Sean Everett argues great game design teaches through play, not tutorials. Super Mario Bros limits players to one action at a time, letting them discover mechanics organically. Most SaaS products fail by overwhelming users with dense dashboards instead.
Game design. Let's talk about it. The best game designers in the world will tell you that the best games are fun, but they can't define what fun is other than it's the mastery process, getting better at the game. So what does that mean? Well, if you compare a really great game like Mario Brothers to SaaS software, Where you click into an enterprise app and then you're bombarded with dashboards full of hundreds of pieces of information and options, you start to see a simple concept: learn how to play the game by playing the game. What does that mean? Well, in the first opening scene of Mario Brothers, there's only one thing you can do. You can move left or right. If you move left, you just can't go anywhere. It doesn't move. Screen doesn't move. If you go right, you run into a brick wall and a little thing you need to jump over. So that teaches you how to jump. Okay. So, and it does it in a safe environment. So you can only do one thing at one time. So there aren't a ton of tutorials and like blinking cursors, jump over this wall. They just assume that you're going to have to figure out how to do it. So you learn how to play the game by playing the game. And unfortunately, too many products Just give you tutorials or they aren't designed well enough, and so they become confusing and users just leave. So that's 101 on game design. Learn how to use the product by playing with the product. Learn how to play the game by playing the game. That's it. Have a great day. Thanks, Sean.
