There are literally millions of games, a plethora of genres and a bazillion different typed of gamers. Obviously one of those folks is going to come across something that he or she hasn't played before, therefore they have to learn how to play it.

The first issue most people come across is understanding the rules of the game. Let's take a turn based strategy game, say magic the gathering, when you first boot it up the first thing that you are given is a tutorial on how to play the game in question deeply going over the rules and actually showing you step by step how to play the game in question. Action based games have taken these to show you "the rules" by laying out the controls. Half-Life: Opposing Force did this by having the player go through an obstacle course.

Modern games, Witcher 2 for instance, show you some of the controls, but not all of them. This brought tons of criticism and personally I am still stuck on the final "tutorial" level since the first week of release. It is ridiculous to think that simply not understanding the basics of a game can have such a drastic impact on player enjoyment, but it does happen and it is a true statement.

So, how do you fix this? Let us use Counter-Strike: Source as an example. CS:S is an extremely competitive game and that alone puts many gamers off from even attempting to play it. The basic way to "learn" CS:S is to simply do the following...

PLAY IT!

Ok, this may seem a bit simple, but in all honesty there are games out there that you can only learn by doing. CS:S has a mode called "gun game", you may have heard of this in other popular FPS games on the consoles, but this is the original form of that game. Being so, it has been adapted for easy mode and to present more difficult challenge for higher skilled players. The first mode that is available in other popular shooters is simply gun game. You start with the pistol, get the next best pistol, then the SMG, etc. The second is called reverse gun game, where you start with the strongest weapons and get weaker and weaker ones, giving the advantage to players whom don't know exactly what they are doing, or joined late. It is a brilliant solution to a problem that has plagued many attempting to get into CS:S.

What you don't realize is the amount of hours it takes to get comfortable with the different weapons, with the mouse you are using (ensure it is set up correctly, see note at end), even the keyboard can take some getting used to. Try playing with lower sensitivity to reduce twitchy mouse movements and provide more fluidness to your shots, remove mouse filters that introduce lag, try shooting the chest and let recoil result in the headshot. As you can see there are vast differences between playing a game and expecting to be good, and actually learning how to play a game.

Once you get the weapons down, and you know your rig, you will have to put time into each map, to learn the intricacies of the layout and learn the choke points, statistical likelihood of someone going a direction, how to tap fire instead of spraying, crouching to avoid being hit, and just where and when to expect to get shot at. Again, it isn't as simple as starting up a game and being good because you know the controls, or have played a shooter before, if you want to be great at anything in life you must put time into it.

What about other games, like non-competitive or single player experiences? Let's take a look at Serious Sam, a game whereby you have dozens of enemies coming from every which direction and level design is going to be rapidly changing. You need to know how many shots it takes to get an enemy down, you need to know how they attack, the ins and outs of the combat itself, but everything else is secondary.

If we put those two together, CS:S and Serious Sam, you need to know what it takes to kill someone, not only the aspects of the gun itself, but the damage model of the game, and give the game a chance to teach us these things. This isn't something that can be put into a tutorial, it isn't something that can be explained, it is something that every CS:S player has put hours upon hours into learning, mastering, and perfecting.

Granted there are dozens of games that you start knowing nothing at all and have to resort to the folded sheet of paper with the controls, somehow they call that a manual, and attempt to interpret everything about the game based on a controller layout picture. It is amazing that some games release half-broken, unfinished, or simply bad, but it is far worse in my opinion to have a great game hindered by lack of understanding because the developer didn't explain the rules or the basics of the game. That being said, for some games there is no tutorial, but it isn't as easy as stating the controls and saying blatantly obvious things the player can do in the game world. It may take time to understand completely and it will take time to adapt at each different game, even ones in the same genre or by the same developer all have different feels to them. But, if you approach it with an open mind and actually give the game a shot rather then simply rushing into it and being pissed that you died a lot, then you will be surprised at how compelling an experience it and many other games you overlooked can become.

Something like Demon's Souls? Yeah... Go give it a shot!

-nabokovfan87