Guiding the Player

How do you guide the player without holding their hand too much?

It's a difficult problem, made all the more tricky by the different capabilities or tastes of players. If the hand of the designer is seen too much it becomes too easy - the player feels led through the game. Too hard and the player gets frustrated and ultimately turns to Gamefaqs or a strategy guide to seek out the answer to their problem.

Navigation
Navigation is the key area of where guiding the player comes into play. The way you plan navigation for the player is determined in a large part by the type of game structure you are using - is it a linear adventure, or is it more of an open world? Either approach relies on one thing - a clear goal. If you muddy the goal at any point, then the player starts to lose track of what they are doing, and in turn finds it harder to navigate the world.

With a clear goal set, it then becomes a case of how you signpost that goal. This is where things start to differ.When you are creating a linear experience things are fairly easy - there is but one path for the player to travel, so it becomes a case of clearly showing the exit point for any one area. There's a lot more depth to this than initially meets the eye however, and requires careful lighting, shapes, and flow through a space to ensure the exit is recognized by the player. However, the problem with linear design is how to make it an interesting space that doesn't feel entirely linear. This is where the concept of wide-linear comes into play - creating pockets of free-form gameplay to allow choice, broken up with pinch points and diodes to push the player forward. Providing a single landmark that can be recognized through the area can also help the player to align themselves in the world and understand how the current space fits within the whole level.

Open world games are a lot trickier. Valves and pinch points can't be used in the same way, and a lot of the tricks used to point players in a certain direction won't work from every angle. The key thing here is to ensure that the world has plenty of landmarks to enable the player to learn the space quickly. They can use these landmarks to understand how the space fits together and where one chunk is relative to another. There's a fascinating book that delves into the way that humans organize spaces such as cities in their mind, which can provide great insight for open world game developers -Image of the City. Open world games often use waypoint markers as a device to guide the player. This can occasionally seem like a crutch - particularly if the fiction of the worlds doesn't really support the idea.

Puzzles
Another area where players constantly butt up against the potential to get stuck is in puzzles. This can be a very difficult tight-rope to walk due to the difference in players' cognitive abilities. People are good at different things - some like math, others are better at solving spacial problems.

The issue becomes one of either holding the player's hand too much and giving them the answer, or making it so hard that they just go and look on gamefaqs for the answer.

There is no right answer here, but the best approach is to provide enough clues for the player to make some simple deductions. Then make the next clues a little more obscure, but provide a way to solve them from the information around them. Don't show them the answer - just provide a little more information over time. The secret here is also a lot of playtesting - but don't assume that your audience won't get it - you'd be surprised how many people actually find their way through as long as enough information is provided - show them that they have that information and it should be enough for them to figure it out and get that sense of reward.

Mechanics

Forms of guidance can also exist at a lower level - within the core mechanics of the game itself.

One example I can use from personal experience to highlight this issue, is the ledge behavior we employed in Enslaved. The idea was to stop the player from experiencing frustrating falls to death, but the decision really divided the audience. A lot of players loved it - it removed that die / retry issue altogether for tricky traversal. A similar number of players hated it - it felt too much like they were being prevented from having the active choice - there was no challenge.

So how do you solve this? The key is to either provide ensure that there is always the potential for danger, a feeling of being challenged in all mechanics. Mechanics without challenge or skill tend to fall flat, as they feel like going through the motions.