Not too long ago, my wife, more popularly known as the lady I live with, made the mistake
of agreeing to be the subject of a series of informal experiments where she’d try
out a handful of titles in order for me to see what games are like for those who don’t
spend much time playing them.
Through these informal experiments, I’ve grown a better understanding of the challenges
that come with learning the language of video games for the first time.
A lot of barriers exist for those who are unfamiliar with typical game conventions and
mechanics, as most titles are designed in a way that assumes players have a baseline
understanding of how games work, making it a difficult hobby for new players to pick
up.
With that said, it has been observed by many of you that the titles I’ve had her play
aren’t always that beginner friendly.
And, well, yeah, that’s a fair point.
So, I decided to continue her video game education and in turn mine by running another informal
experiment, this time having her try out some of the games that I probably should have had
her play in the first place.
Ones less focused on fighting enemies and working through difficult platforming challenges,
and more centered on relaxed gameplay that somewhat aligns with her real life interests.
So I had her play 4 titles all of which were roughly in the life sim genre.
Those being, Stardew Valley, The Sims 4, Slime Rancher, and, of course, Animal Crossing:
New Horizons.
I chose these games partly because they’ve been highly recommended by many of you as
great entry points into gaming and also because they share the core loop of gaining resources
that are used to build up and customize the player’s home base, which was an aspect
my wife really enjoyed when she played Minecraft, so I figured these titles would give her a
similar feeling.
Ultimately, I wanted to see what about these titles make so many people consider them good
entry points into gaming while also examining ways in which they may fall short for new
players.
As usual, I watched on as a mostly quiet observer, only occasionally reminding her of mechanics
that each game had already gone over and sometimes teaching her mechanics that the games never
taught.
So, this is how it went.
In general, she found it a lot easier to figure out how to interact with various things in
these titles, and when I asked her about it, she said it was because she knew how to do
most of the things the games wanted her to do in real life.
Where bouncing off of stuff with a shovel to reach higher places or killing an enemy
up close to get health drops only really happen in video games, things like doing yard work,
building relationships, and paying debts are activities she’s experienced in her own life,
which made it easier for her to guess how to interact with those mechanics.
So with fishing in Animal Crossing; while the game didn’t explicitly tell her when
to press the A button, she knew to wait until the fish pulled the bobber under the water
instead of when it first nibbled because she has fished before and was able to use her
knowledge of that in the game.
By having the core gameplay mechanics center around simple and familiar activities, it
made it easier for her to grasp the basics of those games.
On the other side of things, Slime Rancher which centers around sucking up slimes with
a vacuum gun, storing them in a corral, and then harvesting their excrement to then sell
for money took a little longer for her to grasp.
Obviously, I don’t think new players should only limit themselves to titles that are reflections
of real life, but I do think that for someone just starting out, it can be a good way for
them to familiarize themselves with controls and moving around in a digital space without
being overwhelmed with somewhat obscure concepts.
Along with her just having a little more experience with games now, it also helped that none of
these titles had all that much urgency to them.
She had the time and space to figure things out without the threat of something killing
her.
For the most part at least.
Lady: Are you serious?!
While failing to figure out a mechanic in a lot of games can lead to dying and losing
a lot of progress, with these, that was less of a factor, so she figured out how
to do things without as much frustration.
That isn’t to say there was no frustration with figuring out controls and mechanics though as
these titles still fell victim to a lot of the same issues that exist in the other games
she’s played.
The tutorial for the Sims 4 bombarded her with far too much information in a tiny window and
also had her engage with some of the more mundane aspects of the game.
Inversely, Stardew Valley’s tutorial was boiled down to this, leaving her with little direction.
Slime Rancher gave a lot of useful tips that were on the far side right side of the screen,
and as she typically had tunnel vision for whatever was directly in front of her, she
sometimes missed important information.
And Animal Crossing, despite over explaining nearly everything in the game, doesn’t tell
players certain bits of information, the most important being how to sprint.
As a side note, given that sprinting in previous Animal Crossing games caused the grass to
fade away, I assumed it would do the same in this one, so I decided not to tell her
that springint was even an option in order to keep our island looking pristine.
I later learned that that is not a mechanic in New Horizons though, so, uh, whoops.
Lady: Really? Now you tell me that?
While I’ve talked a fair bit throughout this series about how unexplained mechanics
like these can act as a massive barrier to new players, throughout this experiment, I
noticed a few instances where unexplained mechanics actually benefited my wife’s experience.
Like in Slime Rancher.
One of the early challenges of the game is figuring out how to best store the various
slimes.
There aren’t really prompts that explain how so as my wife collected various slimes,
she dropped them in corrals without much rhyme or reason.
