Dan Cook recently posted slides from talk he gave about creating a “princess rescuing application“– and they’re annotated with his notes, so they’re quite intelligible.

His basic premise is that games are all about fun through learning.  So, why does learning an application have to be such a banging-your-head-against-the-wall experience?  He references his previous work on the learning process within a game: how people learn what the game is teaching.  He provides some great recommendations for “first steps” in moving application design in this direction, such as encouraging more exploratory learning in applications (i.e. it’s okay to fail a few times), and using an inventory system to diminish the negative impact of those 90% of app features that only 10% of the audience uses.

It’s still a very early work– there are few examples of applications attempting these strategies, and there’s a whole lot left to figure out.  It’s still well worth reading, for the insights into both app and game design.  (What does a tutorial screen teach?  It teaches you to click “OK”.)  I’ve been thinking about the material for a few days, now, and I’m going to go back and re-read his Chemistry of Game Design article.

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