Chapter 7. Extreme Beginners and False Beginners: Eight Types of Experiencers

Even veterans are beginners before our game, carrying wrong answers learned elsewhere.

An expert in another game fumbles with our rules. Following a habit that worked in the game next door, they press and hold the screen. We placed nothing there, so they are left empty-handed and say, “What is wrong with this game?”

Which is harder to handle: someone who knows nothing, or someone who arrives knowing the wrong thing?

Common sense suggests that the person who knows nothing is harder because everything must be taught from one to ten. In the field of first experiences, however, the opposite is true. The person who knows nothing is actually easier to handle. It is not because they are a blank slate, but because they know that they do not know. They look slowly, follow guidance, and stop to ask when they get stuck.

The difficult one is the person who arrives confidently with the wrong knowledge. They do not read instructions. They sweep across the screen with habits that worked in other games, decide the game is strange when those habits fail, and leave. Chapter 1 said that familiarity is more dangerous than ignorance. The false beginner is that familiarity in human form.

There is no single kind of beginner. This is another sentence this book repeats. The moment we bundle everyone under the single term “new user,” we cram several different people into the same tutorial. Chapter 6 separated the layers within one person; this time, we separate one person from another.

The Largest Divide Comes Before Type

Before dividing experiencers into finer categories, we must draw one much larger dividing line. If we miss it, every classification that follows will be misaligned.

People opening a game for the first time divide broadly into two groups: gamers and ordinary people.

A gamer comes to “play” a game. They enjoy managing resources, overcoming obstacles, reaching goals, and evaluating balance in themselves. They read manuals, dig in even when things are difficult, and look up guides when they cannot proceed. This person will endure even if we make the first experience demanding. The problem is that gamers in this book’s narrow sense are a tiny minority. Many people open games, but only a handful, viewed across the entire population, come specifically to “play” one. Yet those of us who work inside game companies are usually gamers. We therefore keep designing games around gamers and losing sight of the majority of the market. This is not a matter of taste so much as an occupational habit that lets us imagine only users like ourselves. The classification in this chapter exists to widen that narrowed imagination.

The people we need to reach are ordinary people. They did not come to “play” a game. They came across us while looking for something to fill two minutes: one subway stop, the wait for an elevator, the time until their coffee is ready. To them, our game is only one candidate in the same row as YouTube Shorts, webtoons, and social media, so they do not ask about depth. It is not a fixed formula, but they generally ask first, “Can I finish in three minutes? Can I do it without paying? Can I do it with a friend?” If the screen cannot answer immediately, their finger is already moving to the next piece of content.

This is why the book clearly defines ordinary people as its primary audience from the outset. An entrance designed for gamers easily drives ordinary people away. An entrance designed for ordinary people, by contrast, will generally let gamers pass through too, at least at the entrance. Gamers can tolerate an easy entrance, while ordinary people cannot tolerate a difficult one. Chapter 6 did, however, call it a failure to keep repeating a finger guide to a player who wants control, so we need a device that reconciles the two. That device is skipping and branching: an entrance for ordinary people should include a side path that lets gamers leave at their own speed. Set the entrance at the height of ordinary people, then add depth gradually behind it.

Why a Twenty-Year RPG Veteran Gets Lost in Our Game

Let us move the scene to a fictional character-collection game and imagine two people entering a test.

The first is a veteran with twenty years of RPG experience. They have cleared dozens of hundred-hour blockbusters on console and PC and are unquestionably an expert gamer. Yet this person gets lost before our simple mobile character game, repeatedly pressing and holding the screen. The cause is a habit formed by right-clicking the mouse to summon menus on PC. Mobile devices do have a corresponding action: pressing and holding, or a long press, commonly serves in its place, bringing up a menu for copying or saving when a link or image is held down. But that is only an operating-system-level convention. Our game screen put no menu there. When holding produced no response, the veteran said, “Why is this game so unresponsive?” The game had not frozen. They had brought a habit hardened in another medium to a place where we did not accommodate it. They were a genre expert and a platform beginner.

The second person is an office worker in their thirties who almost never plays games. They said they knew little about games, yet had no trouble on the character customization screen. They decorate Instagram Stories and choose clothes in shopping apps every day, so selecting colors and changing parts was already in their hands. They were a game beginner, but a veteran in the actions our game had borrowed.

