Every time someone plays a new game, a struggle occurs in their brain.  They plug it in and immediately see confusing arrays of pixels, disharmonious 8-bit soundtracks, and awkward plots involving robot children or dragons.  They want to play the game but have no idea how.  Traditionally, the way to solve this problem is through the use of tutorials and reference manuals.  But these are often clumsy and tedious.

Another (better) way to solve the problem is to tap into existing mental models.  Anyone who has played Mario has a general idea of how to play Cave Story, La Mulana, and Knytt:  you make the little guy run and jump over obstacles.  Granted, La Mulana is significantly deeper than Mario, but because it shares the same core mechanics of running and jumping over enemies, as a player you can accept its challenges within the mental model you created for all platformer games.

In the puzzler genre, learning the intricacies of the rules is the entire game.  The makers of Word Ace have managed to find a way to teach complex (and fun) game mechanics to novices quickly.  Their game uses the mental models of Scrabble and Poker.

Word Ace

Word Ace

You can see what I mean from the screenshot.  The player is seated at a table and given options like “bet”, “call”, and “fold”.  There is a communal pool of symbols.  There are chips.  All of these things are familiar to anyone who has played Texas Hold ‘Em.  Even if she doesn’t know anything else about the game, a poker player would understand the betting aspect.  Likewise, a Scrabble player sees ranked letters to build words off of.  Things start making sense without having to be explained.

What the game designers have managed to do is condense an entire tutorial down to one screenshot.  This lets the player get straight to the action and start having fun immediately.  And in a medium often criticized for encouraging minute attention spans, that’s probably a good thing.