Games always had a teaching problem. The player needs to learn, but pausing the game to teach will break the experience.
The best game designers solved this quietly, not with tutorials, tooltips, but with aids that speak to the instinct rather than the intellect, aids surfaces when needed and disappears when not, and the measure of their own success is evaluated by how quickly they becomes unnecessary.
Theoretical Framework
I read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow when I was getting started in my career as a user experience designer and loved his take on how human thinking works, which introduced me to System 1 and System 2, terms originally coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West.[^1] It’s a framework I’ve reached for constantly since I was designing tournament for Deer Hunter, the challenge was surfacing a lost multiplier to the user in without asking them to stop and process, which required System 1.
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
While designing experiences in games, I started noticing the same principles at work in the games I loved. The way a game communicates with you changes entirely depending on whether you’re in danger or not.
When you as a user have space to think, the game provides information to process. But when you don’t, it triggers a reflex. That distinction between aids that ask you to read and aids that ask you to react is the difference between System 2 and System 1. In a high-adrenaline situation, anything that asks for System 2 is a failure.
But knowing how to deliver information is half the problem. The other half is knowing how much. If the game provides too little information way early, and the game becomes an enigma. Too much and it becomes patronising. This is where Csikszentmihalyi’s (pronounced CHEEKS-ent-mee-high) flow comes in.
Where one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how one is performing. — Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
Flow exists in a narrow channel between anxiety and boredom. A new player without enough guidance tips into anxiety. The game feels impossible, unreadable, hostile. An experienced player with too much guidance tips into boredom as the game is telling them things they know.
Aid systems are flow management tools. Their job is to hold each player in their personal channel, and that channel evolves along with the player. Which means the best aids are never meant to be permanent. They exist the way scaffolding exists on a building under construction, holding things in place until the structure can stand on its own, then not. The goal was never the aid. The goal was always to make the aid unnecessary.
Two Contexts, One Problem
There are two distinct moments where aids do their work. The first is when the player has space, exploring, navigating, breathing between encounters. The second is when they don’t, in a football match, mid-firefight, half a second to decide. These two contexts demand different design responses.
What works in one won’t in the other. An aid that lives gently in the world during exploration would be invisible during combat. An aid bold enough to register during combat would shatter immersion during exploration. The games that get this right treat them as separate problems with separate solutions and the transition between the two states is itself a design decision.
Section 1: The Ideal — Single Player Sets the Stage
Single player games are the cleaner laboratory. The game is in control of everything; pacing, camera, context. More elegant choices become possible as nothing else is competing for user’s attention. Can you imagine a multiplayer game pausing to ask you to press triangle? A single player game can.
Before we get to the harder problem of multiplayer, it helps to see what aid design looks like when conditions are ideal.
Ghost of Tsushima and Hellblade — Two Versions of Invisible
In most open world games, RDR2 being my personal pain point, I find myself opening the map a dozen times to confirm I’m heading in the right direction, especially during the early stages.
Ghost of Tsushima covers it with the guiding wind. Summoned by swiping up on the trackpad, the wind guides you toward your objective. And as you grow into the game, you learn the environment and use the wind less and less.
The same philosophy runs through the health bar, which appears when the protagonist unsheathes the sword, and the contextual controls that surface depending on the situation. Information tied to the state that makes it meaningful. The aid lives in the world, reveals itself when necessary, and hides when not.
In Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the voices that narrate Senua’s psychosis also function as a combat warning system. “Watch out” is a dodge prompt that never feels like one. Information delivered through the story itself, indistinguishable from fiction. Zero screen real estate. Zero eye travel. I’m in absolute awe of it.[^2]
The Turn
In single player, the game controls the pace, the camera, the moment. The aid can be as subtle or as prominent as needed because nothing else is competing for attention.
In multiplayer, all of that is a privilege the designer doesn’t have. Five things are happening simultaneously. The pace is set by other players, every moment is precious, and that’s where the elegant solutions of single player start to break down, and new ones have to be invented.
