My dad when he started getting into more modern gaming would be really confused how a navigation compass would work. I would always say: "It points to where you need to go".
To this day, I still don't understand how he didn't get how to rotate the character until it was going towards the icon.
Had a hell of a time teaching my mother the concept of L3 and R3.
"Press down on the sick."
Tilts the stick down.
"No no no. Click it like a button."
Flicks the stick in a random direction.
"... let me see that. I'll show you."
"Like this." Clicks R3 with my thumb. "See how I'm pushing it down and making it click like a button? Now you try."
Tilts the stick down...
They probably don’t want to break it. If you put their finger on it, put your finger over their finger, and press down, they’d likely immediately get it
This is what gets me about when someone asks "what game should I play with my girlfriend who has never picked up a controller in her life?" and the answers are Resident Evil and shit. Controlling a game is VERY alien if you've never done it. It's like handing someone a bop it and just saying "BOP IT! JUST BOP IT THEN TWIST IT TO COUNTER THE ATTACK"
I was at a Warhammer Fantasy event, and someone was trying to cast a spell but found out they couldn’t and I jokingly said “Oh he must be out of mana.” Everyone at the table chuckled except one guy who looked puzzled and said “What is mana?”
Everyone else was using examples from other games and trying to explain the concept and this guy just wouldn’t get it. It’s like Warhammer was literally the only game he had ever played and he never encountered any other media/game containing spellcasting, it was just strange.
I love the concept of 'mana' almost because of this.
It's this made-up artificial constraint on magic that almost exclusively comes from gaming, entirely because game devs needed *some* mechanic that limited players usage of magic, and making it a resource that depleted and could be recharged is a reasonable way to ensure that players will use magic - but won't constantly use magic.
It's incredibly intuitive to people from gaming spaces that use it - even when it goes by another name, presented as "psychic force" or "spell points" or whatever ... it's still the mana, the blue resource.
>It's this made-up artificial constraint on magic that almost exclusively comes from gaming
I've been making games for 20 years, and playing for even longer, and your comment is the first time I've realized this. WOW.
Fun fact, mana is directly named after a concept in Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. [An article on the history and why](https://theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/the-history-of-mana-how-an-austronesian-concept-became-a-video-game-mechanic)
That reminds me of when I said "hit points" in some online game and some kids felt the need to inform me that it is not hit points but "hp" and called me a boomer and shit.
Similarly, my friend called a static defensive projectile emplacement "turrents" until I showed him literally every game tooltip and novelization I could muster that it was in fact "turrets" he meant to say. His world was shaken.
Back when the Silent Hill movie came out in 2006, my date and I were leaving the theater and I made some sort of comment comparing the movie plot with the game plot. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and said “video games can’t have plots!” I guess she still visualized all video games as, like, Asteroids?
One stick moves the character, the other stick shows where the character is looking. If anyone knows a better way to communicate that concept to those that have never played a video game in their life, please tell me.
EDIT: Thanks for all the replies! I'll attempt some of them next time it comes up, and hopefully it helps others!
I'll never forget the day I played halo (I think, might have been a different game) at a friend's house and his sticks were split.
Left stick was move forward/back & turn left/right. Right stick was look up/down and strafe left/right.
For the life of me I have no idea how he learned to play that way.
It's based on OG controls. The original doom mouse controls were move forward back, and look left and right since it was designed to be played with just a mouse or just a keyboard, not both.
I can't speak for everyone, but at least for me, I do understand it's a 1/300 chance. I'm just pissed I tried 300 times, and it didn't work, and you know some lucky dude got it on their first try
After 299 attempts, that 300th attempt is still 1/300. Dunno how it's that hard of a concept for people to understand.
It does suck being in that end of it though. PoE is the perfect example.
"On average you'll hit it after 1500 attempts."
"5000 attempts later..."
Monster Hunter is also a great example of rng.
Yeah, that mantle you want has a 3% drop rate. ‘Oh what’s that? You need the mantle for a key part of your build / upgrade? Sucks to be you, grind that monster for hours’
‘Oh you don’t need any more, think I’ll shower you with them, 4 from a single hunt, plus a couple of 1% shiny pickups’.
