EA Retard Division is making a line of ‘games for dummies’. No joke.
Electronic Arts’ Casual Entertainment label said Thursday that it has signed an agreement with Wiley Publishing to bring games based on the “…For Dummies” how-to books to PC and Nintendo DS.
EA will collaborate with London’s Beanbag Studios to develop the games, which teach players how to play games.
PC titles in the lineup will include Solitaire For Dummies (September), Brain Training For Dummies (October), Sudoku For Dummies (November) and additional titles next year in Western territories.
Poker for Dummies is currently available at EA’s casual site pogo.com, but will be available at retail outlets, along with Brain Training for Dummies, in October.
I am all for making games as pleasant and easy to get into. But the ‘Dummy’ line worked for books because technical books were never written for ‘dumb’ people. Technical books were written to impress other technical writers and to be an encyclopedia of information.
Also, the very successful Brain Age includes sudoku, which is actually quite a mentally challenging game, and new players were able to get into it just fine. Older people seem more familiar with solitaire and other such games than young people.
This is ‘tutorial-itus’ gone beserk. Most games don’t even need tutorials because players will play it and learn *shock* BY PLAYING! If they don’t understand something, there is this magical booklet included with teh game called *shock* THE GAME MANUAL. However, now most games sadly must ram tutorials down our throats and won’t let us start the game without it (I contend these tutorials kill the fun. But they are stuffed in because it is ‘risk averse’ so they think).
I can understand tutorials (which is often just the single player campaign mode) for multiplayer games since if someone enters the game online and doesn’t know how to play, it ruins it for everyone. I can’t tell you how many times in a Warcraft game that some newbie would come in and ask how to build farms while running around the map with his peasant. It was especially annoying when the RTS newbie would mistake the game for Sim City and begin carefully laying out the buildings in an elaborate design. When they got attacked, they began negotiating for peace treaties! “Give peace a chance!” they cried.
How STUPID does EA’s Casual Division think people are that they require solitaire tutorials and then a practice mode where someone ‘helps them’? OH NO, I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING IN SOLITAIRE AND MESSED IT ALL UP! The worst that can happen is that you ‘re-deal’. Hell, even Minesweeper didn’t have a tutorial. Treating customers, ANY customers, as if they fell off the turnip truck is not going to do anyone any good.
I need to begin some ‘article tutorials’ because, as you know, someone could somehow wander onto this website without ever having to read an article before. Such a tutorial would include elements such as reading from left to right (NOT right to left), going down to the next line, and using the scroll bar to move down the page. Because I am so risk averse, I better create a series of instructions for each phase. And once the tutorial is concluded, then they can move on to a ‘practice article’ where they will read it and pretend it was a real article. Then, and only then, are they prepared for the ‘real articles’.
EA is so strange. The Casual Division doesn’t seem to understand the New Market while EA Sports appears to really get it. How can two divisions in the same company go at the New Market in such opposite ways?