In reading RTod’s recent sidebar post on the front page about the upcoming Indie Game documentary, I wasn’t drawn to the movie (I’ve played the games) half as much as I was drawn to this opening tidbit:
I think I’m the only contributor at the League that isn’t a gamer. Given a few hours on a Saturday evening, there are approximately 1,000 things I would choose to do before sitting down with an X-Box for the night.
This got me to thinking: Let’s say that I wanted to make someone a gamer… how would I do that? I mean, I have no illusions about getting RTod to buy an XBox or anything like that… but do I think that I could get someone to play video games from time to time in their spare time?
The immediate (and obvious) answer to that question is, of course, some variant of “Angry Birds”… but we then get into the question of “what kind of game will resonate most?” My mom, for example, would never play Angry Birds for more than the minute it took her to figure out that she never wanted to play it again… but Freecell? My goodness, she was a Freecell maniac. Ask her if she liked to play games and she’d tell you “no, absolutely not!” Ask her about Freecell and she’d wave you off… because that didn’t count. It’s not playing a *GAME*. It’s playing Freecell.
As such, I’m wondering if such a dynamic could potentially come into play here. Are there games out there that we could pretty easily get folks to play while they wave away the very idea that they’re “playing”.
So I came up with two different approaches to this. The first is to go the simple/minimalist direction. Something like Popcap. Bejeweled needs no introduction, Zuma is a great marble “match 3” game, Peggle gets the joys of pachinko into your very own monitor, and if you’re a big fan of Boggle-kinda games, there’s Bookworm… and no special software is required. If going all the way to popcap and starting those games up is too much trouble, there are also facebook versions of many of the games (Bejeweled, Zuma, are two big examples, but Solitaire Blitz is the game where Maribou and I are sending presents back and forth to each other currently). These games are all trifles, however. Little things to do when one is otherwise occupied. I could see, for example, playing Solitaire Blitz while one is wrestling with writer’s block. Write a paragraph, play a game. Check email, play a game. Balance the checkbook, play a game. That sort of thing… but even as one could get non-gamers to play these games (as they may play Angry Birds in an airport but would never dream of doing the same thing while at home), that won’t ever get them to see a game as something more than, say, a diversion from when you’re trying to do something else… and, as such, that’s why I don’t think that that’s the way to go, necessarily.
Since I see gaming as something that I do in order to do it (as opposed to something that I do in order to avoid doing something else) I see gaming as something worth suggesting the same way that I might suggest that a friend read a fantasy book, or watch a sci-fi movie, or visit a particular website (LIKE A BOSS). If I wanted someone to try to experience a game like that, I’d have to have a game that would hook them the way that a book, or movie, or website would do so… and that means that you’d have to tailor each individual recommendation to the preferred hobbies of the person in question.
If the person loved two-fisted detective stories chock-full of monologues explaining how stupid the detective in question had been up to this point, I’d suggest games like the Max Paynes. If the person is an avid golfer, I’d suggest the Tiger Woods games and he can be surprised to see all of the famous courses he’s watched on television (or even played at himself) right there, recreated down to the annoying tree in the middle of the fairway on the 15th hole. If the person is a fan of Clive Cussler? Then I’d have to suggest the Uncharteds.
Here, check this out. Just the first 1:15 (I mean, feel free to watch after that, of course.)
If you didn’t watch past the first 75 seconds, the game goes on to give you a quick tutorial on how to play, how to climb, how to jump, how to shoot. (As the game goes on, there are flashbacks that tell you exactly how you got into such a precarious position.) Games, anymore, have the ability to make their own difficulty quite low in order to allow anyone, even non-gamers, to enjoy the various levels of the game. Auto-aim for the shooters, percentage changes for the RPGs, and AI tweaks for the sports games.
There are a great many games out there that make me do stuff like yell for Maribou to come in from the next room to just watch this five minute cutscene or have her experience a particularly good story (she was blown away by Jade Empire, for example). Now, while I can appreciate that a good video game like Uncharted is likely to ask 10 or 12 hours from you (as opposed to the 117 minutes that something like The A-Team would ask) and is a much greater investment, there’s more than a little unique joy that comes from seeing your protagonist jump because you told him to jump… or watching him dodge because you told him to dodge… and, yes, there’s a special kind of frustration when you watch your protagonist *NOT* realize that he’s being set up, man! YOU’RE BEING SET UP!!! Ah, jeez. I told you.
Anyway, the reason I want people to play certain games is very much like the reason I want them to read certain books or watch certain movies. There’s something *AWESOME* in there.
How would you do it?
RTod was wrong, in that I am also not a gamer. So at least he’s not alone.
For a season, I was addicted to “Angry Birds,” just like everyone else. And I had to quit, because I knew I’d never pick up another novel again if I didn’t.
The primary reason I am no longer a gamer (though I was never a hardcore one) is what I perceive to be an ever increased learning curve in order to play a game reasonably adequately. For instance, I’ve played various installments of the Madden franchise going back to 1995. When they instituted the “vision cone”, which needed to be directed at the receiver you were trying to pass to to make an accurate throw, I was done. At the time I thought, “The main reason I play video games and not real football is because I lack the focus/ability/interest in such a skill.” If you didn’t master this skill, the game was basically impossible. I believe in subsequent versions, this could be turned off, but it just symbolized the movement of games in general. When I play games, I want to check out and indulge in some mindless fun. I don’t want to spend hours just understanding the point of the game and then more hours getting decent and then more hours getting good, the whole while feeling frustrated that I can’t score a damn touchdown against the worst team in the league.
