Stop Teaching, Start Seducing: How to Make Players Fall in Love in 10 Minutes

pics from the movie "Dirty Dancing" (Image Credit: Lionsgate)

By Raphaël Doyen & Joachim Schiavo, with contributions from Arnaud Carrette 

Studios can spend years refining systems, worlds, and stories. But most players know within moments whether a game resonates with them. In an era of infinite scroll and shrinking attention spans, the first few minutes of your game don’t just introduce the experience, they define it.

These opening moments are not just about teaching. They’re about establishing a relationship, setting expectations, and making a promise the rest of the game must uphold.

1. FTUE is not about teaching, it’s about seducing

Most teams approach the opening as a teaching problem: "How do we ensure players understand the controls?" But the real question should be: " How do we prove to players, right now, that this experience is worth their limited time?

Explaining mechanics aims for clarity. Promising an experience aims for engagement.

Consider how some games communicate their intent right away:

• Portal: its opening is iconic not because it teaches portals (though it does), but because it immediately conveys the game’s essence: clever problem-solving & dark humor.

• The Witness: The game doesn't explain puzzles, it teaches a language. It trusts the player's intelligence, escalating gently through curiosity rather than instruction.

• The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the wild: A sandbox tutorial that re-establish emotional connection, encourages exploration without overwhelming the player, and allows them to learn through free will and curiosity.

These openings work because they crystallize the heart of the game in minutes. They are the whole experience encapsulated in a few minutes of gameplay.

2. What do the first 10 minutes actually do?

They establish expectations

A game’s first interaction communicates its identity: tone, pace, genre, and the kind of situation the player will encounter.

For example:

• Disco Elysium’s first minutes are all about surreal humorous introspection, conversational gameplay, and failure as a narrative tool.

• DOOM Eternal’s first minutes are chaos, speed, aggression, monsters, relentless combat, gore… Exactly what the rest of the game offers. 

Strong openings tell players exactly what they’re getting. Those who are aligned stay. Those who aren’t can leave early, avoiding frustration later.

They form long term emotional Anchors

Players recall emotions more vividly than button mapping. The first minutes become the emotional blueprint that shapes how the entire game is interpreted.

Do you remember the first time you played Metal Gear Solid on Playstation? Yes? Me too.

Think of iconic openings like the stealth infiltration in Metal Gear Solid, or the immediate tension and cinematic style it establishes. These early impressions become a shorthand for the game’s identity.

Recently, Arc Raiders executed this perfectly. In just ten minutes, with barely sixty seconds of cinematics, it established the entire context. It taught the core mechanics while simultaneously embedding its emotional vocabulary: discovery, danger, and betrayal

These aren’t simply memorable scenes, they are emotional commitments the game must continuously uphold.

3. Why First Impressions Compound

Emotions are not about quantity 

Cognitive psychology calls this the 'Primacy Effect': early emotional experiences disproportionately shape long-term memory. It means that players who connect emotionally the first time they play a game often remain engaged for dozens or hundreds of hours. Players who don't connect tend to leave, regardless of how much content you throw at them.

It’s not only the amount of content that keeps players invested. It’s the sense that their time matters

Subnautica masterfully uses its opening moments to create a dramatic contrast. Initially, the player is trapped inside a small, claustrophobic lifepod. After quickly stabilizing the environment and introducing the core survival challenges, the player opens the hatch. They are immediately confronted with a vast, open ocean and the imposing scale of a gigantic crashed spaceship just miles away. This sudden shock of immense scale is vital; it delivers a dramatic impact that no later gameplay system, such as crafting or survival mechanics, could match.

When a game struggles to retain players, the issue isn’t always a lack of content or clarity. Often, the issue wasn't the mechanics, it was the motivation. The opening failed to answer the player's silent question: 'Why should I care?

The Opening sets the benchmark

Players subconsciously compare every subsequent moment to how they discovered and envisioned the game. When the game revisits the mood or pacing of the opening, it feels consistent. When it deviates too sharply, players feel the experience has “changed,” even if the quality is high.

Consider the beginning of The Last of Us (Sarah’s death): its intimate tension, emotional weight, and brutal consequences serve as a thematic thesis for the entire game. The narrative that follows echoes this tone, strengthening the experience.

Players can quit games they enjoyed for hours because the experience changed dramatically from what the opening promised (genres, tone or mechanics). 

The opening set expectations. The game failed to honor them.

4. Our Approach: Crafting a FTUE that Sticks

How do we move from theory to execution? With Joachim, we often find that fixing a broken FTUE requires going back to the very foundation of the project. It starts by clarifying or aligning on the Game Vision.

1/Define Your Game’s Essence, your Emotional North Star 

Everything stems from the Game Vision, but a vision document is often too broad. You need to crystallize that vision into a precise "Emotional North Star". This is the singular feeling or experience that defines your game’s unique identity. During research, we use a simple but ruthless litmus test: if players only experience the first 10 minutes of your game, will they understand exactly what makes it special? This isn't about mechanics, it is about identifying the specific emotional intent you need to deliver immediately.

2/ Align the Verbs with the Vision 

Once your North Star is defined, your action verbs, the things players actually do, must tell the same story. A player’s first interactions matter far more than the exposition that precedes them. If your vision promises “build, create, explore,” and your trailer showcases a vast, systemic universe full of creative possibility, but the first ten minutes ask the player to read through dozens of tooltips, your vision and your actions are misaligned.

3/ Create a "Cognitive Bookmark"

The human brain is wired to forget what is average, the “meh” or in good French “bof”. To ensure retention, you must engineer a "cognitive bookmark" in the player's mind. This is the "Wow moment," an emotional challenge, or a striking dilemma that acts as an anchor. Whether it is the sheer scale of the first giant in Shadow of the Colossus or the heartbreaking prologue of The Last of Us, this moment serves as a mental placeholder that players will return to when they describe the game to their friends

4/ Shift from QA to Emotional Resonance Testing

Finally, bringing emotion into design requires evolving how we validate it. Instead of only checking for clarity by asking "Did you understand the controls?", we must also probe for impact: "What moment struck you the most?" or "What do you think the game expects from you?". 

Comprehension is essential, but understanding the emotional signals is what determines if a player stays.

Conclusion: The First 10 Minutes Are Your Game’s Promise

Your first 10 minutes are NOT a tutorial, they are the most honest conversation you'll ever have with your players. It says: "This is what we are. This is what we value. This is what you'll feel."

When that message aligns with players’ desires, they’ll forgive imperfections, persevere through challenge, and invest deeply. If it doesn’t, no amount of additional content can compensate. The opening isn't a separate design problem to solve. It's your game's thesis. It's your contract. Everything after it is either reinforcing or undermining that promise.

So before extending a cutscene or adding another tooltip, ask yourself: Does this moment make players want to experience what comes next? If not, the rest of your game may remain unseen.