The n00b and the 1337, Pt. 2: Skill and Education

Introduction

A week ago, I wrote the first part of this two-part series, so if you haven’t already read that, this col­umn will prob­a­bly make more sense if you go ahead and do that. I’ll wait here.

Oh good, you’re back. Anyway, as I men­tioned then, this week’s post is about the other half of the equa­tion: skill and edu­ca­tion.

The Unskilled Player

Not too long ago, my cousin picked up a copy of BioShock for the PC, a game which, though it is cer­tainly full of flaws, is prob­a­bly one of the best argu­ments for games-as-art from the first decade of XXI century. I rec­om­mended it to him on the grounds of its philosophically-rich con­cept, excel­lent atmos­phere, and also because it is just gen­er­ally a great deal of fun. I also rec­om­mend it to any of you who haven’t played it for the same rea­sons.

My cousin has been play­ing video games with me since I was five years old, and while I do not think he would clas­sify him­self as a “gamer,” he is quite fond of Starcraft, Civilization IV, Final Fantasy Tactics, Resident Evil 4, and sev­eral other games. As you might have deduced from above, cousin’s inter­ests so far have pri­mar­ily grav­i­tated towards strat­egy games, and pre­vi­ous to play­ing BioShock, his only real expe­ri­ence with a shooter (as far as I know) is Resident Evil 4 for the PS2/Gamecube, which is a sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent kind of game.

As a result, though he was (and is, as far as I know), quite open to enjoy­ing the heck out of BioShock, he has found him­self in a some­what awk­ward posi­tion– hav­ing little-to-no expe­ri­ence with the FPS genre, he has a cer­tain degree of dif­fi­culty with some of the basic skills nec­es­sary to play BioShock: mov­ing around in three-dimensional space with the use of a mouse and key­board, for instance. This some­what ham­pers his abil­ity to enjoy the game or appre­ci­ate its rel­a­tively sophis­ti­cated nar­ra­tive.

This may sound like I’m mak­ing fun of my cousin, but I’m really not– there is noth­ing excep­tion­ally intu­itive about the con­trol schemes and fun­da­men­tals of video games that have risen to promi­nence in the video game world. Because most of us who clas­sify our­selves as “gamers” have been play­ing video games since child­hood, we learned the basics of these con­trol schemes and fun­da­men­tal con­ceits a long time ago, and can thus some­times be frus­trated when con­fronted with a rel­a­tive beginner’s attempts to do things we have long since stopped think­ing of as chal­leng­ing.

Any gamer who has ever tried to teach a new­comer how to play a shooter or plat­former can under­stand what I mean– watch­ing some­one else get hung up on pieces of scenery, repeat­edly for­get which but­ton is the “shoot” but­ton, con­sis­tently miss sim­ple jumps, and dra­mat­i­cally shoot past the ene­mies can be a try­ing expe­ri­ence. We become frus­trated, because these skills and con­cepts have been ingrained in us for a very long time– it’s anal­o­gous to lis­ten­ing to a rookie vio­lin­ist, or watch­ing a tod­dler try to climb a flight of stairs.

But it’s not a result of any par­tic­u­lar fail­ing on the newcomer’s part that he or she has trou­ble with any of these games. There is noth­ing inher­ent in every­day human expe­ri­ence which pre­pares a per­son to be able to move an avatar in three-dimensional space with two thumb­sticks, or to map spe­cific actions to par­tic­u­lar motions of the thumbs. In real life, the badguys do not have “weak points” which require par­tic­u­lar sequences of actions to defeat, and rarely “tele­graph” their attacks. The only way to gain these skills and under­stand these con­ceits is to play a lot of video games.

As a result, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine some­one who lacks these basic skills and knowl­edge really enjoy­ing or appre­ci­at­ing the artis­tic qual­i­ties found in many of these games, and it is indeed under­stand­able that many such peo­ple might be a bit skep­ti­cal that said artis­tic qual­ity even exists. Thus, the fact that video games often require some mea­sure of skill to appre­ci­ate serves as a bar­rier to both appre­ci­a­tion of a spe­cific work, and to appre­ci­a­tion of the entire medium.

