

Two Universes - filament
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/05/09/two_universes.html

======
michaelbuckbee
Something not really mentioned in the article is that Portal is very funny.

The voice of Glados is constantly messing with you: asking you to bring your
daughter to work with you for testing over the acid pits, lying to you about
obvious things, etc.

This personality and sense of humor helps drive things forward and keeps you
entertained while you're fiddling with what are essentially logic puzzles.

I've never really seen a website or app pull off humor to the level that
Portal achieves.

The closest thing I can think of would be something like the "You Suck at
Photoshop" tutorials on YouTube:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M>

------
scott_s
One thing the author never mentions is _how_ Portal teaches you how to play
the game. Yes, the player has to _play_ , as the author points out, but
Portal's designers created very deliberate sandboxes in which to play. They
created rooms with distinct features that make it likely that if you play
enough, you'll discover the correct thing to do - even if it's just by
accident.

That is the design part: understanding the rules of the environment you've
created, understanding how people are likely to behave based on prior
knowledge when put into that environment, and creating scenarios which lead
them down certain paths without _telling_ them about those paths. It's a
probabilistic thing. You have to create a scenario where the most likely
outcome is that the user learns what you want them to learn.

Another neat thing about Portal that may apply to applications is that the
spoken lesson doesn't come until _after_ you've discovered it on your own. The
explicit tutorial doesn't so much teach as reinforce.

~~~
starwed
And of course the designers of Portals did extensive testing to get feedback
on what worked! Those brilliant designs weren't plucked out of thin air, but
came from watching how real players interacted with them.

------
macrael
How could the designers of Photoshop actually apply this criticism? This is
what has always bothered me about gameification, even the "good" kind of
gameification this article espouses. When I launch Photoshop, I already have a
goal in mind, and it isn't a goal that the designers of Photoshop have any
control over. In Portal, the goals, and thus the tools necessary to achieve
them, are small and additive and picked by the game designers. When I launch
Photoshop, I'm usually thinking something like "I want to make a button that
means add a song to a playlist". Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when
you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the
app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's
madness.

This kind of analogy usually leads me toward thinking that an app like
Photoshop should provide an extensive tutorial where they could teach you how
to use the app by asking you to create increasingly complex images with
increasingly complex tools. That has the potential to directly apply the
lessons gleaned here from Portal, but doesn't actually affect the end design
of the product. And it doesn't help me because I have not yet said to myself,
"I should put many hours in to learn how to use Photoshop properly" I always
come to it with a specific goal in mind. Plus, how is that so different than
how things are now? All I see here are guidelines for how to make a great
Photoshop tutorial, not design principles to guide the making of a more
accessible Photoshop, which for me seems to be what the OP is trying to get
at.

Another random thought: a paintbrush is the same tool more or less that a
beginner and a master use to create very different qualities of painting. How
can that tool be so simple and yet allow for such complex mastery?

~~~
derefr
> Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you
> only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master
> those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

Not if everything was locked from the beginning with no recourse--but then,
that's bad game design, too. Nobody wants to come over to play a friend's
fighting game (or Photoshop) and find that their favorite characters/tools
aren't available. Instead, well-designed games have a "story" or "campaign"
mode, where things _are_ slowly unlocked, and then an "open play" mode where
everything is available.

~~~
eru
> and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

Games like Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl seem to do well with the the
`open play' mode that doesn't have everything unlocked from the start.

~~~
derefr
They _seem_ to, but that's really one of the main reasons you won't see those
games as much in professional competitive-gaming. As it is, a lot of players
have trouble setting up tournaments just because you have to input a
_password_ to unlock certain characters; imagine if, say, there were better
characters (strictly better, as in "everyone is playing them right now until
someone can devise a counter using another character") which were only
available as _DLC_ \--such a game would probably never get tournament play at
all.

~~~
eru
Maybe. The games of the Smash Bros. series are party games. Nintendo doesn't
care about professional competitive gaming for them, and designed them for a
casual audience. Mario Kart Wii is similar, though surprisingly hard for such
a seemingly casual game.

------
nateberkopec
Game designers have known this for years. For a (hilarious) examination of how
Mega Man X employed the same philosophy, check out Egoraptor's video on it:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM>

~~~
scott_s
Super Mario Brothers also did this. SMB was one of the first games that
scrolled, so very soon after starting, a goomba appears from the right to tell
you that you can move to the right. If you don't jump over or on it, you die,
learning that lesson. Once you learn that lesson, you are under some blocks,
and another goomba appears. You jump over it, but in doing so, you are forced
to hit one of the blocks above you, which causes a mushroom powerup to appear
and flow above you in the same direction. It falls down, hits a pipe in the
way, and comes in your direction. This is timed so that it's unlikely that you
will avoid touching it - which you have so far been taught to do, since it's
quite similar to a goomba.

The first two screens of SMB are deliberately designed to teach you the basic
rules of the game without actually explaining them to you.

~~~
starwed
Anna Anthropy has an older blog article about exactly that:

<http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=465>

------
ColinDabritz
A great article, and Valve does this so very well.

On a related note, Valve launched the 'Perpetual Testing Initiative' for
Portal 2 yesterday ( <http://store.steampowered.com/app/620> ) , which is an
amazingly easy-to-use level editor and shared content community, which should
add much longevity to the game.

People learn to build levels, and get feedback votes from players. The options
are slightly limited, but you can take your level over to the full hammer
editor after.

An interesting move in the context of the article, essentially teaching their
community to be makers.

~~~
MaxGabriel
It's on sale today for $7 if anyone is interested.

------
blazzar
It's an interesting take but I don't buy the relationship between Portal and
Photoshop. Portal has a defined end point to each level, the routes you take
are often limited as well. Photoshop has no predetermined end, it's in the
mind of the user sat in front of it. I am guessing (haven't played it) that
Minecraft may be a better example in that is offers creative freedom.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Not necessarily. I haven't played since before the Adventuring update, but
back then I had to keep the minecraft wiki open on my other monitor to get
anywhere with redstone.

~~~
Ineffable
You still have to do this. Minecraft is a bad example.

~~~
Splines
I think it's a great example of a game with a bad learning experience.
Something you can do in Minecraft to improve the learning experience could be
applicable to productivity applications.

The problem with comparing Portal to Photoshop is that Portal has a fixed goal
for the user: Get to the end of the level. How is the designer supposed to
teach the new Photoshop user in the same manner?

A possible answer is to provide a simulated training ground that with only a
few Photoshop tools "unlocked". By completing tasks you unlock more tools. The
problem still exists in that it's still difficult to determine what mastery
the user will require. And let's face it - in and of itself, using Photoshop
isn't very fun.

------
alainbryden
One of the most cunning ways I've ever seen of getting someone to read about
how much Photoshop sucks - by making them think they're reading about how much
Portal rocks.

------
powrtoch
The obvious example of this philosophy in action is the iPhone. Remember the
first time you played with one? You start out knowing just a few basic facts
like that you can touch things and pinch to zoom, then you find yourself
poking around looking for other nifty interactions you've never tried before
(because you're actually curious), and before long the entire interface is
second-nature.

------
ThomPete
Designer like myself have been thinking about this for decades literally.

The problem is not photoshop. The problem is that playing a game is not the
same as using photoshop.

Why?

Think about it it like this.

I could in theory create every possible frame of portal in photoshop sans the
interaction.

I can't create photoshop in portal in any shape or form.

One is a world the other creates worlds.

