Soren Johnson has made a career developing interfaces between humans and computers (the focus of his Masters in CS from Stanford), but not in the way you might first think: he makes games. Co-designer of the computer strategy game Civilization 3 and lead designer of best-in-series Civilization 4, Soren is currently helping put the finishing touches as a designer/programmer on the upcoming Spore.
You can read more of Soren's thoughts on human-computer interaction and games—like why Harry Potter's Quidditch would be an awful game—at his blog, Designer-Notes.
Joel: Games and gadgets both use polished interfaces to complex systems. Why then are tutorials common in games, but rare in consumer electronics, when they share a similar use profile: repeating complex actions to extract a response.
I suspect there is a perception that having to learn how to use a gadget indicates the design is poor. When building a game, is there a point where the need for a tutorial indicates unwieldy complexity in a design? Are tutorials a necessary evil?
Soren: I am a bit surprised that tutorials within games are more standard than within other electronic products because game tutorials have the additional limitation that they should be fun. If you buy an MP3 player, you are going to want to use it—you aren't questioning whether you actually enjoy listening to music or not. With a game, however, you are constantly evaluating if the game is worth the time you are investing in it. An overly dull tutorial (or, even worse, an overly challenging one) can cause the player to quit before he or she even gets to the "real" game.
In general, the best solution is to teach the player the game as they go along. The player's most important experience is the game's first 15-30 minutes; this is where you either hook the player or lose them, so having them sit down for what is essentially a training video can be really dangerous. On the other hand, game genres have developed certain standards that are almost completely lost on new players. With Civilization 4, a brand new gamer needs to learn the concept of a "turn" in order to play, and our tutorial was aimed at these players as, yes, sort of a necessary evil.
Once people understand turns and left/right-clicking (or are not afraid to just experiment), we orient the design to make sure that the first play-through would be fun, without any game mechanic stumbling blocks. The AI, for example, will not declare war on the human at the first difficulty level. Further, every time you are given a choice in Civ 4—what you want to research, what building you want to construct, where to move your workers, where to found a city, etc.—we always provide the player with a couple good recommendations. They can follow our suggestions as long as they still feel like they are learning the game. It's important to take a comprehensive approach to the player's first experience.
Joel: The "I just want this thing to work" factor does seem to be a limiting one in gadgetry, which may be why the companies try to avoid a tutorial process altogether. In fact, the most prominent example that springs to mind is the Microsoft Office "Clippy," which attempted to provide context-sensitive assistance, but was almost universally reviled.
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