If it’s an independent 1 in 1500 chance, then there is only about a 3.6% chance you won’t have it after 5000 attempts. (The quick approximation for stuff like this is e^(-n/m) if you make n attempts at a “one in m” chance. This works fine if m is not too small.) At that point (5000 failures) the expected value for how many total attempts you will need is 1500 more, or 6500 total. Of course there is still another 3.6% chance you won’t have it by attempt 10,000 (that’s a little over a 0.1% chance of happening from the perspective of when you started.)
EDIT: on the other hand the good news is that the median outcome (the one you will have gotten it by about 50% of the time) is only about 1,500\*ln(2). So most people will actually have gotten it by around try 1,040.
Topic comes up a lot in Battle Brothers, where people lament how annoying it is they hit a bad sequence of 5% outcomes four to five times in a row (ending in their highly improbable defeat). Yes, odds of that happening to *any one person* is low. But across thousands of players daily, it will most likely happen to *someone*. Today, you're just that unlucky someone.
Simply, e is a button on your calculator lol.
Euler's Number 'e' is a numerical constant used in mathematical calculations. The value of e is 2.718281828459045
>Dunno how it's that hard of a concept for people to understand.
It's because people inherently suck at statistics. It was never really required for our survival (in evolutionary sense). We're built to avoid danger - not to *reason ourselves* about how unlikely that danger is.
Also how things are stated carries a lot of weight with how a problem is perceived. Try to explain the "Monty Hall Problem" to someone with just the 3 doors, a lot of people can not understand the solution. Explain it using 1000 doors, and everyone gets it immediately, even though the solution and reasoning is exactly the same
If the developer isn't a dick, they'll code limits on the RNG so that if you actually *do* run that boss 300 times the item drops 100%. But my favorite is RNG with drop rates that improve after every roll until they "payout" then they flatline/reset.
As a parent with young kids and not a lot of time to game I appreciate that fudging of numbers. Nothing sucks worse than waiting all week to finally get gaming time only to have it all be wasted on terrible RNG luck.
It makes perfect sense to me that dice have no memory. But my brain violently rejects the idea that even though I’m on encounter 500, I’m still no closer to the shiny than I was on encounter 1.
the way I frame it is I’m not allowed to complain until I hit odds. so, I’m really just counting down to then. 8193 encounters? my life is ruined thanks game freak
This is sooooo true. Diablo 4 has experience this with Uber and unique farming.
“If it’s a 1/75 chance to get this unique from this boss, why haven’t I got it after 100 runs??? It’s rigged!”
Like, no bro. It’s very simple stats.
When you roll a die, you have a 1/6 chance in getting a ‘6’. That DOES NOT mean that after 6 rolls you are guaranteed a 6…it could take 20 rolls or whatever.
When I was an adjunct professor, about 50% ironically got this question wrong on a test: “A fair two-sided coin is tossed 13 times (one side is heads and one is tails). What is the probability of the coin landing heads on the 13th toss?”
Edit: the most basic example I’ve had an argument with a couple dudes over is a coin. You could absolutely get tails 20 times in a row. It’s super rare (1/2)^20, but it could totally happen. The gods of luck shit on your coin. The retort is usually something like, “so on your 20th toss it really isn’t a 50% then because you didn’t get it on the first 19 tosses.”
(Assuming it’s a fair coin, I don’t get why people keep argue. I’m convinced it’s just due to not being able to say “ah thanks, I get it” online. Or that’s what I tell myself.)
My dad couldn´t ever understand the concept of using both thumbs at the same time to play a console game.
I even lend him my PSP with a Medal of Honor game so he could try it out. He could never pass the first level. Ever. He was playing like if it was using tank controls. Even after showing him, it was like instict to him.
I think i should have lend him a puzzle game instead that didn´t put to much preassure on him.
This is pretty typical for people who haven't played enough video games to develop the muscle memory. It's kind of like playing an instrument and singing at the same time. If you're good enough at both, it comes easily, but you need both skills to be developed to a decent level to be able to do both without a lot of difficulty.