Education and Skill in Other Arts

I am not sug­gest­ing that all video games should become eas­ier, because this is not a prob­lem unique to video games, though it is per­haps more true of video games than of most other media. Most great art requires some mea­sure of skill to under­stand and appre­ci­ate. Literature, obvi­ously, requires the abil­ity to read a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage, which is prob­a­bly a more dif­fi­cult skill than any found in video games. Most of the great­est works of lit­er­a­ture require not only pro­fi­ciency in read­ing, but a great deal of mas­tery– how many peo­ple have found Shakespeare or Tolkien bor­ing and unin­ter­est­ing sim­ply because they couldn’t read well enough to under­stand it? To fol­low a com­pli­cated and twisty polit­i­cal thriller requires some skill in keep­ing track of char­ac­ters and moti­va­tions, and a great deal of the best music in the world sounds only like noise to an une­d­u­cated ear.

We gen­er­ally under­stand that some (or maybe even most) works of art are inac­ces­si­ble with­out a cer­tain amount of edu­ca­tion. One would not hand a five-year-old child a copy of Hamlet and expect him or her to truly appre­ci­ate its depth of emo­tion and mas­tery of lan­guage, or a non-Russian speaker an untrans­lated copy of Crime and Punishment and then become offended when it can­not hold his or her atten­tion for even a moment. Similarly, one should prob­a­bly not direct some­one who has never played an FPS to BioShock, so, sorry, cousin.

But while it’s true that most art requires some skill and edu­ca­tion, there’s some­thing about video games as a medium that involves more “active” skill. It’s not exactly fair to char­ac­ter­ize read­ing a dif­fi­cult book, lis­ten­ing to com­plex music, etc, as “pas­sive,” (espe­cially in some instances), but there’s a way in which the rela­tion­ship between artist and audi­ence is gen­er­ally more one-sided than it is with video games.

This causes me to won­der if a bet­ter ana­logue for the rela­tion­ship between game design team and player might be the rela­tion­ship between com­poser and musi­cian than between author and reader. There is obvi­ously a major dif­fer­ence in that in music, there’s usu­ally an audi­ence as well as a musi­cian, and usu­ally, in video games, the musician-role, the player, is also the audi­ence. This is espe­cially true in the “dance-like” games I men­tioned last time (though that starts to dan­ger­ously mix my metaphors).

In music, the “art” seems to be from two sources: the musi­cal ideas writ­ten by the com­poser, which is then inter­preted by the musi­cian. As such, we can refer to two dis­tinct artis­tic enti­ties: the Bach unac­com­pa­nied cello suites, and Pablo Casals’ per­for­mance of said cello suites. Bach’s cello suites are beau­ti­ful works of art of their own accord, but they are more obvi­ously so when per­formed by Casals than by Smith. Similarly, a “dance-like” game like Prince of Persia is a pretty decent (in my esti­ma­tion) work of art, but more so when per­formed by a skilled player than by an unskilled player.

This is less true of non “dance-like” games, where the player’s skill does not nec­es­sar­ily cre­ate art, but there’s still some truth to it, I think. Mass Effect is much more artis­ti­cally inter­est­ing when its player selects dia­logue options which por­tray Shepard as a con­sis­tent per­son­al­ity than if he or she wavers schiz­o­phreni­cally between Renegade and Paragon options with no con­sis­tency or ratio­nal­ity, and in order to appre­ci­ate BioShock’s moral dilem­mas and atmos­phere, as men­tioned last time, the player has to be skilled enough that he or she can, in fact, defeat the Big Daddies and numer­ous splicers wan­der­ing through Rapture, rather than sim­ply avoid­ing them or being mur­dered by them.

Critics of Games-as-art

One area where this prob­lem of “skill” really raises its head is when defend­ers of games-as-art attempt to get crit­ics of the same to play some of gaming’s great­est artis­tic moments. After Ebert’s var­i­ous famous denounce­ments of games-as-art, many peo­ple responded by telling him to play Shadow of the Colossus. Yahtzee Croshaw’s response to said sug­ges­tion was “…whoa, for a first timer? Don’t book your­self on the London marathon before you can walk.”

Since pre­sum­ably most crit­ics of games-as-art have not played many video games in the last decade or so (or, I sug­gest, per­haps rather face­tiously, they would not be crit­ics), it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that they would have very many of the skills and vocab­u­lary nec­es­sary to really enjoy and expe­ri­ence most of the great video games. Most of those games are aimed at estab­lished gamers and, as such, don’t make much allowance for peo­ple still learn­ing the basics.