Her first attempt resulted in a mass slime escape, leading to an intense moment of panic
and excitement as she tried to gather them all up before they got too far away.
Had the game said exactly what would happen if she mixed slimes in the same pen or put
too many of them in one, she would have been more careful and missed out on an entertaining
moment.
What's great is that the mistake didn’t have a massive consequence, it taught her to be more careful.
So it ended up being a much more interesting learning experience than a prompt ever could have been.
If important information is not communicated to the player, there should always be a reason
for it aside from the assumption that they already know how it works.
Really, the biggest barrier for new players is in how games communicate information, and
that isn’t just tied to teaching them controls or mechanics, it’s also about properly communicating
to them why they should keep playing.
And that is done by establishing
Something that has been pretty consistent throughout all of the experiments is that
my wife likes to have a specific goal to complete when she plays a game.
Beyond that, she also likes it when there are multiple ways to complete that goal.
Having a clear motivation is important for any player, but it is especially helpful to
those who don’t know enough about games to set their own goals.
Of all the titles she played for this experiment, Animal Crossing did the best job communicating
its primary goal to her along with the various ways to accomplish it.
She got a tent, accrued debt and was told that she needed to pay it off.
That made it clear to her what she needed to do and why she needed to do it.
With The Sims 4, Slime Rancher, and Stardew Valley she was given more of an open-ended
goal, that of building up her farm and/or home.
While all of 4 of these games essentially have the player do the same thing: earn money
to unlock new stuff, Animal Crossing made it a lot easier to quantify her success by
seeing how much she had left to pay her debts.
Due to the other titles not having as clear of benchmarks, she felt a bit directionless
when playing them.
Every activity in Animal Crossing had meaning to her because it was working toward paying
off her home, but the activities in the other games didn’t have that same sense of purpose
because the goal was more nebulous.
She knew the idea was to improve her farm, ranch or home, but it was a little more difficult to find out where to start.
To be honest, when watching her play Stardew Valley, I was shocked at how much she struggled
to find purpose because when I played it, I had no issue with that.
As I thought about it more though, I realized that before even starting the game, I had
specific goals in mind because it had been pitched to me as a spiritual successor to
Harvest Moon, a series I had put countless hours into throughout my childhood.
I knew what the major goals would be due to my understanding of and nostalgia for the
series it was paying homage to, so finding motivation in Stardew Valley took no effort
on my part.
Obviously, as my wife didn’t grow up with the same experience, she had nothing to pull
from when jumping into it.
I am sure that not every inexperienced player will have trouble finding direction and setting
their own objectives in games, but especially for those just starting out, it helps a lot
when games set various clear objectives for players to work towards.
Eventually I decided to tell her some of the major things she should work towards with
each game, and once I did she had an easier time getting into the core gameplay of most
of the titles with the exception of The Sims 4.
She really loved the idea of building and designing an awesome house that we would never
be able to afford in real life.
However, the actual act of earning enough money to build the house she wanted to build
was tedious and boring.
It consisted of her choosing jobs for each of us, and then sending us off to work for
about 8 hours, leading to the game fast forwarding for a minute or so while she waited for us
to get home.
Where in the other games, the way she earned money by engaging with the core gameplay,
in the Sims 4 she earned money through an absence of gameplay, creating to some dull
downtime and no real connection between her actions and the reward.
On top of that, the amount of money earned from one day of work is pretty tiny, so in
order for her to build the kind of house she wanted to, she would have had to play for
a long, long time.
Lady: I made 136 dollars. Killing it!
In the hopes of avoiding the lives of our Sims characters becoming an eerily accurate
reflection of our own, we decided to speed up the process so that she could engage with
the element of the game she found most interesting by, ya know, using cheat codes.
Once she had a cool 9,999,999 dollars, the Sims 4 went from being a game she had been
getting bored of quickly to one where she spent nearly a dozen hours designing houses.
While I’m glad the game had a way for her to play in the way she wanted to, I couldn’t
help but think that this sort of thing should have just been a game mode instead of an option
hidden behind a cheat code.
Cheats are probably most useful to inexperienced players, but given their lack of knowledge,
they are unlikely to know or assume that a game may have codes they could enter.
Obviously, this isn’t that prevalent of a problem as cheat codes have largely vanished
from games, but that actually leads to a bigger issue: a lot of titles don’t offer enough
options for players of all types.
I think a lot of games would benefit from following the lead of titles like Celeste
which has an assist mode that allows players to adjust various game mechanics to suit their
needs, while also making it clear that it isn’t the intended way to play the game.
When we talk about accessibility, it is often in relation to making a game less difficult,
but I also think it is important to consider it from the perspective of making a game more
interesting to certain players.