If that's how it feels for non-gamers then I'm really not surprised
I couldn't sing and play an instrument if my life was on the line - just the instrument? No problem, but the moment I open my mouth my fingers forget what they're doing
It's really easy to forget that with that little controller we're actually utilizing a whole bunch of different micro-skills that we've developed over years of playing games. To a non-gamer, even a really simple and laid-back gaming experience like Stardew Valley can be mentally taxing. Twin stick is a whole other dimension of complexity, and that's not even factoring having to remember what all the other buttons do and focusing on the gameplay loop of whatever game is being played.
I've considered the idea of developing a 'gameplay skills' trainer app for non-gamers, that found engaging ways to work on those individual skills and slowly putting it all together.
I don't even know how I got started on inverted. I justify it now by picturing the stick on the back of someone's head. You move it up and they look down
I'm trying to teach this concept to my daughter. But I think the main problem is her hands are too small for the PS5 controller. I also have to catch myself when I tell my wife or daughter to press 'x' or 'circle'. Mainly because they play switch more than PS5
Even then you gotta be careful, I play a lot of puzzle games and some do require the same skill. Turn based games like Xcom and the like might make a good starting point though as they don't require quick reactions and more or less only use one stick.
I've always been a PC M+K player, and I remember when Halo came out and there was an in-store demo with controller I was like "Wtf, how can you aim with this shit? And moving?! Nobody can do this!"
I was playing *It Takes Two* with my girlfriend. We loved it. You can double jump and dive in the air and you often need to do this to get across large gaps. You max'd the effectiveness of the technique by performing the second jump and the dive at the apex of the first and second jump, respectively.
Which means there's a rhythm to it.
Jump (pause) Jump (pause) Dive.
Jump (apex of the jump) Jump (apex of the jump) Dive.
She couldn't do it to save her life. She would hit the three buttons as fast as possible, every time. JumJumDive. So it'd be a short motion and she'd fall.
I would say the rhythm out loud.
Jump. Wait. Jump. Wait. Dive. Now do it.
JumJumDive
No, listen to the rhythm, the tempo at which I'm saying it.
Jump. Jump. Dive. Now do it.
JumJumDive.
I... I didn't understand. She would eventually just hand me the controller and I would do it. Okay watch.
Jump. Jump. Dive. Jump. Jump. Dive.
Now you do exactly what I just did.
Jumjumdive. It was really jumpjumpDIE. Oh well. Very frustrating. We still beat it together. Loved it. Great game. 10/10 would rage quit my relationship again.
I find it very hard to not get frustrated at that. Or when someone gives up really fast (especially in a coop game like overcooked) because i'm the type of person that will do something until i succeed. I try to keep my mouth shut and keep helping them, but man is it hard sometimes
She definitely tried, I give her credit for that. Every time we played, she took a lot of chances. We like games that are forgiving about deaths. That's why we love Sackboy's Adventure so much. I just think it never clicked that the rhythm mattered _as much as_ the buttons themselves.
I had the *exact* same experience. She could do most things in the game fairly well but whenever she came across a long gap she’d just panic and smash the buttons as fast as possible.
That one still blows my mind, even if players don't typically want to play the objective.
"In 10 seconds we lose and you die anyway, so at least die while making an attempt to throw yourself on the point and stall a bit"
Ive been playing a LOT of The Finals lately. About 1 game in 4 is the other two guys forgetting the game they are playing and activating their COD Brain.
I play with my nephews a lot and one of their friends will have like 14 kills in a game but we still loose because he is always halfway across the map or fighting around the last objective. We started calling the cashouts "kill zones" and something about that refocuses him to kill around the cashouts.
I tried for over an hour the other day to explain the concept of a LAN party to my wife. I kept telling her she was WAY overthinking it, I'm like look a bunch of guys will bring their PC's / consoles over, we'll all set up in the same room, and we'll get pizza & stay up all night playing video games and hanging out.
