Can video games teach new tricks to commercial software
developers such as Autodesk? Leading commercial software
developers have started experimenting with a learning technique
used by the video game industry—the smooth integration of the
learning curve into complex games. For example Why are they
doing this? Even early on, designers of arcade videos discovered
that they consistently underestimated the dexterity of players
and overestimated the amount of instructions that players were
willing to read. Later, vendors that created flight simulators
encountered a similar problem. Should they opt to make their
controls accurate or should they simplify their products to
broaden their appeal? Most software developers responded to a
similar challenge by layering the complexity of their
applications, exposing only the most common tools and options,
standardizing common operations, and attempting to maintain
consistent, intuitive paradigms, and organizing features and
functions into logical groups. They also delivered