If we had put both people in one box labeled “new user” and shown them the same tutorial, we would have missed the point with both. We would have wasted the veteran’s time explaining game basics, and bored the office worker by teaching customization they already knew from the beginning. What the veteran actually needed was one line: “On this platform, tap instead of pressing and holding.” What the office worker needed was one reassuring line: “The customization you use on Instagram works here too.”

One step further, a screen that accepts the wrong answer is a stronger prescription than a single corrective line. Do not leave the veteran’s long press unanswered. Let pressing and holding bring up the message, “Tap here instead.” If we design the wrong habit as one possible input rather than an error, a false beginner’s wrong answer becomes material for learning. We will encounter this principle again in Chapter 17 on errors and recovery.

In MEJE Aidong World, core fans and light fans divide into different types of experiencers. Core fans come to meet, collect, and raise Aidong directly. Light fans who have only watched Aidong in videos or a friend’s play belong to the spectator type among the eight described below. The first experience a light fan needs is not the promise “I raise it myself,” but the signal “It feels warm even if I only watch.” The same screen must give core fans things to collect and customize, while giving light fans the warmth of feeling that their favorite is nearby even when they only watch. Treating them as the same experiencer will either burden light fans or frustrate core fans.

Eight People, Each Ignorant of Something Different

Within the large group of ordinary people, experiencers split into eight branches when classified by the kind of thing they do not know. A precise table appears in Appendix A. Here, we will describe only what each person does not know, what their first hurdle is, and which taboo must not be violated.

Genre beginners are new to the genre itself: people who have never played a collection game. Their first hurdle is “What am I collecting, and what is good about collecting it?” The taboo is pouring out genre terms without explanation. Put words such as “gacha” or “limit break” on the first screen and they encounter an alien language.

Title beginners know the genre but are new to this title. They have played collection games, but not ours. They want to learn quickly how this one is different, so their first hurdle is differentiation, and the taboo is looking identical to the game next door. If everything seems similar, they say, “This again,” and leave.

Platform beginners are the RPG veteran above. They are good at games, but this device and its controls are unfamiliar. Their first hurdle is control mapping, and the taboo is forcing the grammar of another platform. Lay PC-style shortcuts over mobile and this person alone will get lost.

Worldbuilding beginners know the system but are new to this world’s story, characters, and norms. Their first hurdle is “What kind of world is this, and who am I?” The taboo is dumping a vast body of lore onto the first screen. People should learn a world by living in it, not be made to memorize it like an entrance exam.

Economy beginners are unfamiliar with the game’s currency, payments, and exchange structure. Their first hurdle is “What is free and what costs money?” The taboo is presenting payment before they understand value. The more cautious a person is from their experience with commerce, the more coldly their interest dies here.

Social beginners are comfortable alone but unfamiliar with cooperation, competition, and sharing. Their first hurdle is the burden of being seen by others, and the taboo is confronting them with rankings and public comparisons at the start. Put someone who has not raised even one character at the bottom of a global ranking, and they shrink back and leave.

Returning beginners played before and left, carrying an old version in their minds. Their first hurdle is “What has changed since then?” The taboo is teaching them everything from the beginning as though they were new. They are not new; they have become a beginner again. Existing users enter the same “becoming a beginner again” state during updates and season transitions. We return to that design in Chapter 25.

Spectators do not yet intend to play and have come to watch, perhaps beside a friend who is playing or through a video. Their first hurdle is “Is it fun to watch?” The taboo is immediately demanding registration and control from someone who only wants to watch. They should be drawn in while watching. Put a membership wall before a person who came to look, and they turn away. People who have observed online services for a long time pass around a rule of thumb: the majority only look, a minority occasionally act, and only a handful create directly. The differences in participation temperature say the same thing. Spectating is not failed participation but one temperature of participation, so the experience must be complete even when someone only watches.

Another yardstick dividing the eight is what each person brings with them. False beginners do not arrive empty-handed; they carry the wrong luggage. Not all eight carry luggage, so we need to distinguish the types carrying a load from those with empty hands. Title, platform, and returning beginners carry the clearest luggage. Title beginners bring the assumption, “The earlier title worked this way, so this one must too,” and stumble exactly where we changed things on purpose. Platform beginners bring controls from another device as if they were obvious. Returning beginners still carry an obsolete meta that has already been rebuilt. Social beginners who assume that public comparison and rankings are normal practice, and spectators who bring the premise that “you only understand a game by playing it” and conclude in advance that watching alone cannot be fun, carry the same kind of luggage. Genre beginners, by contrast, are close to empty-handed. If abbreviations such as “gacha,” “limit break,” and “reroll” cover the first screen, they are not wrong; they simply cannot read it and lose their way. They stand on the extreme-beginner side of this chapter’s opening. Worldbuilding and economy beginners fall somewhere between. They may bring proper nouns from another work or payment grammar from another game, or they may come empty-handed. When choosing an experiencer, then, we must examine not only what they do not know, but also whether they carry the wrong luggage or truly have empty hands.

