
who just play a lot of games. They have the ability to pick
up a new game and learn how to play it much faster than
someone who doesn't play games very often. Expert players
can draw upon their previous knowledge of games to more
quickly learn a new game, and they will more quickly become
experts in a new game within a genre that they play a lot of
than one they rarely play. Understanding these experts can
be an important step in understanding why your game appeals
to players.

Tactical Learning
As players practice skills and problems in a game, they come
to learn the sequence of moves required to solve the problem
or portions of the problem. Tactical learning refers to the
improvement that comes about because people learn familiar
subsequences of problem-solving steps that appear in
multiple problems. Players can solve problems more easily
the more often they encounter them, until eventually they
are able to overcome them with little effort. Many RTS games
take this approach. In these games, the player (unless very
skilled) must play through the level a few times to
understand the problem, and then must play the level a few
more times to figure out how to solve the level. Although
this approach isn't ideal, it takes into account the
tactical learning that must go on during a game and
understands that the average player must go through the
process.

As the game goes on, players begin to learn the patterns of

the game. In an RTS, this could be that they're beginning to
understand how the AI is working and are able to compensate
more quickly for its tactics. This should allow players to
begin to recognize similar problems later in the game, such
as how to deal with their base being attacked, and should
allow them to deal more quickly or more efficiently with the
problem.

Strategic Learning
Strategic learning refers to the improvement that comes
about when people learn the optimal way to organize their
problem solving for a particular problem. Whereas tactical
learning represents more of a linear path to problem
solving, strategic learning involves the players learning
the correct approach to solving the problem. Strategic
learning requires players to organize themselves in a
different manner and is more likely to take a nonlinear or
less straightforward approach.

An example of strategic learning could be in an RTS, in

which a player learns to sacrifice a group of troops in
order to draw the enemy into a trap or away from their base.
This type of maneuver is initially counterintuitive because
the loss of units is usually associated with doing poorly by
beginning players.

It has been shown that novice players tend to work backward

to solve a problem. They figure out what problem they need
to solve for example, they need to destroy an enemy building
and then they work backward from that, analyzing what they
need to destroy the building, then what they need to destroy
the building's defenses, then what they need to get to the
building, and so on until they figure out what to start
with. In contrast, experts tend to think forward,
understanding what they have to work with and what it's
capable of doing and then figuring out a solution looking
forward at the problem.
Player Learning Curves
Besides teaching players the basics of how to play the game 
in the tutorials, you still need to make sure that you don’t
throw every new feature at them right away. Even the game 
itself should be looked at as one steady tutorial where new 
features are slowly taught to the player. Most players have 
a hard time learning and remembering new rules. New rules 
are reinforced and learned best through use and repetition. 
It is important that you keep in mind the fact that people 
don’t tend to learn things easily and try to design to keep 
this in mind.

Another problem you need to watch out for is the casual 
player. If your game is too complex, then you can also cause
them problems. Casual players are those who pick it up, play
it for a little while, and then maybe don’t play it again 
for a week or two. In that time period, if you taught the 
player a whole bunch of things, they’ve probably now 
forgotten them, and then might have to go back and play the 
tutorials again. This can become very frustrating. 
Therefore, try and make the game as intuitive as possible, 
so that people who only play occasionally won’t get 
frustrated by it.

Also, These casual players can also cause you problems if 
your game is heavily story driven, and the player must 
remember all the events in order to accomplish tasks. Make 
sure you include text or some form of auto­remember feature 
in story or RPG games so that if players don’t play the game
for some time, and didn’t take notes, they’re not completely
out of luck and have to start over.

How to Shorten the Learning Cycle

Over time many games have become increasingly more complex. 
There are things that you can do to help the player learn 
how to play the game and to make the game easier to play 
overall.

Analogy Learning
Analogy learning takes advantage of things we already know. 
It uses analogies, symbols and other things that are common 
knowledge to people to help them learn things faster. This 
can be used in a variety of different ways to help the 
player. Below are some ways you can do that.
Generating Specific Rules

Importing Standard game knowledge

Importing computer (non­game) knowledge

Importing real world knowledge

An example of analogy learning is through the use of colors.
You can color stuff which is dangerous red, stuff which is 
poisonous green, things which are mysterious and bad guys 
are often black, good guys usually wear white, etc. There is
a lot of different colors which people will immediately 
associate with things if they’re used in a certain manner. 
Another example is when you create a game targeted towards 
experienced users, and you create a sequel or a game similar
to another popular game which has an initially similar 
camera and interface. People will transfer their knowledge 
of how to play the last game, and make certain assumptions 
about your game right from the start. So your game may be 
easier for them to play. Don’t rely on analogy learning 
however, since many people have learned different things, 
and many people also ake slightly different analogies to 
some things.

