A Brief History Of Player Onboarding In Video Games

Games have always had to find ways to introduce their players to the game, and teach them how it works and what to do. But the way this is done, and how this is typically approached, has evolved over time. And not just in the form of a slow evolution and gradual improvement - there have been several fundamental shifts in the philosophy behind player guidance over the decades.

The 1990s - Figure it out yourself

Those were still relatively early times for video games - and many standards and conventions we take for granted today, simply did not exist yet. Control schemes in games were all over the place, and player instruction was very minimal. The pre-dominant paradigm was “learn by failure”.

The underlying assumption was, that the typical player was both motivated and patient. Players would learn through trial and error, through repeated failure while trying different things - until they eventually figure out what works. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s Law (“All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”) still was being followed.

Tutorials were rare to non-existent. The first level of a game might be designed to intentionally be a relatively safe learning space - but other than that, player teaching relied mostly on visual cues and repetition.

This approach does not scale well with increasing complexity. As games became 3D, started needing camera controls, added inventories and skill trees and other deep mechanics, players increasingly got lost, overwhelmed and stuck early on.

In order to reduce frustration and early churn, games needed to find a way to teach controls, camera movement and core mechanics before putting the player into danger. This caused the first shift in onboarding philosophy.

The Early to Mid 2000s - Explicit, front-loaded tutorials

The new core idea was: “teach before play”. This is the time of explicit tutorials and handholding. Learning was separated from play in the form of dedicated tutorial levels or separated tutorial islands. These tutorials made heavy use of pop-up text-boxes, forced sequences and linear training missions.

The underlying assumption was, that the player would have to first learn the game (within a safe space), then play it for real. This approach ran into problems right away - it never worked well. Teaching outside of gameplay proved very ineffective. Tutorials and their text-boxes did bore players, who felt like they were being “talked down to” and patronised.

At the same time though, the amount of information and knowledge crammed into these front-loaded tutorials could also cause cognitive overload. The result was, that players could not retain all the information they were taught - if they even did read the text in the first place. Mostly player would just skim over the text, with little to no actual comprehension.

Developers quickly realized that this just wasn’t working, and that was the turning point for the next shift in approach.

The Late 2000s to Early 2010s - Contextual, embedded learning

This is when player onboarding and teaching became more contextual and embedded. Tutorials were integrated into gameplay instead of being front-loaded, and now started to rely heavily on “learning by doing”.

Designers shifted to gradually introducing game mechanics over time in order to allow players to learn “one concept at a time”. Games opened up their mechanics and possibilities level by level - or progression step by progression step, rather then teaching everything at once. Pacing design became hugely important.

Onboarding became an integral part of the game design - and not a separate, frontloaded feature. This improved knowledge retention a lot, and also solved the issues with cognitive overload, player engagement and boredom. New mechanics were no longer taught ahead of time, but exactly when needed. Games offered safe spaces for the player to experiment and adopted a “show, don’t tell” approach to teaching - getting rid of text-based approaches.

The game Portal is a classic example of this approach. Every chamber in the game introduces one new idea. There is no traditional tutorial, but the entire game is a tutorial to itself. You have to learn a new thing to solve each puzzle, but that’s the regular gameplay - not the game teaching you.

This approach generally worked well when done right - but it was hard to do right. Very tight level design was required, it was for players to miss cues or misinterpret them, or misunderstand game systems entirely. Subtle teaching like this does not offer quite the same level of clarity as a more explicit approach.

Many games erred on the side of over-guiding the player, resulting in a “Press X to win” feeling in players. Often the entire game ended up feeling restrcited, railroaded and too handholding. With the rise of internet culture, gamers were given a voice - and they loudly demanded more freedom, more feeling of mastery, and more discovery from their games.

In order to address these demands, another shift had to happen.

The Remainder of the 2010s - Player agency and systemic learning

During this time, we also saw a siginficant rise of sandbox games and more dynamic/systemic designs. That too imposed new requirements onto how players are taught. In order to address these new requirements and meet player demands for increased agency and more discovery, tutorials evolved into entirely optional guidance.

Game systems were intentionally designed to encourage experimentation, and to allow players to fail safely. UIs evolved to using a more minimal, less cluttered design and more information was put diegetically into the game world itself. Some games even went as far as removing the HUD entirely.

Onboarding moved from giving players instructions, to teaching them to set their own goals. Hitman (2016) is an example of a game, which redesigned their tutorials from originally guided, to semi-guided, to finally fully unguided sandboxes.

Another result of the playtesting complaints was IO Interactive heavily expanding upon the tutorial missions set at the ICA Facility. The tutorial was designed to teach players the fundamentals of Hitman, how to operate the game and how to set their own goals. The first iteration was a series of individual test chambers where the player would be taught a single mechanic or feature at a time. However, even though this taught players how to operate the game, it was not representative of the nature of the game as an open sandbox. The redesigned tutorial consisted of a short ‘Arrival’ opening that teaches basic movement and camera controls, a ‘Guided training’ mission set on a sandbox yacht level and then an unguided ‘Final Test’ sandbox level. However, despite teaching the controls and the fundamentals of Hitman, developers still felt they had to teach players how to set their own goals so this led to the idea of the ‘Freeform training’ mission. In this mission players are asked to replay the yacht level from the ‘Guided training’ again but this time without any guidance and with more items such as remote explosives available to play with. Playtesters were given a list of challenges on paper that were deliberately designed to be simple and to work well together. This resulted in players setting their own goals and becoming creative in trying to complete all the different challenges.