One more point: the eight are a checklist, not separate boxes. Several can be active in one person at once. In fact, it is normal for someone to be new to the genre, economy, and world all at once.

These eight are easily confused with the eight layers from Chapter 6. They are different axes. The eight layers are roles stacked inside one person; these eight types are differences between people. One person can be a “player” (layer) and a “platform beginner” (type) at the same time. This people axis is also orthogonal to the time axis of Chapter 3’s “eleven first thresholds.” Even at the same T5 threshold (first input), the point that blocks a genre beginner differs from the one that blocks a platform beginner.

▶ Three Questions to Apply to My Screen

Have we mistaken experience for ability, assumed they knew, and removed an explanation they needed?

Can an extreme beginner who knows nothing perform the first action simply by following the guidance?

Is there even one line on the first screen that corrects the wrong answer an experienced person brought with them? If any one of the three is missing, our screen loses either the empty-handed beginner or the false beginner.

So, Whose First Screen Do We Design First?

There is no single first experience that satisfies all eight. A helpful explanation for a genre beginner bores a title beginner, while privacy designed for a social beginner feels dull to someone who wants to show off. Try to fit everyone and the result is a bland entrance that fits no one.

The decision in a first experience is therefore close to choosing whom to leave behind. Select one or two experiencers our game will bring in first, remove that person’s first hurdle before any other, prevent that person’s taboo before any other, and then create branches for the remaining experiencers. Branches are not free, however. If even a branch damages the primary experiencer’s path, discard it. Asking just once on the first screen, “Is this your first collection game?” can provide explanation to a genre beginner and a skip to a title beginner. The familiarity borrowed in Chapter 5 becomes material for branching here. Once we know where a person came from, we know what familiarity to borrow and show them.

This decision leads directly to measurement. Once we choose a primary experiencer, we separately track the rate at which that person clears the first hurdle. A single overall abandonment rate mixes genre beginners leaving because terms blocked them with social beginners shrinking from rankings, making the cause invisible. We must separate them by experiencer to see which person leaks at which hurdle. The separation method is close at hand: store the answer a person gave to the branching question as a segment key, and it becomes the experiencer identifier. Do not take offense at the numbers. Read them as signals telling us which experiencer we addressed incorrectly.

Reference Content

Cases in other media where this chapter’s concepts are visible.

Video Games

World of Warcraft level squish: The maximum level dropped from 120 to 60 and the progression path changed. A returning player carrying an old sense of levels says, “This is not the progression I knew,” and becomes unsure where to start learning again.
Terminology on a gacha game’s first screen: When terms such as “reroll,” “pity,” “pickup,” and “SSR” appear without guidance, a genre beginner cannot even read what should be restarted or what is guaranteed and loses the path.
Streaming spectators: Spectators who enjoy games through broadcasts without touching the controls clearly exist. They range from viewers deciding whether to buy to viewers who only want to watch without socializing. Design so that watching draws them in; do not immediately demand control from someone who came to watch.
The pressure of an early leaderboard: Put someone who has not raised even one character directly into the global rankings and they shrink back. A leaderboard hardened over a long period signals to a newcomer, “I can never catch up,” and can stop them from trying at all.

General Apps

Back navigation for a person switching from Android to iPhone: A hand accustomed to the back button at the bottom of the screen repeatedly makes failed swipes on an iPhone, where the action has changed to a swipe from the left edge, and cannot find “back.”

The remaining reference content is collected in the “Chapter 7 Appendix” at the end of this chapter (collected as Appendix D in the book edition).

Design Note ▶ Try It Yourself

Choose one experiencer our game will bring in first. Decide whether they are a gamer or an ordinary person (the default is an ordinary person). Then check all the types among the eight that are active in them and choose the one that is strongest.

Write four lines about that person: one thing they do not know about our game; the first hurdle they will encounter on the first screen; one taboo we must never commit; and one piece of gamer common sense they brought incorrectly. The last line distinguishes the empty-handed beginner from the false beginner.

Beside those lines, look again at the borrowing table from Chapter 5. Which medium did this person come from? Can familiarity borrowed from that medium remove the first hurdle?