Feedback
Incorporate some type of user feedback into the game. 
Players need to know if they are doing good, doing bad, 
going the right direction or the wrong, or are winning or 
loosing. Many games tend to abstract out the concept of 
winning and loosing, so that the player is just playing the 
game. The problem is that players never know how good 
they’re doing, and inevitably when they think they’re doing 
really good, the computer will show up and crush them.

Arcade games and some RPG’s are notorious for blocking your 
progress with a boss. This tough character must be defeated 
before the player can move on. If the player is unable to 
defeat the boss, they are either not skilled enough or not 
strong enough to move on. This mechanism can work for some 
types of games, but is problematic. Most people won’t 
realize that they shouldn’t be fighting this battle yet, and
will continue to try and defeat the boss, until they get 
frustrated and quit playing. If a player reaches a boss, and
they are too weak to even have a chance of defeating the 
boss and must go through the level some more to build up 
their character, then point this out to the player before 
they continually get crushed.

Think about providing some level of periodic or constant 
feedback in the game. An RTS could have a scout which 
automatically reports to the player and tells them how well 
they are doing. Allow the players to turn this feature on 
and off, in case advanced players don’t want the help. You 
could even consider making the information something the 
player has to spend money on to buy a report or help, so 
that it’s not just freely given.

Strategy games are notorious for having tough AI which can 
crush you quickly. Players can

Consistency
Every part of the game needs consistency. This also relates 
to the rules of the game. You want to avoid special modes 
for the game where the interface keeps changing, the 
controls change or new things cause the player to change 
their habits or patterns all the time. For instance, you 
wouldn’t want to make a jet fighter game where one aircraft 
flies forward by pushing forward on the stick, and another 
flies forward by pulling back on the stick, even if it is 
realistic – unless you’re making a sim.

This is another reason why it is good to follow certain 
conventions which are standard amongst other games which are
similar to yours. It’s good to be original in what you do, 
but don’t be original just to be different. Change things if
they need fixing. The more consistent your game can be with 
other similar games, the more you can lower the learning 
curve.

Also, think about things like artwork and make sure they 
follow some consistency. Make sure that similar icons are 
not only laid out logically and grouped together, but that 
their icons are similar looking and easily discernable from 
others. Make sure that people can tell the difference, or 
begin to recognize the difference, between enemy and 
friendly units. You also want to think about things like 
color, and make sure that common color themes, palettes and 
use are observed. Try and abide by international and well 
known color and symbol use for things like danger, 
directions and all that.

Rewards
Players need to feel good about what they are doing. If the 
player is constantly taking risks, solving puzzles and 
completing tasks, but gets no rewards for their actions, 
they begin to feel disappointed. Players need constant 
rewards. The rewards must also match the risk or the player 
feels cheated. Rewards can come in a lot of different ways. 
In a game like Diablo, almost every time you kill something,
it drops some gold, a weapon or some item which you can 
pickup. Tougher or more advanced creatures drop more money 
or better items. Some creatures also drop more appropriate 
rewards, like a creature who might poison you while 
attacking you, might also occasional drop a potion cure or 
something similar which cures you. This form of reward are 
the short term rewards for doing the constant tasks 
throughout the game.

There needs to be bigger rewards for the player 
accomplishing bigger goals, like finishing a level. This is 
the reason why so many games use cutscenes. A cutscene is a 
reward for the player finishing part of the game. This 
reward may seem small and trivial, but most players have 
come to expect it. Whether the cutscene is pre­rendered and 
just a movie which plays back, or in the game engine, either
way it accomplishes two tasks. Cutscenes reward the player, 
but they also advance the story, which is necessary in most 
games as well.

Other forms of rewards come from the player increasing his 
stats. In role playing games, the players character goes up 
levels as he gains experience. Experience is gained by 
killing enemies, using skills, accomplishing tasks and a 
variety of other possibilities. Going up levels not only 
makes the character stronger, but often gives him new 
skills. Also, as you get stronger, you typically get 
stronger and can use new weapons and skills, or gain 
additional abilities like new magic skills. Going up levels 
is a game play mechanic which advances the game and is 
central to the gameplay, yet it is also a form of a reward. 
Going up levels rewards the player by giving him something 
good, as well as it advancing the gameplay.
There are many types of rewards, but the most Important 
thing to remember is that rewarding the player throughout 
the game for doing a good job is a good thing.

Game Difficulty & Difficulty Levels

Easy, medium or hard the computer asked. Is there really 
such a thing? What really makes a game easier or harder. 
Every game has different ways of handling this. There is no 
easy solution for difficulty levels. The need for having 
variable difficulty levels comes from having different 
levels of players in the world. What is hard for a beginner,
is probably easy for a hard core player. Trying to design a 
game which will appeal to a broad audience is a very 
difficult problem with many solutions.

One of the most classic approaches to the problem of making 
a game more difficult is to make the enemies in the game 
tougher. While this can work, it can also be perceived as a 
cheat, especially for players who have played the game other
difficulties of the game.

Another approach is to add more enemies to a level, and make
it tougher for the player to fight his battles. This 
approach can make it tougher for some players, but can also 
be tough to balance.

