The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Pre-message: Cara, I am not making fun of you. I’m trying to think about the nature of game design and how I take it for granted. Using two sticks is super hard.

Anyway, the point is, Cara came over this evening and attempted to play Portal 2 while I watched. As a very gamer type watching a non-gamer try to navigate Portal 2, it really makes me wonder about the method that games use to teach and the assumptions games make.

It’s interesting to me that Cara never seemed to really catch on that the game was feeding her how to beat it piece by piece. You learn one skill, then use it in conjunction with another skill in the next test chamber, and so on and so forth. She’d see each new situation and feel completely lost, even though there was only one additional element. Towards the end of the long play session, she was starting to get it a bit more, though. I saw her looking at the rooms and attempting to point out things she thought were features. “Is that one of those walls that pop out?” Things like that.
It kind of made me realize how much I automatically break down a game space like that into its component parts. There’s cover, there’s objective, there’s this, there’s that. I have to make myself step back to look at the game world as a world to explore, otherwise I’m immediately breaking it down into the points of interaction that are important to my goals. It never occurred to me how important that is. Maybe Cara would have done better in the original Portal, where things were much more clear about “these are the parts of the puzzle” than Portal 2, which is constantly showing you really cool environments and broken down locales in the early game. She approaches them like someone would approach an actual room that they walked into, instead of just an obstacle to solve. I wonder if there’s a way to make a game show you that’s the idea, more than Portal. I don’t really know.

Similarly, Cara had absolutely no concept of where her character was in the physical space without being in third person. Granted, Portal 2 is not great at showing you this, as you’re bouncing all around through portals, but even when she wasn’t doing intense shenanigans like that, she was fairly lost and unable to figure out where she had come from and where she was going.
It reminds me of an article I read part of or heard about or something like that? I think it was on Radio Lab. Anyway, there was a tribe of people with perfect navigation. They could navigate anywhere, even if they were taken somewhere blindfolded, with no issues. It turns out they had sort of a special sense where they could see a space they were in from the top down in their head, almost like a mini-map, wherever they were, and that sort of thing could be taught and passed down.
I feel like this is another thing video games have taught me, or at least something similar. I do tend to get lost the first time I go somewhere, but once I’ve been somewhere, I know how to find my way back and to that spot again using the same path. Thinking about it, that really must be an effect of the millions of hours of silly games I’ve played. It’s also a skill that basically every single game uses, and maybe takes for granted in its players.

Of course, there are other issues, like how difficult using a dual joystick controller is. (I’ve mentioned that before, and it does take practice for the uninitiated. I’m doing the best I can to give advice, but man, there’s nothing much one can say about it. It’s just about developing muscle memory.) She also was so focused on the game and trying to not suck at it that she spent all her time apologizing to me (not like I minded! I just wanted her to experience the game, because it’s fantastic, and I know she wants to get better at such controls.) that she sometimes missed all the AMAZING HUMOR in the game, which was a shame. I started kind of telling her to stop when people started talking. She also really liked Wheatly. So he’s universal!

Anyway, this is the results of my “study” which was actually just spending a nice evening with a friend. But, you know, also interesting in a study perspective. Or something.

Science.