These four lines grow into Appendix A’s “First Hurdle, First Reward, and First Taboo Table by Experiencer Type.” Correct the fourth line—the gamer common sense they brought incorrectly—before anything else.

One-line summary: There is no single kind of beginner. The largest divide is between gamers and ordinary people (our primary audience is ordinary people, who ask only “three minutes, payment, together”). Below that, eight branches divide by the kind of thing a person does not know: genre, title, platform, worldbuilding, economy, social, returning, and spectator. No first experience can satisfy them all, so choose one primary experiencer and address that person’s first hurdle and taboo first. Next chapter: We have chosen the experiencer we will bring in. Next, we draw that experiencer as one specific person. We move to the persona, and to the perspective of seeing that person as “a candidate to immigrate into this world.”

Chapter 7 Appendix: Reference Content Collection

This collection extends Chapter 7’s argument into media beyond games: there is no single kind of beginner. Beneath the broad divide between gamers and ordinary people, beginners split by what they do not know into eight branches—genre, title, platform, worldbuilding, economy, social, returning, and spectator—and false beginners carrying the wrong luggage are more difficult than extreme beginners arriving empty-handed. The cases are grouped into five branches: video games; board games; video, publishing, and content; mobile, apps, and services; and offline life. As you read each case, identify which of the eight beginners this person is and whether they arrived empty-handed or carrying the wrong luggage.

Video Games

Dead Cells / Hades: Both roguelikes assume repeated death. Someone who knows the genre’s grammar reads the first death as a signal that “the main game starts here” and moves on to upgrades, while a newcomer reads the same death as failure and an ending. Hades (2020) attaches a reward to death itself by advancing conversation and story at the home base to which the player returns after dying. Examine which interpretation the first screen after death supports when the same screen is read in opposite ways by a genre beginner and a veteran.
The first death in Dark Souls: Someone who knows Soulslike grammar reads death as a signal for learning. A newcomer reads the same death as “the game is unfair,” interpreting the same screen in the opposite way. Whether a person knows that the souls dropped on death can be recovered from that place divides the interpretations. Examine how, in one scene, the meaning of death itself must be taught to a genre beginner, while the same explanation is clutter to a veteran.
The jump button in Devil May Cry: In the Western release of the first game (2001), jump was assigned to the triangle button, while sequels settled on X for jumping. Communities often recount that people whose hands were trained by later titles press the wrong button when returning to the original. The remastered HD Collection adjusted the first game’s mapping to match the sequels, this time misaligning the hands of people familiar with the old release. Habits diverge by edition even within one series. Examine how false beginners come not only from other works but from other editions of the same series, which is why “They are our fans, so they will know” does not hold.
EVE Online’s abbreviation barrier: In the space MMO EVE Online, abbreviations such as MWD, AB, and BS fill chat and guidance, making the first screen an alien language to genre beginners. Communities have even created separate glossaries for newcomers. Examine how, when the terminology barrier is high, users eventually create their own unofficial interpreters—glossaries and mentor organizations—to fill the gap, though design could have paid that cost from the beginning.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Even people who do not play games learn slowly through simple actions such as fishing and gathering, where failure costs almost nothing. Only a few tasks emerge each day, matching the pace of ordinary life rather than a gamer’s speed. Examine the shape of an entrance that takes ordinary people as its primary audience, and the dual structure that still holds gamers by stacking depth—customization and collection catalogs—behind it.
Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6: The 2023 game first asks players to choose between Classic, with traditional command inputs, and Modern, which produces special moves with one button in exchange for certain adjustments. Genre beginners reach the fun of a match immediately through Modern, while veterans retain their habits through Classic. Examine how the branching prescription “Is this your first time?” is implemented at the control-system level in a fighting genre notorious for high entry barriers.

Board Games

Twilight Imperium / Gloomhaven: Before heavyweight board games that take hours per session, even board-game veterans become title beginners under the weight of the rulebook. Large games in the Gloomhaven family therefore sometimes provide introductory scenarios that use only part of the rules. Examine whether the product itself acknowledges that even veterans are beginners before this work and provides a separate introductory entrance.
Catan: The rules are light, but outcomes depend on resource trading and negotiation, so even among people who have read every rule, a first game differs completely between those new to trading and those familiar with it. Examine how grammar outside the rules—negotiation technique and a sense of market value—cannot be taught by the rulebook, and how that is effectively the social beginner’s first hurdle.