Some games make ammo more common for beginners, or may give 
the player more health bonuses or power­ups. There is many 
different approaches here, but making resources more 
plentiful for beginners can give them a big edge over the 
opponent.

It is also possible that the games attitude towards the 
player change. The enemy AI can go from semi neutral to 
fiercely aggressive towards the player. How enemies attack 
can be a big change for players. In an RTS, having an enemy 
who plays defensively, versus one who plays aggressively can
really change the game a lot.

Another approach that some people use is called Dynamic 
Difficulty Adjustment. This is a technique which measures 
the players progress and subtly makes the game easier or 
harder for the player. How the game does this can vary. 
Crash Bandicoot is probably the most famous game which uses 
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment. In Crash, they track how many
times you have died trying to get through a level. If the 
player dies more than 7 times in a certain section, the game
automatically places a new checkpoint half way in between 
the current two checkpoints you are having a hard time 
getting to. This makes it easier for you to get to the next 
checkpoint, and not have to play through tough parts of the 
level repeatedly. Crash also detects how many lives you 
have, and if you’re doing badly, and makes it easier for you
to get extra lives if you’re close to dying. There are many 
ways to dynamically adjust the difficulty of a game. Racing 
games also call this rubber banding. It has been found that 
races where the player is too far ahead or too far behind 
aren’t fun, so they speed up or slow down the computer 
racers if the race gets too far out of whack. There is a lot
of different possibilities to dynamically adjust the 
difficulty of the game.

Giving the computer the upper hand in information or giving 
the beginner more information is another way to give it an 
edge over an opponent. In an RTS, a beginner might start 
with no fog of war and know where the enemy is and what he 
is doing at all times, while the computer may still have to 
abide by the fog of war. On normal or medium difficulty the 
game might have both the computer and the player abide by 
the same rules and information. On difficult, the computer 
may not have to abide by the fog of war, while the player 
does. There are many types of information in a game, and 
sometimes having it can make all the difference in the 
world.

New approaches to the problem of difficulty levels should be
sought out for the next generation of games. With a little 
planning, other solutions can be found. Breaking down and 
analyzing what makes a beginning player and what makes an 
advanced player can be an insightful task. What you will 
find in most cases is that advanced players have the ability
to do more tasks simultaneously than beginners. In other 
parts of this book I talk about people solving puzzles 
through pattern recognition. Beginning players especially 
rely on this ability. A beginning player may have trouble 
keeping track of a single enemy attacking them constantly 
from a single direction and in a similar manner, whereas an 
advanced player might be able to handle multiple enemies of 
different types simultaneously attacking from multiple 
different and random directions using varied techniques. So 
this approach requires changing the AI to fight more 
intelligently for more advanced players, which can be 
difficult to do, but overall could be far more satisfying 
for an advanced player, and may add additional replay value 
to the game as well, since the game would seem different at 
each difficulty level.

The problem with some of these approaches, and with having 
difficulty levels in the first place is with the testing. 
You need to make sure your test department can handle all 
the various permutations to the game that could occur with 
different difficulty levels. Make sure that you think 
through every possible solution before you implement it, 
since it can have far reaching implications.

Integrating help into a game

There are many ways to integrate help into your game. In 
Chapter 17 I talk about how to integrate tutorials into your
game. Beyond tutorials though, there are other means of 
giving the player help in figuring out what to do.

You need to make sure that the manual has all relevant 
information for the player and that quick reference sheets 
and other printed material are done well. However, many 
games these days are rentals, which may not have a manual, 
or the player looses the manual or is unable to access it. 
It is handy to have a part of the front end interface also 
have access to any relevant commands, or use an in game 
screen which can be quickly accessed by a key (often F1 on 
computers) which will pull up a list of commands.

Besides just making key commands easily accessible, you need
to make sure that the player is given help when they need 
it. This can also be done through the interface, where you 
need to make sure that any information which is given to the
player can easily be re­accessed. Don’t give the player help
through an audio file and then not allow them to gain access
to the information again. Either let the player replay the 
file, or give them an accessible text equivalent they can 
read. Some people may be playing with the audio off, no 
audio, not understand or get distracted and not hear the cue
and then be at a loss if they can’t replay it.

Help can also come in the form of an Avatar or side­kick of 
some type which aids the player. In Zelda – The Ocarna of 
time – the players character Link has a fairy helper named 
“Navi“ who appears and helps you by telling you key 
information at critical times. This system isn’t very 
intrusive to the player, since the helper can be ignored. 
Any important information throughout the game is always 
relayed to the player. Other games may have another AI 
driven character who tells you things, which help you out.

There is many ways to teach players things in games. The

keys are in trying to make the system as non-intrusive to
the player as possible, make it easy to understand, only
relay the necessary information which is immediately needed,
reinforce key concepts several times, don’t just tell the
player about something, try and show them and make them do
it. See what new ways you can come up with to educate the
players.