This article asks how good video and computer game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games. The short answer is that designers of good games have hit on excellent methods for getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. The longer answer is more complex. Integral to this answer are the good principles of…

This article is excerpted, with the permission of the editors and the publishers, from an edited book published by Peter Lang Publishing in conjunction with Eyebeam (www.eyebeam.org), a not-for-profit new media arts organization in New York City. It reproduces one of the book's four organizing "modules"--Games as Exchange--which focuses on new…