Hand-Holding vs Discovery: What Changed in Games?

Do Game Studios trust their players nowadays?

First Character: **Dressed up in fancy clothes** Hew hew hewww. Welcome to the New Ivy League Class of Pokemon A to Z. We’re going to do a 2 hour exposition of how to play our game

Other Character: Wait what? The games used to just throw me in the back of the truck and tell me to figure out what to do?

First Character: Oh uuh… that’s way too much. We’ll just tell you how to play it. So here’s this and this…don’t forget about this because.- oh! This too! Don’t forget this…

Other Character: Confused and scared

Lately, I’ve been playing the original 1986 Legend of Zelda game. I keep coming back to it every day and I don’t know why! I spawn in, they don’t tell me a thing, there’s these spider guys, I don’t know what the buttons do, idk where anything on the map is - BUT I found out how to upgrade my sword! I upgraded my shield! I even beat 3 boss fights. How did I do all of this without a single piece of text giving me instructions on how to play? Why do I keep wanting to come back to play more? Why am I depressed? And what is going on in today’s industry?

  Last month I started my journey as a Game Developer, I’ll go more in-detail on that in another video. But as a Game Developer, I’ve been wanting to play a variety of different games to get inspired by different game mechanics and stories. I’ve always played competitive multiplayer games like League, Marvel Rivals, and Battlefield 6. Recently I wanted to try playing Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain. I’ve heard how fun the MGS games are and I thought I should give it a try. While playing, I was met with an almost an hour long introduction. The game gave me little to no agency, all these flashy cinematics that ended up getting me motion sick, and I felt more as a spectator instead of a big boy gamer. I’m sure the game itself is AMAZING and fun! But I wish I can move to the gameplay faster or make the tutorial more aligned with the main gameplay loop. When I play games with long tutorials I feel like I’m a fat little baby that can’t be trusted to take off the training wheels until I eat my broccoli salad or whatever.

Now, granted, I understand some games have complex mechanics that would need some explaining in order for players to truly enjoy their game. I had this experience when playing Moonlighter. It’s an indie game where you’re a shopkeeper by day and an adventurer at night. They had a whole tutorial on how the shopping system worked and how some of the combat works. It taught me what I needed and left alone to my own devices to make my own discoveries. But I loved how it was brief and they let you interact with the game as you learned. Even better, they left some things a mystery! They give you hints on how to progress in the game, the game design guided you to 

• the shops and check out better gear

• Some caves had specific loot that would sell more than others

• Be careful on how you manage your inventory

Something about this game made me want to dedicate almost 40 hours in this game, but what was it?

Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation. The National Library of Medicine has a couple articles talking about “what motivates us intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation”. I found this article talked about how the human mind loves exploration. In their study, the scientists were trying to find out if the human mind prefers  They found during their study that, “Regions of left and right frontopolar cortex (lFP, rFP) showing significantly increased activation on exploratory compared with exploitative trials” source. Granted, the tests were hard to get definitive proof on what motivates us due to how entangled exploitative and exploratory results can be - but my hunch is that it is up to the person and their personal interests that drive the motivation. That it takes the person the right amount of switching between exploratory and exploitative to keep them wanting to come back to their game

How To Learn In 2026

We always start the years thinking “this is the year I change myself!” “This is when I learn to paint” “This is when I start my business”. Let me just tell you, you are 90% likely to fail already

Why is that? I know I WANT to learn Spanish, I want to start my business, I want I want I want. But how do you go from “I want” to “I do”?

I want to boil this down to three different reasons. Your approach, your structure, and your identity

Approach:

• I told myself the whole year to learn how to do programming. But I kept trying the ways I heard other people doing it. I followed tutorials, I got Udemy courses. They just weren’t doing it for me? And you know what happened? I dropped it. But finally, in November I found a style I loved! I learned C# through FreeCodeCamp and doing daily practices on SoloLearn

• I learned to change my approach due to a Leadership Class I took in November, called SLII (Situational Leadership II). It was introduced in 1969 by Dr.Ken Blanchard and is still talked about until this day!

