If my future s/o doesn’t stare at me like I’m their whole world while I stand like a crackhead in the candle section of target smelling every single candle before buying one then whats the point
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.
A few years back I played a New Super Mario Bros. game with my sister and mother. We don’t really play video games together, like, at all, so this was a unique experience.
My mom…. had a LOT of difficulties with the controls even on the base levels and I had to guide her through quite a bit. This was even in spite of the fact that she used to play the very first Super Mario Bros. quite a bit during that era.
The original Super Mario Bros.’s first level in particular is so famous for a good reason. It was specifically designed to guide you through the basics in a subtle manner; place the Goombas where you can easily run into them from the getgo and find out they’re Bad without losing a ton of progress. The first powerup’s placed in a way that makes it easy to run into by accident upon it spawning and make you realize that Oops! Some mushroom things ARE good! The question mark in question that you get it from is super conspicuous as well.
And all sorts of similar things all throughout the level. I forget all the specifics, but it’s been analyzed to hell and back. It’s worth looking up and reading about if you’re curious.
Anyway, my experience with watching my mom play (and to a certain extent my sister too since she only casually plays video games) made me realize this exact point that you’re making. It would do the industry a lot of favors to add more accessible learning curves to their games, even if just through optional tutorials.
Emphasis on optional, because as useful as the gentle tutorials are, if the new person comes back to the game a second or third time, a mandatory tutorial they’ve already grasped will only drive them mad.
Ask anyone who had to handle the Temple of Trials, aka the executive-mandated no-can-skip tutorial, of Fallout 2.
Oh man, I am running head-on into this phenomenon right now. My brother and I are trying to get my, now-retired, kind of bored, father into story-driven games. He has a PS4 but he mostly uses it for Netflix and DVDs, and despite being an old-school computer nerd he’s never really gotten into games beyond racing/flight simulators. He loves fantasy and sci-fi books though - which should make those pretty easy hooks to get him past the unfamiliar controls and nonintuitive gameplay, right? It’s…not working great thus far, although he continues to try.
It’s very weird watching him game, because some conventions just…don’t occur to him? My brother and I know that red things will explode if you shoot them, even though most games nowadays don’t explicitly explain that. My dad? No idea. Doors that don’t open? “Dad, the little door thing doesn’t light up - it’s a dummy door, you can’t open it” “But why?” Dual-stick movement + camera controls? Often unexplained, and not at all intuitive for my dad. Same with L2 for aim, R2 for fire. Or the slightly-different-coloured ledge that indicates it’s climbable.
It’s frustrating for him, at least in part because it’s all intuitive for us and so we often don’t think to explain it beforehand. Which I think is what’s happening in the industry too - I mean, people in the industry are almost always at this point people who have grown up as gamers. And it can be really hard to pick apart which things are intuitive because that’s just how humans work, and which things are intuitive because that’s how videogames have always worked and we’ve always played videogames.
