I don't play on hard unless I'm bored or have played through on normal. I definitely think there's a language to gaming you learn by playing. You used to know x was gas or shoot, now you know R2 serves that function across the board.
BaD 2017.8: video game acumen.
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 On 02/09/2017 at 08:56 PM by Julian Titus See More From This User » |
Whoops! I was doing a bunch of YouTube research for tonight’s episode of Nerds Without Pants and almost forgot about BaD! We’re talking about our three favorite game intros for the Stage Select segment and I was watching our listener picks. Anyways…
I just finished Hitman. That’s the 2016 Hitman. Not to be confused with the game from 2000, since we do love mucking up our naming conventions in the video game industry, don’t we? Doom may be my favorite game of 2016, but I’m still annoyed at it simply being called “Doom”.
I freaking love the new Hitman game. I wrote a glowing review for PixlBit, but things are a wee bit backed up on the production end of things, so it might be a few days before it goes live on the site. Nick’s busy at work on the redesign, and I think he’s the only person handling media management. It’s a whole thing, and I’m rambling now.
One thing I had a blast doing with Hitman was finishing an episode, and then watching Brad Shoemaker and Dan Ryckert play the same level on the Giant Bomb video series. They were laughably bad at the game, and as hilarious as Brad and Dan always are, it got a bit tough to watch towards the end of the series. It seemed like they didn’t understand how the game works on a base level, even after having some of the devs from IO sit in with them for one of the videos. Now, it may be that they were intentionally playing the game poorly for comedic purposes, but some of their comments made me question how they navigate games in general.
For example, when you step into an area you don’t have clearance for, your minimap is outlined, and “trespassing” lights up below it. Pretty straightforward, right? Similarly, if you alert someone with a sound or they are suspicious and investigating, their dot on the map turns from grey to white, and then outlined in white when they are actively alerted to something. Hitman communicates information to the player far better than any game in the series prior, so I was constantly shocked that Brad and Dan didn’t seem to ever understand what was going on, why they got spotted, or who was looking for them. As such, they would spend over an hour trying to take out one of two targets in a level, while I had them both done and dusted in far less time.
It got me thinking about video game skill level. I often wonder if I’m good at video games. Like, I have played thousands of games. I’ll go out on a limb and say I’ve most likely played far more games than you have. That’s not a brag, just a fact. I was lucky to have a store full of video games at my fingertips for nearly a decade, and I took full advantage of that privilege. But even with all that experience I don’t play games on hard because I find them to be too challenging. I suck at aiming in most games, so FPS games are tougher for me than most. But I can navigate the older Resident Evil games with no trouble, and I beat Psycho Mantis in the first Metal Gear Solid in Japanese…without switching controller ports, because I didn’t know you could do that.
I believe that when you play enough games you have a basic gaming proficiency that increases over time, regardless of the type of games you play. You become comfortable with button layouts; I can play games on Xbox and PlayStation without having to remind myself which buttons do what, because I’m well versed in them. You understand the “language” of video games. You know that if there is a light shining off in the distance that you are expected to go in that direction. By that same logic, you can almost “feel” when there is an item or secret nearby, simply by how the level is laid out. The game doesn’t have to tell you this; it’s something you know from other game experiences.
I’ve heard a lot of jokes about how people in games media are bad at games. I don’t know if that’s true. Perhaps they are like me, in the sense that they have played so many games that they never linger on any long enough to master them. You may play Dark Souls for 200 hours to wring every bit of life out of it, but I’m more likely to get to the end in 40 hours or something and move on to the next thing, never looking back. I’m not harping on Brad and Dan, but I found it odd at how they seemed to either not understand or outright ignore the information that was being presented to them by the Hitman UI and in game cues. While I know that they know the language of video games it was almost like Hitman was in a dialect that they were not versed in. Which could totally be the case; Brad is all about that DotA, and that game may as well be an algebra text book written in Greek for my part.
Do you consider yourself good at video games? Do you find you have skills that carry over from game to game, or do you treat each one as a wholly new experience?
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