ABSTRACT
Andy Walsh provides excellent advice for the unique challenges a game writer faces while working on dialog and instruction text for tutorials. He describes different kinds of tutorials and talks about approaches to take with each of them. Walsh breaks down the essential goals of tutorial. In every tutorial, players need to come understand their method, their freedom, their limits, their purpose and their joy. It’s also important for the writer to establish the following in order: the setting, the gameplay genre, the narrative genre, the central conflict and the characters, their goals and finally the story. Walsh emphasizes the importance of “show not tell” or even “play not tell” and discusses how and when to use cutscenes in tutorials. Beyond that, he covers emphasizing the moment of change in the tutorial and how to tackle the problem of the player knowing little about the game, while the character they play is supposed to be an expert. Finally, he advises that the tutorial is not the place to talk about backstory for characters or settings. Tutorials are more engaging and effective when they focus on immediately relevant information.
