Design for Learning

Presenting information in multiple ways aids learning comprehension. (Learn more here.) We take advantage of this by including diagrams and examples of play in our rulebooks. Increasingly, rulebooks may link to videos to provide further variety in presentation style. So far, so good. 

What I've been thinking about lately is how designers can better serve players by considering the most common usage of this information. How are games actually learned in the wild? Most often, one person learns the rules and teaches them to the rest of the players. What are the implications of this reality? All of that work that went into making the rulebook easy to learn is funneled into a fraction of the total audience who then proceeds to explain the rules in a less varied and polished way. "Rules explaining" has been the subject of podcasts, etc. for awhile, with the focus on training gamers to be better at sharing the hobby. I don't want to retread that ground. I want to explore how designers can create better teaching and learning experiences. 

Obviously, a clearly laid out rulebook is a must. The rules explainer has to learn the game, after all. However, there are two things I want to see more often in games: a quick start guide and a glossary of hard-to-remember rules. Quick start guides will help anyone already familiar with the game, be it the rules explainer or players returning to a game for subsequent plays. Quick start guides need to include brief set up instructions ("How many cards are we dealt, again?") and a full turn structure including how to begin the next turn ("What happens after the clean-up phase?"). This could be the back page of a rulebook, or inside the first page, or on a single separate sheet. If it's more than one page, it's not a quick start. The point of this guide is to help players who mostly know the rules get into a game without having to flip through the entire rulebook. This guide probably isn't needed after the first turn. 

A brief rules glossary might list ability effects or rules FAQs. It is most useful on the back page of the rulebook. These will most likely be fringe rules or cases that occur outside of the core loop. This guide may be referenced throughout the gameplay, but usually only by one player at a time. 

Player aids aren't just a rules reminder; they are a rules teacher. Player aids can be a combination of quick start guide and rules glossary. They can also be an icon dictionary, scoring table, and win condition reminder. Including all of those is probably too much for a player aid, however. If information is generally not referenced after the first turn, it may be better as a quick start guide. If the information presented is too wordy, it probably should be a larger format rules glossary. In some games, the player aid will be the only written version of the rules that many players see. During an info-dump rules explanation, a player aid is a safety blanket for me. It signals that if I don't absorb all the rules the game will still help me get through my turn—I'm not alone; I have help. 

I'm not a fan of tutorial versions of games, particularly if the rules are significantly different from the main game and it has separate components. I struggle to learn rules, so I don't want to learn them more than once. I also don't want to keep up with components I may play with once and never again. If there is a version of the game that focuses on the core loop but ignores some side boards and bonus scoring, that is my preferred way to learn more complex games. I'm still learning the main game rules, but I'm learning them in chunks. 

I would prefer to always learn games that could be taught using only a quick start guide, a player aid, and the components themselves. But many of my favorite games require more explanation than that. And that's ok. But I also find that, as a designer, the better I am at presenting information the shorter my rulebooks end up. [Hint: that's because they're more streamlined.] Focusing on how a game is taught or relearned on subsequent plays just seems like the next step in becoming a better designer.