Okay, so I have a very snarky hypothesis I want to share with the world.

This is my hypothesis.

Men already think they know everything, even if they don’t which is why we even have a word for it – mansplaining.

I think, and this is the snarky part, that men don’t like tutorials because they don’t like to be told what to do. I also think that because the games industry is still largely comprised of men (80% in Sweden), this is the default attitude.

I should also frame this in some real research rather than just throwing it out there, although if I was a man – this is also snark btw – I could and everyone would listen to me.

Men are confident. We know this because in quite a few studies, among others the ones performed by Dunning and Kruger, men rate themselves higher in their capabilities than they actually can live up to. Men constantly overestimate their performance and abilities. I’m thinking this might be related to the inability to understand the need for tutorials. Because men make the games for other men, they already believe that other men know how to play! And the men who play also believe that they already know how to play! And then the game becomes what it becomes.

Men – according to Victoria Brescoll, teacher at Yale’s School of Management – go into everything just assuming that they’re awesome.

Overconfidence can apparently get you very far in life, as evidenced by the confidence of the mediocre white man. But it won’t teach you games.

On average, men believe that they are performing 30% better than they are. A game will pretty quickly tell you that you aren’t. Sort of. It’s the same reason why men won’t read manuals. Men are more confident that they’ll be able to fix things once they’re broken. Which is also why men is more often calling tech support than women. Also, probably, why men didn’t even bother to plug the damned thing in before calling (12% of men failed to turn on the computer before calling to say it was broken, while only 7% of women did the same).

My snarky conclusion to all this, is of course that men simply don’t think they’ll need to teach the game to other players, and players in turn (at least the male variety) don’t believe they need a tutorial to master the game.

A study a friend did, on the other hand, shows that the enjoyment of a game is much higher if the player learns how to play it first. He called it a tax on the player at the start of the game, to have more fun at the end of the game. Maybe this is connected to why so few players play ‘til the end of a game, as well. Skip the tutorial, skip the end.