[lolcatnip]

>And why is it suddenly OK to force players into doing stuff like this?

That's pretty hyperbolic; nobody is forced to play a game. Maybe it sounds like I'm being pedantic, but you don't see anyone using the same language to talk about other parts of a game players are "forced" to go through. Nobody says you're forced to beat a tough boss, for example, even though you usually are if you want to make progress in the game.

You can probably make a good argument for treating tutorials differently from the rest of a game, but I think it's worth acknowledging that it's the norm for games to gate their content by making you complete other content first, with no way to bypass the gate. Tutorials are just a special case of that.

[JohnFen]

> Nobody says you're forced to beat a tough boss, for example, even though you usually are if you want to make progress in the game.

Yes, but that's actually playing the game. A tutorial is not. If I already know how to play the game and have to go through a tutorial anyway in order to get to the actual game, I'm being "forced" in the sense that it's a time-waster I have to go through to get to the game.

This is why there have been games I've never gone back to. Going through the tutorial yet again simply isn't worth it.