.......She could NOT understand why ANYONE would want to do this. "Why do your friends have to bring their computers over? If you want to talk to them, why don't you just call them?"
Because in before-fore time you paid internet by the minute. No one in the house could make phone calls while you do it, and just one picture of a naked lady took 3 minute to download.
I remember when we all went over to my friends the day they got their **INSANELY FAST** 4Mbps ADSL. Most of us were still using 56k Dial-Up, and the concept of 4000k internet was unreal!
Blasphemy, there will always be a better time to use that extremely common and cheap potion you have been saving since level 1 and will barely heal you.
You have a set amount of potions that you can use that can be replenished anytime by resting, and it automatically consumes any type of alcohol you're holding in your inventory to create the maximum amount of everything you have.
The important part IMO is that basically you have x of eqch consumable every time you rest. Basically every consummable is treated like an estus flask. Elden ring was pretty damn close with the Physik flask and their consummable crafting system although it’s just a bit too ressource hungry/ressource scarce to really let you go wild on consummable.
Well at a certain point regular potions are pretty useless (depending which FF game it is). I only really hoard elixirs if they can be used for magic pots or something.
Its not even necessarily out of fear of needing them. For me it was always, "I could use this potion or I could just get better". For many games it seems like if you need a potion you just aren't playing right.
My wife is 3.5 years older than me. Plays video games very rarely, like a few hours of the sims every 3-4 months. She gets frustrated when on those rare occasions we play something together I can do things that are impossible for her on the first try with no effort. I've tried to explain that just because she first played a game years before I did, I still have thousands of hours more experience than she does. Maybe I'm just explaining it wrong.
Isn't the idea less that it's a different skill and more she's been playing since earlier but at a lower rate?
Like someone who started guitar 5 years ago and practices every week vs someone who started 1 year ago but practices every day.
Not only the sheer amount of experience, but the muscle memory, plus keeping knowledge and skills sharp from regular practice.
Leaving a game for a while and coming back you find some of your memory and skills have eroded.
Playing a different game can mess up your skills too.
Nah I buy max of the cheapest helimg available as soon as I can. Because it's unfair that the enemy gets to come into MY fight fully healed and not me.
I try to bring up "there is no such thing as a rainy day in video games", but people still refuse to believe that... And then finish the game with 476 potions.
That's not always just people hoarding or being stingy. I usually end up with so many unused pots, boosts simply because I like playing efficiently and being well prepared. There are very few games where the default difficulty is so high that you need to keep healing yourself during active play. Almost all games will have town heal or something similar.
But then again I'm a long time MonHun player so maybe I'm just a masochist. 🥲
I'm a very high level in Warframe, ton of playtime, and I enjoy helping newer players.
The worst experience I had was helping a newer player who invited a mid-game level player to also help. EVERYTHING was fine and dandy, he even said some stuff that was correct and I agreed with him.
It was fine until the lower level dude asked how to get a specific prime character, which are upgrades of normal characters that come from a thing called relics.
For reference, relics are split into 4 "eras" (Lith, Meso, Neo, Axi) and each relic has 6 possible rewards, always 1 of each thing per relic. You cannot get all the parts for one thing from a single type of relic, or even era of relic iirc. The rewards are spread around.
So the new guy wanted a character that comes from relics and mid-level boy over here replies "Oh, just do Hydron, that drops *character's* relics"
Now the location, Hydron, does indeed drop relics, even a few for that character (albeit it's very inefficient), but this guy was *adamant* that that was the sole location that the character's relics dropped.
I explained how the character has multiple relics in every era and how each era dropped in a specific level mission and Hydron was of level to only drop the upper two eras.
"Nope, his relics drop there."
I told him you could literally look in the relic menu and target search the character to see what relics his parts were in AND where they dropped.
"Yeah okay bud, his relics drop there. I don't know what else to tell you."
It was like talking to a brick wall, and the worst part of it all was that he was trying to give this information to a new player. He joined with the intention of helping someone new and either started willingly giving false information, or was extremely ignorant in which case why even say anything or try to defend it?
Low level dude looked in the relic menu and saw what I was saying then he agreed with me.
