Not too long ago, my wife, more popularly
known as the lady I live with, made the mistake of agreeing to be the subject of a series
of informal experiments where she’d try out a handful of titles in order for me to
see what games are like for those who don’t spend much time playing them. Through these informal experiments, I’ve
grown a better understanding of the challenges that come with learning the language of video
games for the first time. A lot of barriers exist for those who are
unfamilia
r with typical game conventions and mechanics, as most titles are designed in
a way that assumes players have a baseline understanding of how games work, making it
a difficult hobby for new players to pick up. With that said, it has been observed by many
of you that the titles I’ve had her play aren’t always that beginner friendly. And, well, yeah, that’s a fair point. So, I decided to continue her video game education
and in turn mine by running another informal experiment, this time having her
try out some
of the games that I probably should have had her play in the first place. Ones less focused on fighting enemies and
working through difficult platforming challenges, and more centered on relaxed gameplay that
somewhat aligns with her real life interests. So I had her play 4 titles all of which were
roughly in the life sim genre. Those being, Stardew Valley, The Sims 4, Slime
Rancher, and, of course, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I chose these games partly because they’ve
been high
ly recommended by many of you as great entry points into gaming and also because
they share the core loop of gaining resources that are used to build up and customize the
player’s home base, which was an aspect my wife really enjoyed when she played Minecraft,
so I figured these titles would give her a similar feeling. Ultimately, I wanted to see what about these
titles make so many people consider them good entry points into gaming while also examining
ways in which they may fall short for new
players. As usual, I watched on as a mostly quiet observer,
only occasionally reminding her of mechanics that each game had already gone over and sometimes
teaching her mechanics that the games never taught. So, this is how it went. In general, she found it a lot easier to figure
out how to interact with various things in these titles, and when I asked her about it,
she said it was because she knew how to do most of the things the games wanted her to
do in real life. Where bouncing off of stuff
with a shovel
to reach higher places or killing an enemy up close to get health drops only really happen
in video games, things like doing yard work, building relationships, and paying debts are
activities she’s experienced in her own life, which made it easier for her to guess how
to interact with those mechanics. So with fishing in Animal Crossing; while
the game didn’t explicitly tell her when to press the A button, she knew to wait until
the fish pulled the bobber under the water instead of
when it first nibbled because she
has fished before and was able to use her knowledge of that in the game. By having the core gameplay mechanics center
around simple and familiar activities, it made it easier for her to grasp the basics
of those games. On the other side of things, Slime Rancher
which centers around sucking up slimes with a vacuum gun, storing them in a corral, and
then harvesting their excrement to then sell for money took a little longer for her to
grasp. Obviously, I don’t thi
nk new players should
only limit themselves to titles that are reflections of real life, but I do think that for someone
just starting out, it can be a good way for them to familiarize themselves with controls
and moving around in a digital space without being overwhelmed with somewhat obscure concepts. Along with her just having a little more experience
with games now, it also helped that none of these titles had all that much urgency to
them. She had the time and space to figure things
out wit
hout the threat of something killing her. For the most part at least. Lady: Are you serious?! While failing to figure out a mechanic in
a lot of games can lead to dying and losing a lot of progress, with these, that
was less of a factor, so she figured out how to do things without as much frustration. That isn’t to say there was no frustration
with figuring out controls and mechanics though as these titles still fell victim to a lot of
the same issues that exist in the other games she’s played.
