Why the tutorial hands you three levels for almost nothing

In the first three minutes you hit level three, unlock two abilities and clear four objectives, all for taps a child could manage. The generosity is startling and deliberate: before you have learned anything or done anything difficult, the game has convinced you that you are good at it and getting better fast.

What everyone sees

Lavish early rewards look like a gentle on-ramp — easing beginners in before the real challenge starts. Their deeper function is to manufacture a feeling of competence in advance of any actual skill. By handing out levels and unlocks for trivial actions, the tutorial installs an early sense of “I am good at this and improving,” and that belief, not the trivial achievements themselves, is what carries the player into the harder stretch where quitting is easiest.

What is actually happening

White’s concept of effectance motivation held that people are driven by the feeling of producing effects and being competent in their environment — a sense of mastery is intrinsically rewarding and sought for its own sake. Bandura’s work on self-efficacy showed that early experiences of success are among the strongest sources of the belief that one can succeed, and that this belief predicts persistence in the face of later difficulty. A front-loaded tutorial engineers exactly such early successes: the easy wins build a sense of competence and self-efficacy that the player then works to protect and extend, sustaining engagement precisely when the game becomes genuinely hard.

Why it stays hidden

The design hides because the early wins feel earned — the player really did complete the objectives — so the manufactured nature of the competence is invisible. They carry into the difficult phase a belief in their own aptitude that was installed rather than built, and attribute their persistence to genuine skill. Because a demanding opening would drive beginners away and is never shown, the contrast that would reveal the tutorial as a confidence device is never experienced.