Wikipedia, see also this GDC talk

By now, player onboarding went far beyond just teaching the controls and core mechanics. It became about inducing the right mindset and make the player think like the game. This agency-first approach came with it’s own trade-offs as well: it tended to lead to steeper learning curves, higher risk of player confusion or intimidation and a chance of players bouncing off early because the game systems are just too opaque to them. This approach didn’t work for all players, as some simply needed more guidance and more handholding than that.

This would lead to another shift - but before that, there also was another development that happened a bit in parallel to all that. And while this is less of a general shift in global design philosophy, it still had a very huge influence.

Late 2010s and Beyond - Data-driven and personalized onboarding

With the rise of mobile gaming, free-to-play titles and live-service models a new, data-driven approach to player-onboarding emerged. Player retention became a key metric, and through tools like A/B testing and personalized onboarding games heavily optimized for that - overcoming the “early bounce-off” problem of the agency-first approach.

Onboarding was seen as a retention funnel and part of the monetization strategy. Since player acquisition came with a cost, every player that bounced was seen as a financial loss. Through the use of methods like behavioral tracking, adaptive difficulty, and other data-driven approaches, player retention was heavily optimized.

This led to over-optimization which often feels manipulative to players. There’s also a tendency to “handholding creep” in this approach, where the amount of prompts and nudges tends to increase over time, as the game becomes ever more optimized for not only player retention - but also towards maximum conversion (turning free players into paying players). Many of the “tricks” employed to achieve these goals are not about making a better game that’s more fun - but often lean way more into habitualization and creating addiction-like behavior.

This is where you get your lootboxes, gacha mechanics, login-rewards, daily quests and all that other junk.

The 2020s and Ongoing - Invisible onboarding and meta-onboarding

This is the final and most modern approach to player onboarding we are looking at in this post. And this is less of a fundamental shift or complete break in philosophy than those seen before.

It takes the same basic approach as the agency-first method of the mid 2010s did. Still following the idea of “learning by doing”. Still using diegetic cues and environmental guidance instead of UI or text. It still keeps the idea of teaching things not ahead of time, but just when they are needed. The idea of keeping everything optional. It even still keeps the “show, don’t tell” idea of the late 2000s. “Teach without speaking” is still a major guideline.

But what does change is that “guidance has to be absolutely invisible” overtakes “player agency first” as the main guiding star. It is now considered okay to take away some player agency in favor of more guidance - as long as the player just doesn’t really notice much. Instead of giving the player total freedom - it’s now more about giving “managed agency”.

Another, even bigger change though, is that for the first time, game design actively recognizes that players also learn outside of the game. That many gamers look to streams, videos, and tiktoks created by other players for getting new ideas of what to try in the game. Even gameplay trailers and other marketing materials are now considered to be part of the out-of-game onboarding funnel, that can already teach some core aspects of how the game works - and instill certain mindsets within the player. It’s also incresingly recognized how important it is, that what the marketing teaches is in line with the actual game. All of that is then combined with the general assumption, that game literacy in players has increased over time. That - for example - teaching systems can rely on players already having come across WASD movement in other games.

Some new ideas that are getting popular now, are the use of challenges and achievement lists as teaching tools. Systemic learning, embedded (optional & invisible) tutorials are now employed across the full player journey - the entirety of the game. And also using the metrics and data tracking pioneered by the mobile gaming space - just with less focus on monetization optimization - and more focus on the player experience instead. Level design can now be informed by eye-tracking data, and/or various kinds of heatmaps. The appearance of environmental cues can be microtimed to the 100th of a second - and finetuned using that data.

An oversimplified example:

• In the 2000s you might haven been given a front-loaded tutorial that gives you a mandatory quest to “freeze an enemy” + a text-explanation of how ice-damage and freeze works and then gated access to the main game behind completion of that quest.
• In the 2010s the game would have encouraged you to experiment with different damage types - but if you then discovered freezing or completely missed that, was more or less happenstance.
• In the 2020s the game would still encourage you to experiment - but would also present you with an optional achievement for “Froze 5 enemies”. Or might even offer a “freeze as many enemies in 10 seconds as you can challenge” that allows players to share and compare their results and compete for high-scores. That’s a very visible achievement or challenge - but an invisible tutorial, since it does not feel or read as a tutorial to the player.

Designers are now also becoming wise to the idea that players can be over-taught and over-controlled, and that providing too much or too tight guidance leads to boredom and lack of engagement, and can also cause players to bounce off prematurely - just like a lack of guidance can. That’s where “just-in-time” and “just-when-needed” invisible micro-tutorials can help to provide more tailored guidance, specific to the player, instead of a “one-tutorial-fits-all” approach.

In some ways this current, most modern modern approach feels a bit like a “best-of” of everything that came before, just made (mostly) invisible to the player.

Conclusion

If you look closely at all of those different shifts and approaches, some patterns start to emerge. There are some key design trends that emerged, that show how onboarding design is moving in a very specific direction.

Onboarding is generally moving:

• from explicit guidance (like text) - to implicit guidance (like environmental cues)
• from linear, fixed tutorials - to adaptive, optional, personalized onboarding
• from front-loaded teaching - to just-in-time, only-when-needed guidance
• from controlling the player (telling them what to do next) - to guiding the player (helping them try what they want, offering suggestions)
• from dedicated, separate tutorials - to completely invisible, embedded guidance

Modern game designers no longer try to explain the game to the player - instead they try to understand how players learn naturally without being told and then try to hook into that. Because that natural learning is the main source of fun - while any explicit teaching just kills the fun.