The tutorial for the Sims 4 bombarded her with far
too much information in a tiny window and also had her engage with some of the more
mundane aspects of the game. Inversely, Stardew Valley’s tutorial was
boiled down to this, leaving her with little direction. Slime Rancher gave a lot of useful tips that
were on the far side right side of the screen, and as she typically had tunnel vision for
whatever was directly in front of her, she sometimes missed important information. And Animal Crossing,
despite over explaining
nearly everything in the game, doesn’t tell players certain bits of information, the most
important being how to sprint. As a side note, given that sprinting in previous
Animal Crossing games caused the grass to fade away, I assumed it would do the same
in this one, so I decided not to tell her that springint was even an option in order
to keep our island looking pristine. I later learned that that is not a mechanic
in New Horizons though, so, uh, whoops. Lady: Really? N
ow you tell me that? While I’ve talked a fair bit throughout
this series about how unexplained mechanics like these can act as a massive barrier to
new players, throughout this experiment, I noticed a few instances where unexplained
mechanics actually benefited my wife’s experience. Like in Slime Rancher. One of the early challenges of the game is
figuring out how to best store the various slimes. There aren’t really prompts that explain
how so as my wife collected various slimes, she dropped th
em in corrals without much rhyme
or reason. Her first attempt resulted in a mass slime
escape, leading to an intense moment of panic and excitement as she tried to gather them
all up before they got too far away. Had the game said exactly what would happen
if she mixed slimes in the same pen or put too many of them in one, she would have been
more careful and missed out on an entertaining moment. What's great is that the mistake didn’t have a massive consequence,
it taught her to be more careful
. So it ended up being a much more interesting learning experience than a prompt ever could have been. If important information is not communicated
to the player, there should always be a reason for it aside from the assumption that they
already know how it works. Really, the biggest barrier for new players
is in how games communicate information, and that isn’t just tied to teaching them controls
or mechanics, it’s also about properly communicating to them why they should keep playing. And that
is done by establishing Something that has been pretty consistent
throughout all of the experiments is that my wife likes to have a specific goal to complete
when she plays a game. Beyond that, she also likes it when there
are multiple ways to complete that goal. Having a clear motivation is important for
any player, but it is especially helpful to those who don’t know enough about games
to set their own goals. Of all the titles she played for this experiment,
Animal Crossing did the best job c
ommunicating its primary goal to her along with the various
ways to accomplish it. She got a tent, accrued debt and was told
that she needed to pay it off. That made it clear to her what she needed
to do and why she needed to do it. With The Sims 4, Slime Rancher, and Stardew
Valley she was given more of an open-ended goal, that of building up her farm and/or
home. While all of 4 of these games essentially
have the player do the same thing: earn money to unlock new stuff, Animal Crossing made
it
a lot easier to quantify her success by seeing how much she had left to pay her debts. Due to the other titles not having as clear
of benchmarks, she felt a bit directionless when playing them. Every activity in Animal Crossing had meaning
to her because it was working toward paying off her home, but the activities in the other
games didn’t have that same sense of purpose because the goal was more nebulous. She knew the idea was to improve her farm, ranch or home, but it was a little more diffi
cult to find out where to start. To be honest, when watching her play Stardew
Valley, I was shocked at how much she struggled to find purpose because when I played it,
I had no issue with that. As I thought about it more though, I realized
that before even starting the game, I had specific goals in mind because it had been
pitched to me as a spiritual successor to Harvest Moon, a series I had put countless
hours into throughout my childhood. I knew what the major goals would be due to
my underst
anding of and nostalgia for the series it was paying homage to, so finding
motivation in Stardew Valley took no effort on my part. Obviously, as my wife didn’t grow up with
the same experience, she had nothing to pull from when jumping into it. I am sure that not every inexperienced player
will have trouble finding direction and setting their own objectives in games, but especially
for those just starting out, it helps a lot when games set various clear objectives for
players to work towards. Ev
entually I decided to tell her some of the
major things she should work towards with each game, and once I did she had an easier
time getting into the core gameplay of most of the titles with the exception of The Sims
4. She really loved the idea of building and
designing an awesome house that we would never be able to afford in real life. However, the actual act of earning enough
money to build the house she wanted to build was tedious and boring. It consisted of her choosing jobs for each
of u
s, and then sending us off to work for about 8 hours, leading to the game fast forwarding
for a minute or so while she waited for us to get home. Where in the other games, the way she earned
money by engaging with the core gameplay, in the Sims 4 she earned money through an
absence of gameplay, creating to some dull downtime and no real connection between her
actions and the reward. On top of that, the amount of money earned
from one day of work is pretty tiny, so in order for her to build the k
ind of house she
wanted to, she would have had to play for a long, long time. Lady: I made 136 dollars. Killing it! In the hopes of avoiding the lives of our
Sims characters becoming an eerily accurate reflection of our own, we decided to speed
up the process so that she could engage with the element of the game she found most interesting
by, ya know, using cheat codes. Once she had a cool 9,999,999 dollars, the
Sims 4 went from being a game she had been getting bored of quickly to one where she
spent nearly a dozen hours designing houses. While I’m glad the game had a way for her
to play in the way she wanted to, I couldn’t help but think that this sort of thing should
have just been a game mode instead of an option hidden behind a cheat code. Cheats are probably most useful to inexperienced
players, but given their lack of knowledge, they are unlikely to know or assume that a
game may have codes they could enter. Obviously, this isn’t that prevalent of
a problem as cheat codes have l
argely vanished from games, but that actually leads to a bigger
issue: a lot of titles don’t offer enough options for players of all types. I think a lot of games would benefit from
following the lead of titles like Celeste which has an assist mode that allows players
to adjust various game mechanics to suit their needs, while also making it clear that it
