I've been enjoying your green videos of power for some time now, but I do have a question about some of the material from this video and that maybe touches a little bit on the paradox of tutorials video.

Typically, when I think of a narrative interest curve it does not look like the narrative tension curve that you used in the video. Rather, it starts with a gigantic spike - the hook meant to grab the audience - before sinusoidally approaching the climax (it peaks and dips, but on average increases until it hits the climax).

So, here is the question. How do you account for needing a big opening while simultaneously matching up to the flow curve, which needs an easy opening?

I thought that this might be related to an older video of yours, the paradox of tutorials. In that video, on the one hand we have the flow curve, which needs to increase difficulty gradually. On the other hand we have our expectations of the story (the narrative interest curve), which state that we're a big badass and should be doing big badass stuff right from the start. On the third hand (uh...) we have ludonarrative dissonance, which results if we try to cheat and give the player an easy QTE (on the flow curve) to represent the character doing something super badass (on the narrative interest curve).

So, I guess add to my earlier question "...without making the player feel like they're rubberstamping some badass stuff with one or two button presses."

My first thought is that you could use an introductory cutscene for this: you can establish that the player character is a huge badass, then in the interest curve dip that follows you could do some tutorials, so that when the curve peaks again after that the player is then prepared to do the same things they saw in the cutscene, but in gameplay.

The problem, of course, is that this doesn't use synergy very well in mapping the hook to the flow experience, as your model proposes ought to be done. Can you think of a better way to handle it?