That’s just me, of course. Folks game for a variety of reasons.
Ya know what really kept me in keeping up with the NCAA games? Laundry.
If I had to fold laundry in the off season I’d fire up the PS2, set a game on AI Vs AI, and let them go. Nice mindless and commercial free football for an hour while I worked through laundry or paper grading.
What I think Madden/ NCAA figured out was that there are a lot of players who miss “coach mode” and who play games because they get the logic of the game but don’t have the skill to go do it for real. They want to hit that sweet spot where knowing the game of football is a large boon so that when ~real~ NFL’ers play they have the advantage of knowledge.
I just miss the pure coach mode. I tried to play a game with my father in law (not a gamer) and just letting the AI go worked until he called a Triple Option. The QB had too many options for the AI to do anything so he stood there. And got Creamed. Badly. Like, pushed back 15 yards (line of scrimage only moved a yard back but it was ugly to watch”.
You know, it’s funny, games seem easier to me than they’ve ever been. To your point, they’re certainly much more complex thanks to having all those buttons and fancy processing routines, but for the most part all that has pushed designers to create easier games to make up for all the crap you have to learn to manage.
I would recommend it based on observed interests and then let it go.
For example, if someone had been into Crash mode in the Burnout series, then I would recommend them Burnout Crash. If someone had been into Ninja Gaiden, I would recommend Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. If someone was into Ayn Rand, I would recommend Bioshock 2.
After that, it’s on them.
Thing is there’s gaming and there’s gaming. One is something you do, as you said, to do, and one is something you do to avoid doing other things. And I guess there’s the third kind of gaming which is gaming you don’t know ~not~ to do but when challenged you can’t say ~why~ you do it.
Farmville (and it’s children) is basically that third kind of gaming. You can’t win, you can’t lose, you just gather stuff to get more stuff and spend hours looking at ads or planning your day around when you need to log in and hit “harvest”. It’s not really gaming but people tend to put it in that box.
If someone only games to waste time then I don’t think you’ll ever ease them into gaming for the sake of gaming. I’ve been trying for going on 20 years to get my dad into gaming to game. Sadly I started gaming when the line between gaming to do something else and gaming for gaming’s sake was pretty thin. Look at the games of the late 80’s. How much story was there to Rally Racer or Centipede?
And then I never quite got my parents to buy into Myst. That was one of the first games I had for the PC where there was more than “just more aliens to shoot”. Even when I got into the later versions of Mechwarrior if my dad looked in on me gaming all he saw was stuff in the crosshairs, and piles of papers I was not grading yet (I lived with my folks my first two years teaching).
Thing is, if gaming is just to avoid other stuff, there’s not much incentive to invest in learning the rules/structure of other games. If I just want to burn braincells for an hour while I wait for a meeting, Angry Birds or Plants vs Zombies is about all I need to do it. There’s no need to invest the time in becoming literate in systems for say Saints Row or Uncharted.
So my advice is not not try to ease someone from one to the other rather help them find fun stuff where they want to be. If the hope is to create a Gamer out of a gamer, then I wonder if the only way to do it is to hand them the game and say “here, try it, just give it an hour. Think of it as going to see a Micheal Bay movie. Give up an hour of your life and maybe you’ll have a lousy time or maybe you’ll like it.”
I call that sort of thing “Skinner Box” gaming.
If it’s possible for a videogame to be unethical, I’d put Zynga’s skinner boxes in that category.
Yet people do it. It’s almost like smoking.
And then there are the companies that embedded easy transactions so that if your fish died because you didn’t clean the tank out you could just pay $3 and fix them. Multiply that by 30 days and 3 kids… And then to say with a straight face that you weren’t doing it on purpose….
My friends and I refer to them as ‘time-sinks’.
My mom games this way, but instead of Zynga junk she’ll sit down and play slots or video poker on her computer – not for money mind you, just pretend monies in the pretend casino that acts as the frame for the gambling-simulator video games you can buy on those 1,000 Casino Games!!! CD-ROMs at Target for $10.
She also does a couple of Popcap puzzle games, but I’m pretty sure she conceives of those as time-sinks as well.
The real tell tale between “gaming” and “Big G Gaming” is how people talk about it. A Gamer will say “I solved this wicked puzzle in Myst Rebooted yesterday. Get this…” where as if you ask a small g gamer about any games they play they’ll just blush and say “I don’t play that much”.
My mom’s been addicted to Majhong for ages but I can’t get her to transition into games with novel puzzles or story.
minecraft comes to mind.
To me, video games are less a mode of entertainment than a vocation. It would surprise me that a lot of people just need to get exposed to the right game to get into them – it sounds kind of like suggesting someone would get into basketball if you could just get them to watch a couple of classic Lakers-Celtics games.
Sure, someone out there is just waiting for Magic or Bird to unlock their hidden affinity for it, but most people have already figured out what they’re into on their own.