isn’t the intended way to play the game. When we talk about accessibility, it is often
in relation to making a game less difficult, but I also
think it is important to consider
it from the perspective of making a game more interesting to certain players. This sort of thing doesn’t work for every
title out there, but for something like the Sims 4 which has two pretty distinct phases
of the game, living and building, allowing for some sort of option that lets the player
just focus on one of those things without having it be tied to a cheat code, would be
nice. I’ve found that people who play games often are far more willing to stick wit
h a game they
aren’t entirely sold on than someone who doesn’t, so it is massively important to
provide inexperienced players a reason to want to keep playing, and really only one
of these games did that for my wife. So, are casual titles the best way for new
players to get into games? The answer is a definitive: probably. These kinds of titles offer a relaxed environment for
inexperienced players to get used to moving around in a digital space and to learn the core concepts
of the game. While m
y wife never felt the same levels of
excitement that she did when completing certain tasks in more difficult games, she also didn’t
have to deal with the frustration that comes from continual failure. With that said, there are a lot of other factors
that go into choosing a good starting point that go beyond a title’s gameplay. The most obvious being finding a game that
fits their interests. In the first experiment, I threw my wife into
a handful of titles with settings and stories that she had l
ittle interest in. My guess is that if someone has gone their
entire life without really getting into video games, they are probably more likely to be
interested in the settings and concepts that are prevalent in casual life sim titles. There's also a lot of reasons on the more techincal side of things. As we’ve continued doing these
experiments I’ve noticed more and more that my wife gets pretty nauseous while playing
first person titles and that became extremely apparent while playing Slime Ra
ncher. Lady: I just don't like these kinds of games. Raz: What about it? Lady: Just, yeah, cause they're nauseating. Simulation sickness is something a fair amount
of people suffer from while playing first person titles, and, while it can affect anyone,
people who play games regularly are less likely to be consistently bothered by it because
they’ve spent more time acclimating to that sort of stimulus. So, despite Slime Rancher having a lot of
qualities that make it an appealing game for new pla
yers, the mere fact that it is in a
first person perspective might be really difficult for a new player to adjust to without the
proper aids. After some research and experimentation, I
found that having her play in windowed mode with an unmoving image in the background ended
up helping a fair bit. In general though, first person titles are
probably a little riskier to start with than 3rd person ones. Beyond that, even just the way a game looked
had a direct influence on her interest in it. In ge
neral, titles with a more retro art style
have been far less appealing to her than ones with more modern graphics. One of her major complaints about Stardew
Valley was that she couldn’t tell what things were (I can’t tell what anything is). Pixel art is often a little abstract, which
means it calls for those looking at it to extrapolate meaning from blocky edges and
lack of detail. For people like me who grew up playing games
with this sort of style, it’s probably become second nature to do this
, but that wasn’t
the case for my wife. Obviously, it wasn’t impossible for her
to figure out what certain things were supposed to be, but it wasn’t always immediate and
she had a harder time telling which things she could and couldn’t interact with. So, she preferred the games where she just
didn’t need to think about that sort of thing at all. While everyone has different tastes and responses to artstyles, when trying to get an inexperienced player into a game, it's important to consider not o
nly what kind of style is most appealing
to them but also what will communicate information in the most easily understandable way. Lastly, I think games that have an optional
co-op feature can be incredibly helpful to new players. Through these sorts of modes, they can pick
up on various things that someone with more experience does while playing and implement
it in the way they play. It is a far better teaching tool than standing
over the shoulder and just telling them what to do. My wife and I
ended up playing a fair bit
of Animal Crossing together, and while I would never say that I think it does a perfect job
with local co-op, having to stay within the same screen ended up teaching her a lot about
how I play. So, yeah, look, what I’m trying to say if
it hasn’t become obvious already is that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the perfect
entry point into gaming for someone with similar tastes as my wife. She has put more time into New Horizons than
all of the other games she’s played
throughout this series combined, and, unlike any other
title, she’s continued to play it even when I wasn’t around to watch.. So, I figured instead of trying to overanalyze
why anymore than I already have, I’d just ask her: Raz: So why do you think you’ve played Animal
Crossing more than any other game so far? Lady: I think because everybody likes Animal
Crossing. Everyone’s playing it, and it strangely
enough makes me feel like I’m a part of this exciting thing that’s happening, and
that’s what
makes it fun. And makes me spend, apparently more than 50
hours playing it. Raz: 60 Lady: 60. Great. And speaking of segways, wires? Am I right? As someone who constantly listens to stuff,
it’s really nice to not be tethered to a device all the time, so I really like using
stuff that’s wireless, and this video’s sponsor, Raycon provides just that. Raycon makes high quality wireless earbuds
that sound as great as other premium earbud brands but start at about half the price. Beyond just sounding
good, they are also really
comfortable, to the point where I almost always forget that I’m even wearing them. And if you’re the type of person who likes
to exercise or just shake your head around a lot, mine have never fallen out of my ear,
which is great. Their latest model, the everyday E25 earbuds
are awesome. They have 6 hours of playtime, seamless bluetooth
pairing, tons of bass, a more compact design that gives a nice, noise-isolating fit, and
they also come in new, fun colors. And if you
click the link in the description,
you can get 15% off your order. All in all, Raycon makes great earbuds that
I use all the time, so if you’re in the market for a really awesome pair of them,
you should check Raycon out. Anyway, thanks again to Raycon for sponsoring
this video. For all of you still watching, I appreciate
you very, very much. More stuff is on the way, so keep an eye out. So yeah, I hope you have a great day and/or night,
and I will see you in the next one. Lady: Do you ever gam
e so hard that it hurts? Raz: *laughter* Lady: What? I’m being serious! My thumbs hurt. Like, genuinely. Like, I’m not kidding. Can you please stop laughing at me?