This sort of thing doesn’t work for every title out there, but for something like the
Sims 4 which has two pretty distinct phases of the game, living and building, allowing
for some sort of option that lets the player just focus on one of those things without
having it be tied to a cheat code, would be nice.
I’ve found that people who play games often are
far more willing to stick with a game they aren’t entirely sold on than someone who
doesn’t, so it is massively important to provide inexperienced players a reason to
want to keep playing, and really only one of these games did that for my wife.
So, are casual titles the best way for new players to get into games?
The answer is a definitive: probably.
These kinds of titles offer a relaxed environment for inexperienced players to get used to moving around in
a digital space and to learn the core concepts of the game.
While my wife never felt the same levels of excitement that she did when completing certain
tasks in more difficult games, she also didn’t have to deal with the frustration that comes
from continual failure.
With that said, there are a lot of other factors that go into choosing a good starting point
that go beyond a title’s gameplay.
The most obvious being finding a game that fits their interests.
In the first experiment, I threw my wife into a handful of titles with settings and stories
that she had little interest in.
My guess is that if someone has gone their entire life without really getting into video
games, they are probably more likely to be interested in the settings and concepts that
are prevalent in casual life sim titles.
There's also a lot of reasons on the more techincal side of things.
As we’ve continued doing these experiments I’ve noticed more and more that
my wife gets pretty nauseous while playing first person titles and that became extremely
apparent while playing Slime Rancher.
Lady: I just don't like these kinds of games.
Raz: What about it?
Lady: Just, yeah, cause they're nauseating.
Simulation sickness is something a fair amount of people suffer from while playing first
person titles, and, while it can affect anyone, people who play games regularly are less likely
to be consistently bothered by it because they’ve spent more time acclimating to that
sort of stimulus.
So, despite Slime Rancher having a lot of qualities that make it an appealing game for
new players, the mere fact that it is in a first person perspective might be really difficult
for a new player to adjust to without the proper aids.
After some research and experimentation, I found that having her play in windowed mode
with an unmoving image in the background ended up helping a fair bit.
In general though, first person titles are probably a little riskier to start with than
3rd person ones.
Beyond that, even just the way a game looked had a direct influence on her interest in
it.
In general, titles with a more retro art style have been far less appealing to her than ones
with more modern graphics.
One of her major complaints about Stardew Valley was that she couldn’t tell what things
were (I can’t tell what anything is).
Pixel art is often a little abstract, which means it calls for those looking at it to
extrapolate meaning from blocky edges and lack of detail.
For people like me who grew up playing games with this sort of style, it’s probably become
second nature to do this, but that wasn’t the case for my wife.
Obviously, it wasn’t impossible for her to figure out what certain things were supposed
to be, but it wasn’t always immediate and she had a harder time telling which things
she could and couldn’t interact with.
So, she preferred the games where she just didn’t need to think about that sort of
thing at all.
While everyone has different tastes and responses to artstyles,
when trying to get an inexperienced player into a game, it's important to
consider not only what kind of style is most appealing to them but also what will communicate information
in the most easily understandable way.
Lastly, I think games that have an optional co-op feature can be incredibly helpful to
new players.
Through these sorts of modes, they can pick up on various things that someone with more
experience does while playing and implement it in the way they play.
It is a far better teaching tool than standing over the shoulder and just telling them what
to do.
My wife and I ended up playing a fair bit of Animal Crossing together, and while I would
never say that I think it does a perfect job with local co-op, having to stay within the
same screen ended up teaching her a lot about how I play.
So, yeah, look, what I’m trying to say if it hasn’t become obvious already is that
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the perfect entry point into gaming for someone with similar
tastes as my wife.
She has put more time into New Horizons than all of the other games she’s played throughout
this series combined, and, unlike any other title, she’s continued to play it even when
I wasn’t around to watch..
So, I figured instead of trying to overanalyze why anymore than I already have, I’d just
ask her:
Raz: So why do you think you’ve played Animal Crossing more than any other game so far?
Lady: I think because everybody likes Animal Crossing.
Everyone’s playing it, and it strangely enough makes me feel like I’m a part of
this exciting thing that’s happening, and that’s what makes it fun.
And makes me spend, apparently more than 50 hours playing it.
Raz: 60
Lady: 60. Great.
And speaking of segways, wires?
Am I right?
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Anyway, thanks again to Raycon for sponsoring this video.
For all of you still watching, I appreciate you very, very much.
More stuff is on the way, so keep an eye out.
So yeah, I hope you have a great day and/or night, and I will see you in the next one.
Lady: Do you ever game so hard that it hurts?
Raz: *laughter*
Lady: What?
I’m being serious!
My thumbs hurt.
Like, genuinely.
Like, I’m not kidding.
Can you please stop laughing at me?