• Do a quick explanation about D Levels and S Levels

• To summarize briefly:

  • Everyone is at a separate “Development” level in all the various things in life (Example: You may be very experienced in football, but brand new to cooking a beef wellington). Development Levels go as such:

    • D1: High commitment, low competence.

      • Example: You have an interest in making a movie, you know NOTHING about making a movie but you do all the filming and it’s exciting

    • D2: Low commitment, low to moderate competence.

      • Example: You’re starting to see filmmaking is a lot harder than it look, thinking about giving up (or even actually give up)

    • D3: Variable commitment, moderate to high competence.

      • Example: You’re starting to improve at filmmaking and can do it almost autonomously, but sometimes you feel better about talking to a friend to help boost you up

    • D4 High commitment, high competence:

      • Example: You can do filmmaking autonomously and have strong confidence in your craft

• I found that I was a D1 in Programming. I was not competent AT ALL. I was super excited to learn and just went whatever direction I went.

  • In the class, they talk about how people at D1 need “High Directive”. High Directive essentially means you need someone to coordinate how an entire plan should go. The opposite would be “Low Directive”, an example of this would be if your manager asked you to do something - they didn’t need to give you instructions on how to complete the task, you already know how to do it.

• Eventually I fell into D2 and lost my commitment and dropped it for almost all of 2025

• Thanks to the SLII class, I realized what I needed. I needed a style that matched my Development Level at programming. I needed High Directive and not just learning aimlessly

  • SoloLearn and the FreeCodeCamp courses taught me the syntax piece by piece. This helped me understand the language in bite size pieces and I felt more confidence attacking Game Development later on with my newly gained knowledge

Structure:

• What do I mean by structure? I mean two things. Do you have time in your day? And to change the structure of your mindset when you think about “New Years Resolutions”.

• Stop and think for 10 seconds, do you actually have time in your day to do the thing you’re asking to learn?

  • Can you do it before school?

  • Do you have kids? Is there a time they’re sleeping and you can give yourself some time?

  • Are you working two jobs to make ends meat?

  • I can’t tell you what to do, but I highly suggest thinking about a time of day to dedicate towards this thing. It doesn’t have to be EVERY day. It can be 2 or 3 days a week

• Next is our mindset on New Years Resolution. We tend to think of it as one goal post that doesn’t need to get done until end of December. I’d like to propose a new idea. Break it up into quarters. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. 

  • If we really care about our New Years Resolutions, it breaks us when it gets to the end of the year and we don’t achieve what we set out to do

  • Sometimes those emotions get so strong we self-sabotage, which ends up taking us further from the goal we were hoping for

  • Breaking our New Years Goals into quarterly goals allows us, instead of 1 big failure, we have 4 opportunities to meet that goal

  • Now if you fail your first quarter, you can think like this: “If we don’t meet our goals on Q1, that’s okay! Let’s review what went wrong and try to improve on that during Q2.”

• I tend to only do 3 goals/max per quarter. I find, any more than that is too fast. You can repeat the same goals as the previous quarter, but just make sure they are SMART goals. 

• What are SMART Goals?

  • SMART is an Acronym to help better organize how you approach your plans on achieving your goals:

    • S - Specific

    • M - Measurable

    • A - Achievable

    • R - Realistic

    • T - Timely

  • This can be another blog post of it’s own, but if you’re interested in this concept find out more at this Link Here

Identity:

Lastly, this may be wooshoo voodoo mindset stuff - but it has really helped me! In James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits”, he talks about the first thing you need to start a new habit, is your identity:

- Importance of Identity Link

- Every Action Is a Vote Link

- Refer to yourself as an Entry Level Programmer! Novice Artist

- I first read Atomic Habits, 3 years ago! It has changed my life. I highly recommend picking it up if you’re into this idea of having more impactful habits

- Atomic Habits has helped me get into the gym, write, and read. But I needed something more to help me learn a new skill. Going through the SLII class and finding the matching style I needed for my Development Level really helped making the learning experience so much better!

- I’d love to hear what plans you guys have for 2026! Please comment down below your plans for each quarter of 2026! I will reply to all comments!

- If you’re into this type of content, like and comment below what you’d like to hear more about.

- Subscribe! I will be making more content like this in 2026 every single month