Comments
Edit: Some people have corrected me on the Sims 4 having an option to build stuff without a budget. That is my bad for missing it. I thought I had checked all the menus for it, but I missed it. I even searched online before the video to see if there was a mode, but the results pretty much all directed me towards cheat codes. Hey! Thank you for watching. If you would like some extra content, I post videos of my wife's (also known as the Lady I Live With) playthroughs along with a monthly Q+A podcast on my patreon, so if you have the interest and means to do so, consider supporting: https://www.patreon.com/razbuten. Also, catch me over on Twitch where I stream games and whatever: https://www.twitch.tv/razbuten Anyway, I appreciate you all for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this one. It was a lot of fun to make, and getting to chronicle my wife's journey into games (and descent into madness) has been a pleasure. I look forward to making more in the future. In the immediate horizon though I have a super self-indulgent piece about feelings or whatever, and I have some ideas on a piece about a certain animated show that just made it's way back onto Netflix, so look forward to those coming out soonish (at least, soon by Raz's standards).
"Lady I live with" "Child I created"
The lady I live with: "I have never played games before." You: "Then let's begin with Dark Souls."
"I decided not to tell her sprinting was an option" Me, with over 100 hours in Animal Crossing, who never realised sprinting was an option: "THE. WHAT."
making her play the sims 4 in console is the cruelest thing you've done to her
I'd like to see the lady you live with attempt to teach another non-gamer how to play some of the games she's liked.
"Dear Lady I caught the spider that killed you 6 times already. Feel free to kill it back. I left it in your house. From Raz" Raz is such a good husband.
I'd like to see her take on what I'm going to call "silly little puzzle games" - Untitled Goose Game, Unpacking, Witchy Life Story (upcoming). No timer/pressure/consequences, but has goals that are more structured and puzzle-based rather than sandbox sims.
So cute!!! My 66 year old mom got gifted a switch lite and animal crossing. The amount of dedication she put into it was just so adorable. She comes to me telling me about new mechanics she discovered hahaha. My dad even recognized her obsession. He is well aware of her routine of getting to nooks before it closes at night.
I can't wait for Season 2 where your wife becomes ''a casual gamer'' or Season 19 where she becomes a pro player and wins tournaments
I love that you went and got the bag hat item for your characters.
It's interesting she found Animal Crossing to have a clear goal because as an experienced gamer, I had difficulty getting into Animal Crossing and didn't end up playing that long. It felt directionless to me, go make money to.. upgrade my house.. but then what? Also making money was difficult, and getting upgrades (crafting stuff) seemed very random. I felt like I was just wandering the island. Whereas Stardew Valley, I had clear goals and had to manage time during the day to try to get in everything I wanted to do.
My Fiance never ever played video games growing up. We got a switch, and I got her animal crossing last week. She hasn't stopped playing. She loves it.
“Do you ever game so hard that it hurts?” It’s called “Mario Party” sister.
The year is 2025, Razbuten just uploaded “What winning fighting game tournaments is like for someone who doesn't play games” and people are starting to question that last part
I love how patiently this series treats the difficulty new players find with games. I started to play games older than most and I felt as if there was a lot of prior knowledge that was just expected of me, and that when asking about it many people would harshly brush you off as a "fake gamer" or just stupid. but I love the consideration for new players that goes into these videos, makes me feel less like I just suck at video games and more that I'm just new to it. love this series a lot
When I first played sims as a child I found it so hard because I wanted to do so many things but had no money. Instead of discovering cheat codes, I found out you could assume the identity of other, already existing sims. I ended up building and buying whatever I wanted as the one of the richest families in town, the Goth family. I think this is a way new players are able to take advantage of large cash sums for the first time, not just by using cheats.
"Do you ever game so hard it hurts?" That's it she's one of us now.
"Do you ever game so hard it hurts?" I felt that on a spiritual level.
This guy keeps flexing the fact that he has a wife. Stop making me insecure.