The Assumed Language of Video Games
Let's talk video games. This super interesting video came out last week where a gaming YouTuber gets his wife (a complete non-gamer) to play video games while he sits and silently watches. As a lifelong gamer, it was completely fascinating to see how enmeshed some of the language is.
It reminded me of another anecdote from my life. I live in the US, but I was not born here and ended up spending almost my entire prepubescent years in a foreign country. My family came here rather abruptly through something called the Diversity Visa Lottery (story for another time). The startling change was extremely stressful and while it took a long time, I eventually figured out and internalized almost the entire discography of American social minutiae and etiquette.
Years ago, I somehow stumbled upon guides posted by US universities intended for their foreign exchange students and that shit was hilarious because I had forgotten how much of a gap there is to bridge. I couldn't find the pages anymore but it had advice like "If someone invites you to dinner, do not show up 3 hours early" and "If someone invites you to lunch, do not assume it is a romantic engagement." etc. It was full of advice that pretty much everyone living the culture takes for granted, but is otherwise eye-opening to a newbie.
So back to video games. The video above made me realize how often the art exists behind an insurmountable gatekeeping mechanism for many people. It's fair to say that I adore video games, primarily because the experiences it provides through the medium are impossible to have in any other way. I can think of many examples, and here just a few:
Europa Universalis 3 is an epic strategy game set around the medieval and renaissance period. There is no real 'goal' per se, but the mechanics are in place to subtly encourage certain behaviors. For example, a higher prestige rating gives you better research, more tax revenue, and a smaller chance of revolt. When playing as Spain, one of the ways you can increase your prestige was to devote yourself to colonialism. Before I knew it, I had all of Latin America colonized with nearly all of its population wiped out from disease. I felt awful, but I also realized that that I embodied the incentives of someone like Charles V to a T.
The heart-pounding terror I felt at the fear of losing my character in a roguelike due to a tactical blunder. Most notably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Invisible Inc. Roguelikes typically have a feature called perma-death where if your character dies, you have to start all over. It has a way of focusing your attention.
The sense of scale and helplessness against an all powerful AI which doesn't even consider your existence in NaissanceE.
It often saddens me that there is no convenient way to share this admiration with other people. If I read a good book, see a good movie, listen to good music, it's trivial to share it with others (unless it's a 3 hour Russian sci-fi slog, or a 1,000+ page epic tale with sword and sandals fantasy, but you get the point). Video games have gotten more popular over time, but there's still somewhat of a niche hobby. For one, there is still a gender divide. An oft-quoted statistic is that 45% percent of gamers are women are women, but that always struck me as bullshit on a gut level. My girlfriend plays Dark Souls but she's the exception in my limited experience even though most of my friends are women.
So, I'm not sure if I have a point besides pontificating on where video games could become more :air quotes: accessible :air quotes: not from the standpoint of accommodating disabilities (I think they obviously should on that point) but on having a greater penetration into the cultural zeitgeist. The video I linked above highlights a slew of practices that developers and the gaming community at large have silently internalized. I'm not sure if there is a feasible way to break that bubble.
One thing that did strike me as strange was just how much of a beginner the Razbuten’s (the YouTuber) wife was. The lady is married to a dude who makes gaming videos for a living yet a significant amount of basic gaming vocabulary failed to transfer. I was surprised that it could be that inscrutable to outsiders and it made me wonder how much of the assumptions developers make act as a de facto barrier. It's always possible that she's just a complete idiot, and I agree that reading the help would have been useful, but I still think some examples were salient (e.g. Uncharted's use of yellow paint to guide progress, or Doom's inconsistent system interactions).
In fairness to her though, mouse and keyboard as a control scheme is neither intuitive or natural, it just happened to be the best way to play FPS by accident and convenience, and it took several years after Doom before WASD became common practice. Regardless of how good the scheme, it's still a limitation on its design when it's unintuitive to beginners, and it's always possible that we're limiting ourselves because of path dependence. It's helpful to know just how difficult first person 3D controls can be without years of habituation. This is a reason why I'm especially excited about the future of VR because it appears like it's heading in a direction of trivializing the control scheme hurdle for beginners. (Update: and like magic, Razbuten’s follow-up video was specifically about how Virtual Reality is much more intuitive to beginners.)
Come to think of it, this reminds me exactly of another pet-peeve of mine: Mathematical Notation. This is written by Stephen Wolfram (yes, the same Wolfram) about the history and evolution of mathematical notation. He came across this issue when trying to develop a system of "dumb" mathematical expressions that even a computer can understand, and he quickly realized how inconsistent "real" mathematical notation is. The article mentions several examples (e.g. letters sometimes mean variables, and sometimes mean specific numbers, and sometimes mean instructions).
I ran across this issue when I tried to relearn math a few years ago and found myself needlessly confused with the inconsistent notation. I specifically remember one instance where I came across 'm' and ended up spending hours trying to figure out whether this was just a variable or if it was a specific function within the specific context I was in, and I couldn't just google "What is M?"! I found the exercise frustrating but I also realized that there would be virtually no receptive audience for major changes to traditional notation, because the folks in control (high-level mathematicians) have already internalized the bizarre vocabulary, and the folks it would help (newbie mathematicians) have already given up if they found it inscrutable. I see a similar situation with video gaming based on the video linked.