Video, Publishing, and Content

A foreign-language film without subtitles: The same screen is a wall to a language beginner and simply dialogue to someone who knows the language. What someone knows upon arrival changes the difficulty of the content itself. Examine the shortest illustration of the premise behind this chapter’s entire classification: difficulty is not an attribute of content, but a relationship between content and experiencer.
The opening of Mad Max: Fury Road: The 2015 film establishes only the premise of wars over water and oil in a short piece of narration, then throws the audience straight into a chase. A worldbuilding beginner can follow without knowing the earlier films, while fans receive an uncluttered introduction. Examine the sense of minimum length that compresses guidance for a worldbuilding beginner until it is short enough not to bore a veteran.
Joining a long-running soap opera midway: Daytime serials that continue for decades place dialogue in every episode in which characters retell past events to one another. Even someone who missed yesterday can catch up with who is who within a few episodes. Examine the method of spreading guidance thinly across the entire work rather than confining it to one entrance, so a title beginner can join at any episode.
“Previously on” recaps in serialized works: Seasonal dramas conventionally condense the preceding plot into about a minute at the start of a new episode. It is a light review for someone who watched last week and an answer to “What changed while I was gone?” for someone returning after months. Examine the standard device for removing a returning beginner’s first hurdle without touching the main work—the prototype to which returning-user guidance in games can refer.
Introductory books and academic papers in specialist fields: Even on the same subject, an introductory book assumes the reader knows nothing, while a paper assumes familiarity with prior research. Assumptions about what the reader does not know reshape the vocabulary, introduction, and footnotes in their entirety. Examine how the location of the primary reader changes the form of the document itself, and why one book rarely satisfies both.

Mobile, Apps, and Services

Duolingo’s placement test: At the start of a language course, Duolingo lets learners choose whether to begin at the beginning or take a proficiency assessment. Those who choose the assessment start at a point suited to the result. Examine a textbook implementation of branching: it separates a genre beginner, someone new to the language, from a returning beginner, someone who studied it before, with one question and applies the answer directly to the starting point.

Offline and Everyday Life

Applause between movements at a classical concert: A first-time attendee tries to applaud whenever a movement ends, while someone who knows the convention waits for the entire piece to finish. One must read the number of movements in the program and watch the conductor lower their hands to know the end; that reading is itself a grammar shared among insiders. Examine a structure where well-intentioned applause becomes a marker that someone “arrived without knowing,” and whether one line of guidance can remove that burden in advance.
A fast-food self-order kiosk: Even someone familiar with in-app payments pauses at a store kiosk when the first screen pours out the entire menu at once, unsure where to begin while a line forms behind them. The same act of ordering follows different screen grammar on a smartphone and a kiosk, turning a mobile expert into a platform beginner. Examine how the time pressure of a waiting line multiplies the beginner’s hurdle and why the same UI must be far more forgiving than a screen viewed alone.
Onboarding an experienced hire: They are a veteran at the job but a beginner in the new company’s tools, procedures, and jargon. Repeating new-hire training is boring; skipping it leaves them blocked. This is why companies create separate onboarding for experienced hires. Examine a case where both “They have experience, so they will know” and “They are new, so teach everything” are wrong, and choosing what to skip and what alone to teach becomes the classification of the experiencer.
A licensed driver starting a rental car for the first time: They are skilled at driving but new to that car’s ignition method and button layout, so they get lost in the parking lot trying to release the parking brake. The unfamiliar thing is not the skill but the layout. Examine how much of mastery is actually a habit tied to a particular arrangement, and why changing the arrangement makes veterans the first to get lost.
A car with the turn-signal stalk on the other side: Depending on model and standard, a turn-signal stalk may sit on the left or right side of the wheel. It is commonly said that veteran drivers switching to an imported car or an overseas rental often move the wipers while trying to signal. Examine how one lever turns a decades-long driver into a platform beginner, and how the wrong answer is absorbed as one harmless sweep of the wipers rather than an accident, allowing the person to laugh and move on.
A new TV with a different remote: Someone can be skilled at watching TV yet become a platform beginner the instant they cannot find the input button on a new remote. They knew every function; only the button’s name and position changed. Examine how a false beginner’s blockage is not a lack of ability but a mapping mismatch, and why the prescription is not education but one line of correspondence.
Starbucks-style size terms: Store-specific names such as Tall, Grande, and Venti become a small alien language to a first-time visitor. At the counter, “Give me a large one” and “A Grande” need translation between them. Examine how the taboo against pouring out genre terminology without explanation operates identically at a café counter, and how one follow-up question from the staff substitutes for that translation.