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

Razbuten

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2023.
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 7 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

16M views7 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentSoftware designGame design

An analysis of how a non-gamer struggles with unspoken video game conventions, highlighting the importance of intuitive UX and game design.

About a year ago, my wife asked if she could play a game. Instead of simply saying yes, I decided to run an informal experiment where I had her play a sampling of games to see how, after a lifetime of not playing games, she would do. These are the results. Patreon: patreon.com/razbuten Twitter: twitter.com/theRazbuten Mass Effect Footage from World of Longplays - BoneofHead youtube.com/user/cubex55/featured longplays.eu/news.php #GamingForANonGamer

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an insightful look into game literacy and how experienced players take UI and UX conventions for granted.

gundmcon Hacker News • Recommends

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. link to this video
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vinkelhakeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The UX of video game tutorials”

This guy1 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 - link to this video
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newswasboringon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Life is not short”

…hinking, 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 link to this video…
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zjpon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Linux becoming a Windows / OS X clone”

…ventually 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. link to this video…
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savanalyon Hacker News • Mentions

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 link to this video
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throw149102on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Over three billion people worldwide now play video games, study reports”

…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 link to 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.…
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rgoulteron Hacker News • Mentions

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. link to 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…
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rilezgon Hacker News • Mentions

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): link to 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.
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