one thing i think is interesting, as someone who basically grew up playing video games non-stop, is how some types of video game just don’t gel with people
like, it’s easy to forget that, even though i’m pretty bad at most games, that my skill at handling video games is definitely “above average.” as much as i hate to put it like this, i’d say my experience level is at “expert” solely because I can pick up any game controller and understand how to use it with no additional training.
a friend of mine on twitter
posted a video of him stuck on a part of samus returns. the tutorial area where it teaches you how to ledge-grab. the video is of him jumping against the wall, doing everything but grabbing the ledge, and him getting frustrated
i’ve been playing games all my life, so i’d naturally intuit that i should jump towards the ledge to see what happens
but he doesn’t do that.
it’s kinda making me realize that as games are becoming more complex and controllers are getting more buttons, games are being designed more and more for people who already know how to play them and not people with little to no base understanding of the types of games they’re playing
so that’s got me thinking: should video games assume that you have zero base knowledge of video games and try to teach you from there? should Metroid: Samus Returns assume that you already know how to play a Metroid game and base its tutorial around that, or should it assume that you’ve never even played Mario before?
it’s got me thinking about that Cuphead video again. you know the one. to anyone with a lot of experience with video games, especially 2D ones, we would naturally intuit that one part of the tutorial to require a jump and a dash at the same time.
but most people lack that experience and that learned intuition and might struggle with that, and that’s something a lot of people forget to consider.
it reminds me a bit of the “land of Punt” that I read about in this Tumblr post. Egypt had this big trading partner back in the day called Punt and they wrote down everything about it except where it was, because who doesn’t know where Punt is? and now, we have no idea where it was, because everyone in Egypt assumed everyone else knew.
take that same line of thinking with games: “who doesn’t know how to play a 2D platform game?” nobody takes in to consideration the fact that somebody might not know how to play a 2D game on a base level, because that style of gameplay is thoroughly ingrained in to the minds of the majority of gamers. and then the Cuphead situation happens.
the point of this post isn’t to make fun of anybody, but to ask everyone to step back for a second and consider that things that they might not normally consider. as weird as it is to think about for people that grew up playing video games, anyone who can pick up a controller with thirty buttons on it and not get intimidated is actually operating at an expert level. if you pick up a playstation or an Xbox controller and your thumbs naturally land on the face buttons and the analog stick and your index fingers naturally land on the trigger buttons, that is because you are an expert at operating a complex piece of machinery. you have a lifetime of experience using this piece of equipment, and assuming that your skill level is the base line is a problem.
that assumption is rapidly becoming a problem as games become more complex. it’s something that should be considered when talking about games going forward. games should be accessible, but it’s reaching a point where even Nintendo games are assuming certain levels of skill without teaching the player the absolute basics. basics like “what is an analog stick” and “where should my fingers even be on this controller right now.”
basically what i’m saying is that games are becoming too complex for new players to reasonably get in to and are starting to assume skill levels higher than what should be considered the base line. it’s becoming a legitimate problem that shouldn’t be laughed at and disregarded. it’s very easy to forget that thing things YOU know aren’t known by everyone and that idea should be taken in to consideration when talking about video games.
All of this. Basic game literacy is remarkably complicated. I grew up on the earliest ones and had high fluency up to around the Super Mario 64 era. I fell out of regular gameplay at that point and even from that baseline, I experience a really bewildering disconnect from what’s required to approach most games today.
I wonder if this is partly a gatekeeping thing, keeping games for G A M E R S by assuming the player already has an ‘expert’ level of literacy re: the game’s mechanics and lore, which provides both a way to keep out Others (read: non-gamers) from their game space & a way for players to rank themselves by how well they do/how much they know, setting up a hierarchy they constantly struggle to rise up in so they can look down on those who can do/know less.
I.e., a manifestation of the Curator Fandom vs. Creative/Transformative Fandom split.
Man, this so much. There’s also a strong disparity between what people think will be fun for someone and what is actually fun for them? The amount of women I’ve met who were “not into video games even though their boyfriends tried to get them into it” I’ve met is staggering. But the thing is, said boyfriends kept pushing FPS zombie games onto their girlfriends, which are games that a) require a lot of coordination and previous knowledge and b) are not that interesting. I understand the appeal of a FPS game, but you also have to understand that someone’s who’s never played one before will not enjoy being dumped into a world where they die constantly and only get to splatter brains onto concrete.
But I once got a friend whos bf had been trying to push video games onto unsuccessfully for years to spend three hours gleefully laughing and cursing at a screen with a controller in hand. You know what game I picked?
Journey.
Because Journey has a fairly low entry-level, you can’t actually die or loose progress, there is no time pressure, and the controls are relatively easy to learn. She still needed help getting through the tutorial, but the game is very forgiving and getting lost is enjoyable rather than frustrating, so it was a good experience for her. She didn’t know video games could be that fun.
I also got my father to play this game, someone who has never had a controller in his hands in his whole damn life.
But here again, something I’ve noticed a lot from people who try to get other people into video games, is that they lack the patience necessary to teach a complete, bloody noob how to play the game. Even easy, forgiving games like Journey, when people first start, they suck at controlling the camera, they cannot walk in a straight line, they don’t follow the obvious path because the cues are not obvious to them. And a lot of gamers (lots of them male) get really irritated and angry at people if they don’t intuitively use the controls correctly and end up angling the camera at their feet all the time, and a lot of newbies get very self-conscious, very fast when they can’t quickly get a hang of how the game works.
So I guess my piece of advice here is, if you want to get someone into games, there’s two main things to remember:
a) don’t pick your favorite FPS as their first game to try out. Pick something simple and forgiving, with few buttons and a straightforward game mechanic and something that won’t kill you and make you restart for every mistake.
b) be patient. The same kind of patient you have to be to teach your grandmother how to write an email. They’re not going to do it “right”, they will do weird things and roundabout things and maybe surprise you with weird, novel solutions because they won’t follow the patterns laid out for them. You’re gonna have to watch them spend fifteen minutes trying to nail a double jump. You’re gonna watch them poke everything except the really obvious glowing button to open the door to the next level. They are going to leave key items lying around because they didn’t realize it’s a key item. Be. Patient.
Video games are an amazing and novel experience and can be a lot of fun and escapism and hobby, they can be beautiful art or compelling stories or just fun puzzles, but we stop a lot of people from getting into them by setting the entry bar really high and then mocking people for not getting it right the first time. The first time you played Super Mario you ran straight into the first Goomba you saw and died. Your first Pokemon team was made entirely out of cool looking Pokemon with high power moves and zero strategy. Give people a chance to learn.
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