Since we’ve talked about how fantastic The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past is doing its tutorial and how well its starting sequence worsk, and how it introduces the player fantastically into the game world without explicitly telling the player how the game should be worked, how the puzzles work, and how everything else works, we should also talk about a few other examples where this is working quite nicely. We should look at tutorials that work very, very well without being an explicit tutorial in the sense that the player starts it, then you get instructions, you go through it, and then you start with the game.
One of the qualities of a good tutorial is that you are taught without being explicitly told that you’re taught, and that it embeds itself in the game experience without giving you an extra area that feels extra and artificial. You’re introduced into the game and almost naturally you go through the experience of learning a number of things as you play, and you get to use the knowledge of what you’ve learned in that tutorial throughout the rest of the game.
One of the things that I found with Lemmings is that the first handful of levels are really fantastic tutorials without being a tutorial. You can imagine that the developers, DMA Design, could have created another button in the home menu, the starting menu, and created a tutorial where they teach you where to click and tell you which ability for the lemmings is for what and how long they work such things. They chose a different path: they chose to have a fantastic UI design where the buttons speak fairly well about the functionalities that they invoke. Maybe not the atomic explosion, but the rest of the buttons do very well.
They found a way of building a tutorial without building a tutorial, which is making it so that the first handful of levels really teach you step by step, combining different abilities such that you can reach the goal. The very first level is just: dig down a hole in the ground and give these lemmings a path from start to finish. And it’s really made such that you can’t really fail, and you can simply try without running the danger of losing your lemmings because you dug a hole too early and therefore they fall down the ground or you lose the level. You can still lose the level, but you have to be crafty about it.
You will naturally find that the only ability in that level that you have is the digger. And applying the digger helps you then finalize the challenge and get them to the next level.
The next level is easy as well and teaches you the next ability: which is the blocker/stopper ability. And it does so by not giving you all of the abilities and plenty of them, but giving you only the ability that you need and explicitly forcing you to look at the ability and then apply it to the game world – if you do not select it and act, Lemmings will fall off the cliff. If you don’t act in Level 2, there will be terminal end to Lemmings, and that can be fun to explore, too – to see if what happens if you do NOT act or not act quickly enough. And that alternative ending, you learn very soon in the level, if you don’t act in the first 20 seconds. But that’s how learning should be: it should be easy, it should be fun – and it should be a safe space to explore, “oops, Lemmings die here”.
For the first levels, it’s fairly obvious what the combination of ability for Lemmings must be, and in what combinations are required to get them to their goal post.
Progressing across the next levels, they slowly but surely pile on top of the abilities, giving you two or three abilities to combine so that you understand that it’s usually not one ability, but multiple. Then they give you a level where there are two potential options of how to overcome the challenge. And suddenly you start having multiple abilities, and you can solve it this way or that way. And slowly but surely, the challenges get more complex as you go along.
Until level 15 or so, I don’t think it’s a real challenge of completing them. But they use these levels to really teach you how to think about the game, what to expect from the game, and encourage you to simply try. Lemmings is a fantastic trial‑and‑error game where you look at the level, you look at the abilities, and then try and think: how can I solve this? And you don’t require a detailed plan and measure distances and things on the screen with a ruler. You simply try it out. If you fail, you try again. If you succeed, fantastic, you move on.
Lemmings is fantastic in encouraging you in that. And part of the reason why it’s so fantastic is that the first handful of levels give you the safe space and the ability to explore and experiment that you take along into the later levels, 15, maybe 20 and beyond.
