Another thing Emmett said that got me thinking was this:
Probably these developers know something I don’t. Probably they know that their market already understands the conventions of this world, and that eventually, and through repetition, anything that deviates from these conventions seems somehow false. (I suspect that this might be what Tom means when he mentions games literacy.) But for me, this time at least, it never stopped feeling like a videogame.
This is a criticism I hear a lot – that playing videogames presupposes a certain amount of knowledge. The reason I hear it a lot is because my wife is so unfamiliar with videogame conventions. So much that she’s a terrific litmus test for the accessibility of a particular game. Give me a joypad and my hands instinctively fall into a familiar grip. After a short while, I’ll be accustomed to the controls of a game that there will be almost no barrier between what I want to do and what I can make the game do. The controls will disappear for me, allowing me to fully immerse myself in the game. For my wife, the controls are always present. She isn’t familiar with the joypad, so when the game tells her to “Press X to open”, she has to actively think about where button X is. It will never not be a game for her. Years of experience has taught me that, almost universally, “X” (or “bottom button”) means “Okay” and “O” (or “right button”) means “Cancel”. I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t even think about it now. For my wife, this is still a strange concept even though she uses these buttons every day to watch movies and TV through our Xbox.
Within the game worlds themselves, there are also conventions that might only be immediately obvious to someone who is familiar with games and has been playing them for a substantial amount of time. For example, the near-ubiquitous red barrel has an obvious meaning to gamers: kick-ass explosions. Wooden crates can be smashed open to potentially give you some amazing loot. In most games, the double-jump has no grounding in either the narrative or the physics of the world – I mean, what the fuck is that? Someone can ‘jump’ again in mid-air to go even higher? Seriously? – but this is something I almost expect when I’m playing a platform game. When it isn’t present, I feel like something is missing. Giant Bomb has helpfully put together a fairly comprehensive list of the most common videogame conventions so that we don’t have to go through them all here.
And so it’s not so much the fact that these conventions exist that bother me, but more the fact that this is used as a stick to beat videogames as a medium. A typical conversation when we try to play games together:
“How did you know you could open that door but not the door beside it?”
“It’s obvious!”
“Not to me!”
“Well, because 25 years of playing videogames has taught me which doors can be opened and which can’t.”
“You see?! This is why I can’t play videogames!”
Here’s where I’m in danger of sounding like a snob, but my answer to this is: so learn, get used to it.
You’re reading my blog, so I’m guessing that you’re probably a middle-to-upper class white male with at least a secondary school education
Once you actually master the mechanics of it, there are also conventions used in literature and reading. Right now I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. To read this properly, to understand it and convert it from just words on a page to ideas and concepts, it helps to be familiar with, among other things, the logic of metafiction and the various philosophical theories of language including, but not limited to, the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first time I read Thomas Pynchon’s V, I was completely unfamiliar with metafiction, and I had a hard time reading that book. Just as the game never stopped being a videogame for Emmett, V never stopped being a book for me. I was reading at such a cripplingly slow pace that it took me forever, which meant I never really developed a ‘flow’. I was always completely conscious of the process of writing that made up this book. I didn’t enjoy it. Because I wasn’t immersed in the subject of the work, I was very aware of the form of the work, I was aware of the author’s ‘tricks’. It’s like my wife playing a game, the controller/book never disappeared for me
I guess this is made worse with games because they are all rules, they’re all convention. I recently played a game of Carcassonne with my wife, and the rules never once disappeared into the background because we constantly had to think about what we were doing. Our first game of Dungeons & Dragons was quickly disbanded after we said “fuck this” because we couldn’t figure out what the various numbers meant or how we were meant to calculate things. In none of these cases did we blame the game’s rules, we blamed ourselves for not knowing them
But still, what should be done? What should I do when I’m having trouble reading a book like V? Well, I should read other books. Books that are more at my reading-level. Slowly build myself up my familiarity with literary conventions so that I could enjoy the book properly. You wouldn’t expect a teenager coming straight off Twilight (for example) to be able to pick up and enjoy Ulysses (again, for example), so I don’t see why you’d expect someone completely unfamiliar with modern videogames to be able to enjoy them properly either.
So the question is, why blame the game?
Completely OT – but have you considered putting some kind of a Read More link on the excerpts you post on your tumblr blog?
After reading the other guy’s post it seems to be more of an uncanny valley-type argument: that the graphical realism only makes the scripted behaviour of NPCs and the simplistic physics of the environment more jarring. I don’t think that’s so much about gaming conventions as it is about basic limitations of the platform. I don’t tend to enjoy sandbox games for that reason, but I’m much more accepting of games where the setting is unreal, either abstract or dreamlike. For me, the Assassin’s Creed games get away with it, but the game world there is portrayed as a simulation within the games, so I’m probably cutting it some slack.
Re: Tumblr – this is one of the reasons I’m so back-and-forth about Tumblr. I love the simplicity of their interface, I hate the lack of extensibility. I’ve deleted my feed from here and re-added it as something different. Hopefully, it will play a bit nicer.
As for what I was saying in my post, I totally get that I quoted Emmett almost completely out of context and that the larger point he was making was about technical limitations. I just wanted to address something that was only tangentially related to his overall point. Plus, it was directed as much to Helena as to anyone else. When you’ve been married for almost two years, you’ll start having little passive-aggressive arguments with your wife via blog posts that no-one reads. Twenty-first century living.