A Week In Comments

Did he play

*puts on glasses*

the back nine holes?

YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH…

I love games, I’d honestly call gaming “important” to me, but does that mean the people who don’t, right at this moment, don’t understand the why of it don’t deserve to experience what I know to be a great medium? Of course not.

It seems so simple, so easy to dismiss, I mean *EVERYONE* knows how to play Mario right? And even if they somehow have honestly never played a single Mario game before then clearly they should have no problem with it regardless since it’s something we were all doing when we were five and six years old, right? Wrong.

I mean, at least from a personal standpoint, when I was a kid games lasted me forever. Even just to beat one, as a five year old, as a seven year old, and so forth, took a long time. It wasn’t easy. It took me, when you get right down to it, countless hours of gameplay to actually beat the first Zelda, for instance, but then after I beat it I could do it in an afternoon. But it’s took time and experience to get to that point. Yes I can beat Mario 1 in a few minutes via warps and whatnot, so now a game like New Mario Bros isn’t super hard for me to run through on my first try, but again that’s because of a skill set I built when I was young and mentally mailable. To a thirty year old man whose never played Mario before? It’s an alien experience.

That guy needs someway to enter into this “world of games” that the rest of us take for total granted. Gaming now is a somewhat mature medium, adolescent perhaps a better term, but I think many of us forget how new it is overall and the fact that many of us have been there the entire way learning at the same pace the medium has been growing. We scoff at someone not understanding a Mario game, and get offended that someone might not be able to beat an even more complex game that designers might choose to include a “Super Guide” function in their titles as well.

That’s silly. You can’t expect someone with no gaming experience to game at the same level as the rest of us, it’s an acquired skill, a specific way of looking at an artificial world, at the trends and repeated solutions we see all over the medium. There’s a fun article about jumping on Kotaku, I think it points out something interesting; you don’t jump as a mode of locomotion in the real world, but in games it’s a wildly common ability. But to someone whose never played a game before they’re going to get stuck *reeeeeeally fast* in any but the most basic situation that required a fundamentally three dimension solution. To us that ten foot high wall over across the otherwise sealed off garden is the obvious exit point, to someone whose never played a game it simply might not even occur to them that they could simply jump out of an area from a point that’s several feet higher then their avatar’s head.

I know that’s a odd sounding example, but the point is that even the most fundamental preconceptions of how to play a game simply don’t exist in the mind of many people.

Things like Super Guide that honestly are just about teaching someone how to play the game as much as skipping a segment that’s “too hard” are are important if you ever want to expand gaming’s market beyond us life long gamers and into the rest of the world.

For those of you who don’t think these non gamers “deserve” to experience the things we do let me as a simple question? Why? Why are we so special? Why is it that because we can beat a friggin’ Mario game without hand holding we somehow deserve the exclusive rights to play videogames? Why can’t that thirty year old man whose never played a game before get a chance to experience something fantastic like Uncharted 2? Realize what we all know, that games can be a truly profound, and superior, form of entertainment. Even art.

It’s just something they need to learn how to do. You can’t appreciate the difference between a 1983 POS and a slick tricked out modern car if you don’t know how to drive. You can play a game if you don’t know “how to Game”. Things like this merely aim to close that gap. That’s a good thing.

I’ve been measuring money in Sandwiches for years! Don’t you be simplifying the mathematical importance of these very precise measurements! At least round it out properly and explain the different denominations of sandwich currency to the people!

It’s 3 bucks for a cheap sandwich.

It’s 4 for a breakfast sandwich.

It’s 5 for a footlong.

It’s 6 for a quality sandwich.

It’s up to 10 for a deluxe.

Next time you’re thinking of picking up a 10 dollar game, compare that to what you’d spend on that BLT deluxe. Or when you’re thinking about buying that episode of Core, wouldn’t you rather have that plastic wrapped sub that’s been sitting in the deli cooler for the whole day?

This is an important measurement people! And we can’t have it made too simple or it weakens the validity!

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