Got a complex game? Have you tried turning the tutorial into a 𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝?

Curiosity is one of the strongest drivers of human motivation. It can even override rationality and survival instincts. If you put a sign on a door that says “whatever you do, DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR” we all know people are going to open the door.

Skilled designers can weaponize this idea. Games with deep systems are immensely sticky and wildly satisfying, but trying to explain how the systems work AND what they give you as rewards AND why you should value those rewards is an immense amount of information for many games to hand out all at once… But without understanding what the rewards for this are and why they’re valuable, how will you get people to engage with them?

Easy. Just don’t tell them what the reward is. Make it clear something is going to happen, probably something good… But don’t tell them what it is. Hollow Knight gives you rewards when you’ve hit certain collectible milestones, like with the Grubfather collecting his grubs. You don’t know what the reward’s going to be, but it doesn’t matter – as long as the rewards don’t disappoint us when we get them our curiosity will keep us motivated – and then make us interested in reading the text that explains the reward we just got.

Persona 5 took things a step further. They made the tutorial for the whole progression system the reward, not just its payout.

The Velvet Room is a dream-state location where you access progression systems for the game’s creature collector loop: mainly sacrificing or executing the personas you collect to power other ones up and obtain items… Or even fusing them together into more powerful personas. It’s a lot to take in, even right from the beginning. Worse, players are impatient to get back to the gameplay, and the gripping narrative of the core experience, giving them near-zero tolerance for chonky tutorials.

So the Devs introduced Igor and his Velvet Room early. They brought you to the magical location in a dream, with you locked behind bars as a kind of psychic prisoner run by a goblin-man sitting behind a desk.

Okay, that’s interesting. The heck is going on? Igor doesn’t tell you much. He just says that you are in need of “rehabilitation” and that he will explain the functions of the place at another time. You’re about to wake up, and there isn’t time to explain it all now.

This makes the player highly curious about what that place is and what “functions” it has. When the story takes you back to the Velvet Room, the tutorial delivers the information you were already craving – and so players are much more interested.

The tutorial becomes a reward.