I would say that my favorite way of playing a tutorial in a game is when the game breaks it off into chunks. So say a game has jump, attack, and dodge mechanics. First section could have the player just walk to another area, the next section requires the player to jump over an obstacle, and then dodge an obstacle, and lastly the player has to attack an enemy to clear the level. I would say that Nitrome.com games have really perfected this formula but it might be a pain to play them to find out since flash has died and their HTML5 games have moved to another site.