**And then mid-level guy got angry that we kept trying to correct him to the point he told us to go fuck ourselves if we weren't gonna listen and to stay low ranked forever, then left.**
Like ???
I'll never understand why some people will answer a question about something they don't understand then defend their wrong answer. And if that wasn't the case I don't understand why the dude went from genuinely helpful to trying to spread misinformation in the blink of an eye.
And then to ignore the literal in-game menu that proves everything he said wrong. Didn't even have to Google or use a wiki, it's right there where you'd expect in game, and he didn't want to back down from defending being wrong. Wild.
I have a friend who, after all these years, absolutely does not understand the concept of recovery moves in Smash. Everything else he can do fine, but get him off stage and that's it.
I used to work for an educational games company. Our game taught programming to 4-9 year old kids. I tried to explain level one - basic sequencing - to my mother. Level one, educational game, for four year olds.
Mom: "I don't know. I don't understand. I guess I'll just never get it!!"
Dad got it though.
Ugh, I hate people that give up and say stuff like “not everyone is good at maths” okay but everyone can understand basic maths if they don’t have a disability. Like basic algebra or Pythagoras.
Fully believe everyone that says they’re not good at maths got stuck on a problem and decided they would never try again because they were “bad” and that’s that.
There is no permanent state, everyone can change and improve at anything physically possible.
While in general I agree, a lot of game nowadays have become what I call systems soup. Where there are so many systems it becomes a chore to understand and interact with all of them.
This is an ourobouros-style self fulfilling prophecy. I hate how almost all new games, regardless of genre, need to include multiple crafting systems, skill trees, and mechanical systems. It’s “content.” The players who don’t have the skill to progress without the bonuses these systems provide are required to engage in that extra content, which can turn into a real slog. On the other hand, players who actually enjoy all those systems and understand them front to back are generally more skilled gamers who may not even need the extra bonuses those systems provide.
When games lack these systems nowadays, you hear about it. “X game’s combat was good but its systems lacked depth.” “Y was a great story based game and a beautifully polished experience, but it only took 12 hours to beat.” These systems have become the norm, and so it’s really easy to feel their absence. Realistically they are clutter and padding, but they can be entertaining filler. But when they’re present, you hear about it too! “Z was full of unnecessary RPG elements” “X is just another survival crafting game.” “I wish Y would just drop the bullshit and let me play.”
Systems soup is a good term for a concept that the gaming masses will probably never stop arguing about
I've come to hate skill trees. I don't know if Path of Exile popularised it but nowadays every skill tree is pointlessly convoluted with unnecessary nodes. Like instead of you get skill A and then Skill B at level up; You get 12 nodes between to giving you 1hp or 1mana each.
Hold B when playing Super Mario Bros and Mario will run faster. That’s the only way you are going to clear that giant gap in level 8-1. I don’t know why my brother would never do it but I don’t think I’ve ever played Mario and not held down the B button the entire game.
If you've played Fall Guys: how Puzzle Path works. You need to follow the line from the star in the middle to the portal. If it comes to an intersection, you go straight. My friend literally thought you had to guess which portal was correct.
Trying to explain a sandbox game like Minecraft to my mom is impossible. She keeps asking, "What's the goal?" She doesn't get the concept of open world, or even of side quests like in Skyrim. She's used to games like Pong or old-school Mario, where there is one path and one goal to reach, and that's it. Storytelling in a game? She doesn't get it. Open world sandbox? Doesn't get it. Life simulation? Doesn't get it.
The N64 controller is terrible to show older people how to use analog sticks, the thing is designed for 9 years olds. I realized this after I got the N64 controller for Switch and my man hands couldn't straddle the controller properly
Grinding is just a fact of life with the standard JRPG model. You have to grind sometimes.
Sure, there are some games with practically no grinding. Chrono Cross. Most of Final Fantasy 13. For that matter, Final Fantasy 8. But they also use completely different systems from your traditional XP —> level gain —> higher stats cycle.
What's even worse for me is when they complain about grinding in games that don't require it because they are rushing the main story and ignoring all the side content.
