Quicksay: Local Maxima (Patreon)

When the Nintendo eShop closed a while back, I bought a few games to shore up my collection, including Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. It got me thinking about the idea of integrated tutorials. I assume you know the kind of thing I mean, where a game tries to teach you its mechanics while you’re playing. Sometimes this is done smoothly (The Witness) other times it brings the game to a halt (Dream Team). Sometimes it involves text, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes characters refer to the buttons on the controller, sometimes they don’t. There’s a lot of ways to do it but I think it’s fair to put them under the broad category of integrated tutorials.

There’s a pretty clear dividing line across console generations. The SNES/Mega Drive generation didn’t favour integrated tutorials at all, they started to become widespread with the PS1/N64 generation and then were fully normalized by the time the PS2 rolled around. Part of it must be tied to the decline of manuals. During the PS3 era, manuals started to become slim pamphlets and by the time the PS4 rolled around they were practically gone.

As an aside, I still have some mild disappointment when I open up a new game these days and see there’s no manual, even though they’ve been missing for over a decade at this point. It’s not that I really loved them - or even read them all - but there was a certain amount of artistry to them. Some could even be fun to read. For a certain generation, there’s fond memories of reading the manual in the car on the way home. I don’t want to harp on about it but it was a real thing that many of us experienced and it was nice. I suppose I would say it offered a level of hype which games could easily match since the manual painted a pretty clear picture and you didn’t have too much time for your imagination to go wild before experiencing the real thing. Probably just a post-hoc rationalization for enjoying part of a bygone era but I think there was something enjoyable about the slight delay before playing being filled by the manual.

Since I’m already in reminiscence mode, I also somewhat miss those old custom installers PC games used to have. My first PC had a small hard drive so I installed/uninstalled games frequently and got to see some of those installers several times. If I remember right the C&C: Red Alert 2 one used to show unit blueprints which you didn’t see anywhere else in the game. I sometimes wonder if consoles should have a little installer API for developers to use so that players can get a similar experience today. When you buy a PS5 disc you have to sit through the installation anyway, it would be nice if it could somehow lead you into the experience with a few images or something.

Anyway, even if manuals were to make a miraculous come back, the kids of today wouldn’t read them. They’ll be on their phone as they wait for the game to arrive in the mail and maybe in the meantime they’ll watch one of their favourite streamers play through the early stages. That is assuming they didn’t buy it digitally, in which case their pre-load might be ready to play one second after midnight. Those eShop 3DS games include a digital manual which you can access from the home menu. I’ve been chipping away at Etrian Odyssey V and actually consulted that manual to learn what the benefits of character retirement would be. Unfortunately it wasn’t very helpful. The internet doubles as a manual now if there’s anything you need to know but it would be a mistake to blame our current information overload on the prevalence of integrated tutorials. Most of us had either a poor or non-existent internet connection back in the PS2 days when players were no longer expected to Read The Fucking Manual anyway.

Personally I wish the arcade style intro screen with some button prompts was the preferred approach more often but I think we can all agree on one thing: integrated tutorials are sometimes bad. Sometimes they destroy the replayability of an otherwise very enjoyable game. Sometimes they’re just irritating or the approach seems ill-suited to the game at hand. I think the worst kind of integrated tutorials - where it feels like the game screeches to a halt to explain something you already know - are an example of a broader phenomenon which touches many aspects of game design: the local maximum. This is a mathematics term which describes an output that’s higher than all the surrounding points but is still not the highest globally. Put simply, it describes a peak but not Mount Everest.

Likewise, an integrated tutorial can be a local maximum. It always solves a problem (people not understanding how to play) but it can also come with drawbacks which prevent it from being the best possible solution. To me, this explains some common design patterns which I find frustrating but which constantly reappear, even over very long periods of time. It’s been many years since the first instance of low health red jelly vision but despite much derision over the years, it still appears as recently as Doom Eternal. Of course this too solves a problem, players not realizing they’re on low health will get much more frustrated when they die since it seems to happen all of a sudden. Obviously it also comes with a drawback, your vision is obscured at the precise moment when you need it most. Maybe that hindrance at the worst possible time is interesting in its own way but it usually annoys me, to put it mildly.

Another digression here. Any time this red jelly stuff appears on screen I immediately go to the graphics/accessibility settings to find a way to turn it off but I don’t think I’ve found even a single game where I’ve been allowed. Despite the growing number of accessibility features in games these days, some simple options still tend to be missing. I think players in general might be more welcoming of accessibility settings if there was more catering the other way too. For example, I often wish there was a way to disable the red text effect you see in narrative heavy games like Phoenix Wright. That red text might be another local maximum.

Doom Eternal also features teleporting enemies, an archetype which is present in countless games and which I’ve rarely, if ever, enjoyed. I suppose I should put the question to you, can you think of a single teleporting enemy you love? I’m struggling. If you ask me, they’re the worst thing about God Hand. Still, I suppose teleporting enemies sometimes solve a problem. Modern games tend to have high mobility for the player character so a teleport might be the only viable way for an enemy to escape at all and that escape will force the player to re-prioritize their target which can be fun. Again there’s an upside but there’s a downside because the teleport can feel arbitrary and reacquiring the target can be frustrating.

To be clear, I’m not dismissing the usefulness of these local maxima but I also feel that games sometimes seem inhibited by them. It sometimes feels as if games are pre-designed to a certain extent. Even if a game is innovative in other ways, developers end up following trends in certain areas and each decision leads into the next in such a way that developers get trapped instead of re-evaluating the core assumptions which got them there in the first place. Of course that’s much easier said than done but it seems like something which is worth keeping in mind. Historically, someone does break out of the local maximum sooner or later which can cause other developers to adjust. For example the low health red jelly is itself a better solution than the low health beep noise which was prevalent around the time of Super Metroid and is even more irritating, especially over a long period of time.

Apparently Miyamoto once said that “A great idea solves multiple problems at the same time.” but that’s such a generalized statement it can’t be universally true. I think it can lead to the kind of interwoven mechanics I really enjoy and is usually good advice but sometimes I wonder if developers are looking for a single solution to a problem which would be better solved by a couple of small adjustments instead. For example, if I was working on a FPS where red jelly seemed like the standard approach I would want to find an alternative. When Bayonetta’s health hits a low enough threshold, the game briefly slows down which causes the enemy’s attack to seem even more impactful than usual. This calls attention to your health in a nice way - especially for an action game where taking damage usually locks you into a hitstun so the time dilation doesn’t really interfere with controls. That might be a start but it probably wouldn’t be enough by itself. Remember the solution needs to work for casual players who will never read this blog post. If you combine the slowdown with some flashing on the health bar or a few low health beeps that switch off after a while, maybe that would be enough. Worth trying at least.

Every problem needs its own considerations but I suppose if there’s anything to take away here it’s that one problem does not necessarily equal one solution. In the Miyamoto case two problems can have one solution but the opposite is also true. One problem can be solved by several things working in tandem and that’s not always bad either. Perhaps this type of thinking can help break out of the local maximum.

Also, please let me turn off the red jelly.