Symbiosis, and why tutorials destroy it

This is hardly a groundbreaking idea, but look at that picture above. That, right there, is videogame heaven. It's, bar none, the most perfectly designed first five seconds of any game ever. In those first five seconds, you learn almost everything there is to know about Super Mario Bros. without a single tutorial. There are blocks with question marks above your head – a question mark denoting some sort of mystery. What will come out of there if I manipulate it somehow? You press one of the buttons and discover that your functions are to Run (B) and Jump (A). You try jumping into the first block, and a coin comes out. Now, there's something coming towards you. You could run into it (killing you), or you could jump over it. Or on it. And then it gets squashed.

There are always going to be haters who will say that Super Mario Bros. is an incredibly simplistic game, and at its core, it is. But I'm firmly of the opinion that, sure, games have gotten more complicated – there's way more buttons to press and way more to manage than simply running and jumping. But I think that videogames definitely don't give the player enough credit to figure things out on their own.

Tomonobu Itagaki, father of jiggly boobs, is credited as saying that the reason why we play videogames is because there's such great output for such a small amount of input. It's definitely true, too. I mean, we're manipulating the image of incredibly difficult tasks, all by pressing the X button or rotating the second analog stick. This is also often the first argument trotted out against motion control, although in many cases (unless you're playing Tiger Woods or something, where your input equals your output, often to frustrating effect, as in real golf) your input using motion control is equally small to the output arriving on the screen.

People talk about "hardcore" games as being difficult; yet, I can't even count how many supposed hardcore games lead the player through every challenge, holding their hand with so many unnecessary tutorials. But on the other hand, there's a sticky dilemma when there's no tutorial. Namely, how to explain away the difference in skill between the character and the player?

In almost every game you or I have ever played that involves real-time action, your character is supremely skilled at whatever it is that they do. To get the player up to speed on controlling said character, a series of tutorial pop-ups, or a tutorial level, or several of both, is used to make the player the equal of the character. Throwing the player out into the wild in this situation wouldn't make sense, because why would your super-spy assassin character not know how to jump or kick?

Blatant tutorials are an incredibly inelegant way of going about doing this (and so are those dialogs that say, "Hey! I heard you could fish! I was reading in this book and it says 'press Y.' What do you think that means?") This also simultaneously brings into sharp relief that statement from Itagaki. How crazy is it that what our interactions boil down to in videogames is, in essence, binary? Either you're pressing the button(s) or you aren't. Videogames are indeed becoming more complex, and more able to simulate the details of life, and yet, the way we interact is still firmly rooted in systems that aren't capable of dealing with them.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution. Not every game can be as simple as Super Mario Bros. And even late-period Mario games have tutorials of a sort (although I'm definitely a fan of the Super Guide idea – only give tutorials to those who need them. Brilliant!). Destroying that illusion of symbiosis between the character and the player is really offputting, and why tutorials need to go the way of the dodo bird. I suppose the only way to make that happen is with incredibly solid game design, game design that takes the ideas of World 1-1 and transplants them into a modern context.