This seems like a prob­lem, but I’m not sure that it really is, in prac­tice. As men­tioned above, most artis­tic media have sim­i­lar barriers-to-entry, and I don’t think video games need to apol­o­gize for theirs. The like­li­hood that Roger Ebert is ever actu­ally going to lis­ten to the sug­ges­tions of the gam­ing com­mu­nity and pick up an Xbox is slim, and sim­i­larly, I expect most crit­ics of games-as-art will not be very inter­ested in play­ing games in the first place.

Frankly, that’s fine. We in the gam­ing com­mu­nity should prob­a­bly quit try­ing to get var­i­ous older crit­ics of other media to pay atten­tion to ours. I doubt that new authors par­tic­u­larly care what Roger Ebert thinks, or that film­mak­ers pay much atten­tion to what a book reviewer might say of their work. The fact is that any­one who cat­e­gor­i­cally denies video games any artis­tic worth and also refuses to play them is sim­ply not worth our time. These folks are not likely to change their minds any time soon, and it’s not worth beat­ing a dead horse to try to get them to. They just don’t know what they’re talk­ing about.

New Players or Less Vitriolic Critics

But in the case of peo­ple like my cousin, newer, rel­a­tively unskilled play­ers who would still like to play these games, there is a prob­lem. Furthermore, one can imag­ine that not all crit­ics of games-as-art are quite as cer­tain or vit­ri­olic as Ebert has usu­ally been. What sort of games should adult non-gamers play if they wish to become gamers, and to learn the basic skills and vocab­u­lary nec­es­sary in gam­ing? And what sort of games should we use to show crit­ics who are nev­er­the­less will­ing to pos­si­bly engage in dis­cus­sion? For my own two cents, I rec­om­mend coop­er­a­tive games that place the new­comer on the same side as more vet­eran play­ers, thereby enabling the new­comer to learn from more expe­ri­enced play­ers, as well as pro­vid­ing a lit­er­ally “safer” way to learn, as, pre­sum­ably, the newcomer’s every mis­take will not be pun­ished by death as it would be in a com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tion or in many single-player expe­ri­ences.

Specifically, for the bud­ding shooter enthu­si­ast, I would rec­om­mend Left 4 Dead, for a myr­iad of rea­sons, includ­ing its rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity, coop­er­a­tive bent, end­less replaya­bil­ity, and bite-sized dura­tion. It’s also just gen­er­ally an excel­lent game, and so will pre­sum­ably help sell the new player on video games both as enter­tain­ment and art.

In Conclusion

Over the course of the last two posts, I have talked about two sides of the same coin: the prob­lem of dif­fi­culty, and the neces­sity of skill. Games need to have some sem­blance of dif­fi­culty, or they become unin­ter­est­ing, incon­sis­tent or unre­lat­able, and play­ers will, accord­ingly, need to have some degree of skill or they will be, at best, sim­ply unable to engage with the game and expe­ri­ence what­ever it might have to offer.

This is a prob­lem for games devel­op­ers, as they have to decide how hard to make their games, and what audi­ence a game will be acces­si­ble to. It is worth keep­ing in mind as play­ers, as well– espe­cially when inter­act­ing with less-experienced play­ers. Not every­one has sunk hun­dreds or thou­sands (if not hun­dreds of thou­sands) of hours into video games as many of us have– and will there­fore have a harder time under­stand­ing why BioShock or Shadow of the Colossus is really all that excit­ing.

A Question

Having men­tioned above that most games are a lit­tle inac­ces­si­ble to the bud­ding gamer or rea­son­able but inex­pe­ri­enced critic, I ask you, the Audience of the Analytically About Games, to give me some sug­ges­tions for five games that might be help­ful to a new player. These games should be rel­a­tively easy but still pos­sess some artis­tic worth (so not just Super Mario Bros, prob­a­bly). They should be inter­est­ing to play but have a rel­a­tively easy dif­fi­culty curve, and should in some way show off what video games can do, whether in graph­ics, sound, writ­ing, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, or any num­ber of other qual­i­ties.

Please com­ment below with your sug­ges­tions.