Games and implied expertise [Blog]
I have a longer article about sports and anime in the pipeline, which largely focuses on leaving behind our confort zones. As I’ve been focusing on this topic, I wanted to write about something an anecdote that’s stuck with me regarding confort zones, expertise, and video games. Back in highschool, I was dating a person. Don’t worry, this story isn’t about how our relationship didn’t work out, and I still deeply respect them.
During a date I asked them if they’d be interested in trying out a game. They seemed interested, and since they’d never played a game in their life, I picked the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I figured it would be a solid pick, Zelda games aren’t too technically complex, the style isn’t too aggressive and I remembered the writing as being pretty solid. Hell, these were games I grew up playing, how hard could it be?
I was shocked to find that this person could not find the strength to move Link in a straight line. To date I have never witnessed a legendary hero so deeply intoxicated, with the player doing everything in their power to maintain control over a character that I’d remembered being literal childs-play to manipulate. Link had slid along every wall in the village and jumped into a lake five times before he’d finally found his way to the ranch. Fortunately, by that point I had enough sense to realize that their interest was waning, and we ended up watching a movie instead.
Years later, this experience still sticks with me as deeply emblematic of how complex games have become. Once upon a time, video games were something that could be picked up and played, controlled with a single joystick and a button. The player would manipulate what could generously be referred to as a “character” through simple environments and potentially even perform one action. For instance, Pong is a game that can be enjoyed by anyone for at least a short amount of time. It only requires the player to move a paddle up and down, and depth can be found in the angle, speed, and motion of the paddle when it intersects the ball.
We now live in a world with games like Ultrakill, where you can move forward, back, strafe left and right. You can jump, slide, slide-jump, wall-jump, bullet-jump, crouch, slam-jump, slam-store during a jump, and bunny-hop. Which just covers most of the movement options and doesn’t even touch the combat. And yet I find Ultrakill to be a game that’s deeply relaxing, the amount of mechanics it throws at me allows me a certain degree of expressivity in combat that nothing else does.
Of course, I had to learn how to do all of this first. Compared to a friend of mine who played Ultrakill recently, I’m extremely comfortable with first-person shooters. They struggle to aim at all, which is entirely because they’re bad at the game. And how could they not be? Ultrakill is extremely advanced for a first-person shooter, so someone who isn’t entirely at home with the feeling of adjusting a camera while moving through an environment will hardly begin to even want to try bullet-jumping.
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I’m slightly at risk of making a statement that could be slathered across a $20 Target “Gamer” t-shirt, but being able to play games competently is a legitimate skill. For example, I’ve played a total of 150 hours of the Total Warhammer series on and off over the years, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to internalize how they function. Isn’t that a horrible concept? I’ve spent roughly one-hundred and fifty hours of my life playing a game I don’t understand, and every single hour I played, I sucked at it. And it wasn’t fun.
I‘d find it draining and emotionally taxing, I’d make obvious mistakes that made me feel like an absolute idiot. For example, there would be times when Total Warhammer’s autoresolve system would tell me that the battle would result in a “Pyrrhic Victory,” which is more or less winning by the skin of your teeth. I’d get confident and try to manipulate it into a “Close” or even “Decisive” victory, so I’d skip the autoresolve and play the battle. I’d be thrown into a battle I didn’t understand, screw up, and then I’d lose. Compared to using the autoresolve and winning, I’d decided to put my skills to the test and failed miserably. I was categorically worse than the computer that most players said was worse than the player.
Speaking as someone with more than a few issues with self-esteem, this is one of the reasons I’d stop playing it for a while. It was a genuine blow to my ego, losing a battle the game had told me I’d probably win, and this would happen semi-frequently. At the same time, skipping battles in Total Warhammer means you’re skipping playing the actual game. Eventually you’ll be skipping every battle, and then you aren’t really playing Total War, you’re playing a 4X game with screaming rats. Which isn’t nearly as fun, despite how it sounds.
And so I decided that unless a battle was absolutely silly to play, like a twenty on three situation, I would play it. Even if I was losing. And as a result, I got better. The game didn’t tell me to do this, I decided that I would actively try to become a better player. And after 150 hours, that’s started to pay off, and it feels incredible.
With all of this in mind, it’s hard for me to remember exactly what it was like to be bad at some styles of games, while others are extremely fresh in my mind. And when I think about the modern day developers, who all have certainly played a massive breadth of games, it can become a problem when the knowledge a game assumes the player needs to possess exceeds what they might actually know. It isn’t just a matter of remembering when we didn’t know these things, nor is it a matter of attempting to make games accessible to every person on earth. While these are great mentalities for devs to have, there is a limit to how realistic those goals can be to achieve.
The only way to teach someone how to move a character through a 3D environment is to let them have the time to move through the environment. The only way to teach someone to aim in an FPS is to give them a few targets and a gun. Does that mean tutorials can’t be made in better ways? Of course they can, but we’re at a point where games have become so mechanically dense that it’s hard to see how we can teach the player without totally overwhelming them. Does that mean that we should make games less mechanically dense? Hell no, but we shouldn’t treat Ultrakill and Total Warhammer as the baselines of simplicity for their genre, even if they feel like they are.
This is one of those problems that can end up in a rut, where you can’t make the perfect game that everyone can play, nor can you make a game that’s so mechanically complex that anyone can play it. At the same time, how developers respond to this conflict early in the project’s lifespan is extremely important, as defining what your user should be expected to know will have far-reaching ramifications on the rest of the project. But even when games do miss the mark, there can be enough that keeps the player invested in learning how to play, beyond the struggle.
How the player interacts with the struggle is ultimately up to them. They can quit, they can bash their heads against a wall, they can try to come up with new strategies and overcome these challenges. This is what makes games incredible as a medium, the ongoing conversation between a player and a developer. The skills that have evolved over the years, and how developers seek to challenge those skills. These are the things that make games great.