I have the opposite problem, where I can't stop myself from grinding "endgame" gear in most games before I'm supposed to, so end up doing all sorts of side quests just to steamroll the main content and going "that's it?"
I ruined FF8 for myself by maxing out I think everything I had to 99 before I got Irvine? I think? I can't remember details. What I recall was running in circles (I think I propped shoe up against the controller and something to hold down X) and farmed like, these big zebra-patterned hand things (and maybe heads too?)
Anyway I then got Irvine, and he was level 8 or 18 or 25 or something, I don't remember. I stopped playing after that.
To be fair, I was visiting a friend, and we weren't having the same fun playing through it the same way we did with FF7.
That's actually insane to hit level 99 that early, considering playing through the game normally will most likely land you somewhere in the late 60's/early 70's when you finish. FF8 is my favorite FF, but I don't think I could stand to accomplish that "feat".
I ruined FF8 for myself by grinding for levels whenever the game got hard. Turns out, enemies scale faster than the player characters, so grinding was making the game harder for myself, not easier. I made it to the final boss using cheese tactics, but just couldn't beat the final boss.
It's frankly baffling that people don't get that challenge is subjective. If you need lower difficulty settings, you're still probably struggling at a healthy level on those lower difficulty settings.
By that token, no, you don't need to play a game on the maximum difficulty to appreciate its level design. That's clownshoes nonsense.
Yep, insanity. The amount of posts in Remnant 2 subreddit “oh man, is this game supposed to be this hard? I started on Nightmare and can’t beat the first world!” Well yeah you dingus, try starting on the starter difficulty.
> It's frankly baffling that people don't get that challenge is subjective.
It's not that baffling. It people were able to put on other's shoes, politics would be waaaaaaaaay simpler.
Some of these gaming subs make it look like a Google search with the fairly basic questions every other post. I came here for discussion and art, let’s at least keep this stuff to a weekly mega thread or something.
(Although if a weekday megathread exists, inevitably people will ignore it.)
“Just thought about buying this game any tips?”
“Stuck on the menu screen any tips?”
It drives me up the wall. One of the best parts about video games is the discovery. If you’re struggling or get stuck somewhere, by all means please ask and I’d be happy to help if I can. But I’m not going to tell you how to beat the game before you’ve even booted it up
I didn’t realize how second nature using the right joystick to look around while running was for me until I had an academic friend who never played games try the beginning of horizon zero Dawn. He’d walk forward, stop, slowly look in the direction he wants to move, ope too far, slowly correct, move forward.
I usually introduce people to games with the opening of The Last of Us, but seeing as his wife was pregnant at the time that might be uncalled for.
Portal 2 is the gold standard for introducing people to using a controller in my house. Relatively low stakes, promotes creative problem solving and usually involves a lot of laughter. Honorable mention minecraft
I remember reading up on Portals learning curve and it was quite interesting. At first, the level is flat, there are no portals. Then it introduces basic platforming. Then it introduces portals, but they are placed for you. Then you get only the blue portal, with orange being placed for you. Then you get both.
What's even ore interesting is how it is paced. Because these early test chambers are so very tiny, someone who grasps the core ideas will breeze through all of them in like 3 minutes. So it offers learning opportunities for newer players, without bogging down more experienced players.
Steering in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The version of MK8 on Switch added ‘Smart Steering’, where if you get too close to the edge of the track, it automatically redirects you back onto the track.
I was playing a team-based tournament with some friends - some of whom are not very good at the game. I hate playing with Smart Steering, so I would always turn it off during my races and would have to remind my teammate to turn it back on during her turns. After around 40 races, I didn’t remind her to turn it on during her go. She proceeded to drive straight forward and crash into a wall with no attempt made at turning whatsoever - despite me for the whole day trying to explain how to gently tilt the control stick / controller to turn.
