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

What Hacker News said

Recommends gundmc · 2020-04 · on “An analysis of unclear lessons in video games (2019)”

I really recommend clicking through and watching the referenced embedded video that forms the basis for this article. It's very well done and much more substantive than this summary. [this video]

Recommends vinkelhake · 2021-06 · on “The UX of video game tutorials”

This guy[1] put his non game playing wife in front of a bunch of games, one of them being SMB. He noted that she never learned how to sprint, and that the game doesn't tell you how to do it either. If you can't figure it out on your own, you have to be told about it, or read the manual. NES games (and other games of that era) were in general pretty bad at tutorials. Players back then were expected to figure things out for themselves, mostly by trial and error. The video has a bunch of other interesting observations. A common theme is that games often assume that the player has some base understanding of game play that might not always be there. [1] - [this video]

Recommends newswasboring · 2022-06 · on “Life is not short”

I don't know man, I downloaded Cup Head because it looked cute and it has been kicking my ass since like a month. I know it is one of those notoriously hard games but I think the point stands. I think games have moved away from precision challenges to more abstract ideas. Like Doki Doki Literature Club, I have no f'ing clue whatever that is all about but I am experiencing it. Challenge for me comes from the fact that it relies on peoples knowledge of tropes to enable different story progressions. I don't have that because last game I played was in like 2009. Another game I am having trouble with is watch dogs 2. I know, AAA game, made for less than pro gamers. But again, they are relying on

Recommends zjp · 2023-09 · on “Linux becoming a Windows / OS X clone”

I agree, for most people the system is a bootloader for Chrome. But this article is about one guy's disappointment he can't hold the whole system in his head anymore, and I'm just saying the user never cared about that in the first place. But also, if you've only used one operating system, there hasn't been any need to generalize what you've learned from that system interaction wise. We had to learn a bunch of computing conventions. Eventually you learn things like "most command line tools have -v,--verbose". Grandpa doesn't think computers work this way, he thinks Windows works this way and how should he know how Linux works. 'What games are like for someone who doesn't play games' is a pre

Cites savanaly · 2019-10 · on “Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test”

The funny thing is that even the easiest games are surprisingly difficult, even insurmountable, for otherwise capable humans who have not been "trained" on what to expect and learned domain knowledge through trial and error. See [0]. [0] [this video]

Cites throw149102 · 2020-08 · on “Over three billion people worldwide now play video games, study reports”

Adding onto this, imagine how you would feel if someone said "There are 3 billion Spanish speakers worldwide" But then you learned that only 500 million were really fluent, and the rest ranged from broken Spanish that was enough to get by in a Spanish speaking country to people who were forced to take a Spanish class in highschool and never used it again. I think this concept of "fluency" in games is probably a more useful metric. The question is, if I dump you in front of a game that you've never played before, but it conforms to the language of video game design, how quickly can you beat it? I would imagine that someone who only played Candy Crush would not understand how to move their cam

Cites rgoulter · 2022-03 · on “Ask HN: Best video games to expand teenage minds?”

> And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything ? I'm reminded of this video, where a game-playing husband discusses his non-gaming wife's attempts to play games. [this video] Part of the problem his wife ran into was that she lacked the 'literacy' for games that her husband (who had played games growing up) had, and so wasn't able to perform basic interactions which he had experience with. I think deep discussions about a topic require familiarity with the basics. - What kind of discussion can you hope to have or appreciate if you don't share fundamental understanding? You can probably ask what they found fun, or what's cool about it. > what does story arc m

Cites rilezg · 2022-04 · on “Video games are kinda boring”

This reminded me of the youtube video 'What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games', specifically the section 'Thinking Games Would Be Cooler' (begins at 14:43): [this video] I think games both appeal and do not appeal (to different people, or the same person at different times in life, respectively) because of the limitations of what the game allows you to do. It can be empowering to feel like you understand the world of the game you are playing, or disempowering to have to follow the arbitrary rules created by the developer.