Tutorials & Learn as you play... The book?

I came across a link to an academic paper that discussed the tutorials in Rise of Nations in the context of how to improve teaching and learning, more generally.

I'll dig into the nitty gritty of the paper over the weekend, but I must say that I was quite flattered to find that RoN was deemed worthy of such attention. We did agonize over the flow, structure, and content of the learn-as-you-play experience. We spent many hours in the usability lab watching people either break or get bored by early versions of the tutorials.

In the end, we came up with something that we were pretty darn happy with -- and I find myself still applying some of the lessons learned back then in my work on games and social computing websites.

Anyhow, the paper (in .pdf) is here: The Paper

And it looks like the author, James Paul Gee, has also published these thoughts (as well as other RoN related musings) in book format: A handful of books that refer to RoN.

Ah, fond nostalgic memories!