Section 2: The Stress Test — Multiplayer
FC 26 Rush — A System That Knows What You Need Before You Do
In FC 26, a functionality called Trainer exists to aid the players. A list of toggles, Pass Receiver Indicator, Shot Target, Directed Runs Indicator, Switch Indicator, Defending Trainer, Movement Indicator, Button Hints. It looks like a settings menu, but what it is, is a map of everything you don’t yet know. Each toggle represents a skill not yet learned. The game allows you to set your own learning, master each at your own pace and then allows you to remove them.
I also loved how the action buttons are displayed around the player controlling the ball. Not in a corner, Not in a HUD, but around the player, where the eyes already are. That one decision, anchoring information to where attention already lives is crucial for the success of the trainer mode.
But the trainer is built for players who are new to the controls entirely. Where as the Rush mode lives inside Ultimate Team, and most Ultimate Team players have been playing this franchise for years. They understand football. They know what a defensive gap is. They know when they should press. Their challenge isn’t knowledge, it’s pace.
Rush compresses the game into a smaller pitch, fewer players, faster transitions, tighter margins. A player who has spent years reading a full XI match suddenly finds their football brain operating just behind the tempo. They know what a gap looks like. They just can’t find it fast enough. This is where the in-match spatial overlays do their real work.
The Defensive Gap overlay is the most visually assertive. It appears and states one fact: this space is undefended. The directional chevrons work differently.
Where the defensive gap tells you where, the chevrons tell you which way things are moving. Orange arrows communicating the momentum of the collapse rather than just its location. Not “there is a problem” but “this is the direction the problem is heading.”
As a defender in Rush, depending on how high you are on the field, the camera could give you almost no information of what happens in the other goal box. You’re watching your half while the ball is at the other end, and by the time the attack organises, you’re already reacting late. The chevrons close that gap ,not by showing you where the space is, you’ll see that when the attackers arrive, but by showing you that the tides have turned before they get there.
FC 26 uses an overlay, Ghost of Tsushima uses wind (I’m not forgetting you, little Inari Shrine Fox). The goal is the same, guide the player without breaking the experience. One lays information over the world. The other weaves it into the world. Neither is wrong. They’re solutions built for different cognitive contexts.
There’s a third tier that doesn’t fully exist yet. But I think it should.
The idea is this: the system watches your inputs, identifies a decision that didn’t work, and surfaces the right option the next time the same situation occurs. Not after the mistake, but before the next attempt.
Prospective correction rather than retrospective feedback. You reach the box, you panic and pass when you should have shot, and the next time you find yourself in that position, the game surfaces the shoot prompt once, not to embarrass you, but to remind you.
The honest problem with this is that intent is genuinely hard to read from inputs alone. In football, passing instead of shooting isn’t always wrong. Sometimes it’s exactly the right call. A system that can’t distinguish a poor decision from an unconventional one will nudge you away from creativity as readily as it nudges you away from mistakes. That’s a hard problem and I don’t think anyone has cleanly solved it yet.
The most respectful aid is one that trusts you learned something, and speaks up when the evidence suggests you haven’t. And whatever form it eventually takes, player override has to remain essential. Even this, the most considered, least intrusive version of guidance must be something you can turn off.
Fortnite — The Aid That Rewards Both Skill Levels
Fortnite’s weak point indicator is almost insultingly simple. Swing your pickaxe at a structure and a glowing dot appears. Hit the dot and you do double damage. Miss it and you don’t.
For a new player this is a tutorial that never announces itself as one. You notice the dot, try to hit it, notice hitting it feels different, faster, more satisfying. You learn resource gathering through instinct rather than instruction. For an experienced player, the dot becomes a metronome. Hit, move, hit, move, a rhythm that separates efficient harvesting from slow. The indicator never changes. What changes is what you do with it.
This is what it looks like when an aid genuinely transcends its original audience. It isn’t simplified for beginners and hidden from veterans. It’s the same thing for both of them, and both are better for it.
Closing
Good aid design should be unnoticable, when its not required. The guiding wind fades not because Tsushima removes it, but because you stop needing it. The best aids don’t announce their departure. They just quietly stop having anything new to say. And when that happens, when the player looks up and realises the screen is a little emptier than it used to be, and doesn’t miss what’s gone, that’s when the design just works.
