What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games ...

Last year, the lady I live with, also known as my wife, asked if she could try out one of the games I’d been playing. She described it as the one with the cute little ghost guy, and after scrolling through my entire library, I realized she was talking about Hollow Knight. Given the fact that her experience with video games at that point consisted of the occasional race in Mario Kart and a smattering of Crash Bandicoot levels from when she was a kid, I knew with fair confidence that her playing Hollow Knight would go terribly. So, obviously I booted it up and set her into the world of Hallo wnest. As she played, every moment, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, had a strange sort of intensity. For example, in the tutorial there are a set of platforms that the player needs to jump across. The only penalty for falling is a little bitof time, and on my first playthrough I breezed past it and immediately forgot about it. For her, it was intense beyond belief. She wasn’t sure what the penalty for fallingwould be, and she didn’t have a full grasp on how to adjust her jump height and distance. Each successful jump felt like a triumph,and after landing, she’d look out at the next platform, searching for the nerve tojump again. Watching her work through this early sectiongot me thinking a lot about the language of video games, and just how much a person’slevel of video game literacy affects their experience with any given title. I can’t really think of a time in my lifewhere I wasn’t interested in games, and because of that, there are certain aspectsabout them that are almost instinctual to me now, and that is because a lot of gamesuse the same ideas and vocabulary in order to get information across to players as quicklyas possible. It’s why the color red is almost alwaysassociated with health, why the A button or its equivalent is typically the command to jump , and why platformers,more often than not, move from left to right. At this point, I’ve played enough gameswhere after five minutes of playing one, I almost always know what to expect, no matterthe kind of game, but that inherent understanding of how games work and what to expect fromthem doesn’t exist for the lady I live with because she hasn’t spent the time learningthose things. This made me wonder how people learn the basicsof video games, so I decided to run an informal experiment where I’d have her play a handfulof titles and see how she approached figuring each of them out in the hopes of getting abetter understanding of how people learn the language of video games. In an effort to not influence how she approachedany given title, I didn’t give her any advice or instructions; I just watched, silentlyjudging. I had her play through the early sectionsof 9 games: Super Mario Brothers, Shovel Knight, Celeste, Portal, DOOM, Skyrim, The Last ofUs, Uncharted 2, and so that I could really test the strength of our marriage, Dark Souls. I picked these titles because a) I felt theywould be a solid sampling of three major types of games that being 2D platformers, 3D platformers,and first-person shooters/adventures, while also offering a diverse spread of genres andgameplay mechanics and b) I like them. This is how it went. Just kidding, we’re still good. With each game, I noticed that there werea vast amount of seemingly basic functions and mechanics that she either didn’t fullygrasp or know existed. This first came up with Mario 1-1. She figured out the jump easily enough, butnever realized she had the ability to dash, making her time with the level painfully hardto watch. There are no in-game instructions on how todash or do anything else really, so players will only learn about it if they read theinstruction manual, figure it out through experimentation, or have another person tellthem how it works. As she didn’t even know it was somethingshe could do, she never figured it out. For me it has become second nature to tryto sprint in games, whether or not I know its an option. I just assume it will be and guess it is probablythe B button or its equivalent, but I only make that assumption because of years of beingconditioned to make it. Figuring out the controls for all of the games,whether they were explicitly explained or implicitly taught through level design, wasa challenge for her. Part of this stems from her not being allthat comfortable with a controller. Anytime a game asked for her to press a certainbutton, she’d look down at it to search for that button. One of the most instances of this came upwhile playing The Last of Us. Early on there is a prompt on the screen topress L3, which she could not find on the controller as there is no button labeled L3. She noticed it was shaped like a circle, soshe guessed it might be one of the joysticks. However, she didn’t know that it meant topress down on it, so she just sort of moved back and forth until eventually figuring itout. I’ve certainly played games that do a betterjob of illustrating how L3 and R3 work, but it is interesting that there is pretty mucha hidden button on most controllers that new players will have no reason to know exists. I know that figuring out a game’s controlssounds easy, but she essentially had to not only memorize which buttons did what, butalso which buttons were where, adding another layer of things to keep track of and makingthe process a little bit more overwhelming. She typically faired better with games thatdidn’t give too much information to remember.