Razbuten
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2023
20:38 · 17M views · Sep 28, 2019
Razbuten has his wife, who has never played games, try a sampling of titles and shows where she struggles. It highlights unspoken game conventions that experienced players take for granted.
HN uses it to illustrate learned literacy in game and software UX, and how unfamiliar conventions confuse newcomers.
8 comments from Hacker News
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 my knowledge of AAA games for conveyance. I regularly have moments where I am thinking, what do I do? where do I go? Now I have played GTA vice city, so open world is not an alien concept. But the scale of it all, its just magnificently complex. Edit: I occurs to me all this can just be the fact that I suck at video games. But I used to be good at them, that's the point. Edit 2: This video explains my feelings better than me this video
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 pretty good video about a similar thing. It's easy for you, you know computing vernacular. this video
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
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
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 camera around in a 3D environment, for example.[1] You could extend the metaphor further, for example Spanish is spoken in many different ways around the globe, and therefore some people who speak one dialect of Spanish can't understand another dialect of Spanish. The same could be true for games, and we would need to classify and understand these dialects. [1] this video Interesting video talking about what games are like for a non-gamer, shows an example of not understanding how to move the camera and the player at the same time.