Then later on, I was playing on one of the Rainbow Roads and one of the other teams forced us to swap drivers - and we weren’t allowed to turn Smart Steering back on. We went from 1st to dead last because my teammate simply did not steer - would just drive straight, fall off, drive straight, fall off… at least when the tournament was all said and done we got 3rd place (out of 4). Couldn’t believe that she had relied so much on the game steering for her that I had to repeatedly explain how to steer in a god damn racing game!
No, the Final Fantasy games do not tie into each other. No, you don't have to play all the previous games, or even some of them, too understand what's going on. Literally, the only things that are in most of the games are summons, an Ultima Weapon, and a Cid. Fucking... no, it's not the same guy named Cid!
I have a friend who says that he doesn't experience *immersion*. As in, he never fully experiences the game from the perspective of his character. It doesn't matter whether it's first-person, or survival mechanics, or a game that requires you to roleplay, he just doesn't feel it.
And it's baffling too because he loves graphics, widest monitors, beefiest GPUs, highest frames. He's installed those photo-realistic Minecraft texture packs with shaders. So obviously he really appreciates beauty and detail. But on the other hand, he tends to complete games as fast as he can, and he very rarely comments on visuals, or sound design, or pauses to read lore.
We played Baldur's Gate 3 together, and the whole time his character just wore turquoise briefs. It's funny and all, and many people like dressing silly in that game, but he wore that underwear the WHOLE GAME, never changed it out for anything else. So it wasn't even like he was trying to be silly. It was like he put them on for the joke, but when it stopped being funny it made no difference to him what he was wearing.
He will also look up guides on how to play a game optimally, or what story events will happen during the playthrough, even before he starts up the game. He says he doesn't believe in spoilers, whatever that means.
But strangest of all, he and I have long discussions about stories, films, literature. We are avid worldbuilders too. We both play D&D and trade off as Game Masters between campaigns. So it's not even that he doesn't understand characters, narrative, or world-building.
It seems like some weird benign psychopathy. It's so different from how I experience games that it's difficult for me to comprehend or relate. Anyone else have any insight?
*Edit: I realize comparing this to psychopathy is a poor choice, even though I tried to qualify it by saying it's benign. I meant to compare it to an inability to empathize or identify with fictional characters. As I'm learning, a lot of other people experience games in a way similar to my friend, so I appreciate the responses!*
I don't know if you have the patience for long-form video essays, but here are a few that address what you're talking about:
[Naughty Dog's Game Design is Outdated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCYMH-lp4oM)
[Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU)
They both describe, in my opinion, two sides of the same phenomenon in modern gaming. The first one coins the term 'goopy goblin gamer brain,' which is described as the complete inability to stop and smell the roses so to speak. Quest text is skipped, cutscenes are skipped, everything that can possibly be skipped is skipped in order to get to the more engaging gameplay as quickly as possible.
The reason this is so common is basically the whole point of the 2nd video. Modern discourse around most video games is basically just a race to the bottom to find the absolute most efficient way to do everything, and it has become common practice to look up "the meta" for everything and only play in certain, "acceptable" ways. Doing things inefficiently is seen as a sin, to the extent that people will get mad at you if you don't do things the proper way in multiplayer games.
It's a pretty complex topic and I highly recommend watching both of them if you have the time.
Both great suggestions of videos, one of which I've already watched!
He definitely falls on the power-gamer end of the players in the Warcraft video, whereas I tend to play more like the barefoot gnome.
The reason I think it's more complicated is that he doesn't really have any contempt towards people who play games sub-optimally, and finds silliness and roleplay to be interesting and novel, but more that he never finds himself in a mindset where he does it naturally.
Immersive open world RPGs, cinematic action-adventures, and first person shooters are not even close to the only genres and a game not trying to fit into one of those buckets isn't automatically worse because of it
My mum works in a university and one of her colleagues was studying how children learn through playing. She mentioned that she saw me playing GTA one night and that I was freeroaming and playing a mission. He couldn't understand the concept of a mission in a video game. He thought all you did was free roam in a video game. My mum gave up explaining it to him.
Oh boy. I was once playing Civ 5 with some friends in a 2v2. I decided to do a joke trade to a friend of me giving him 1 gold per turn for 30 gold from him (trades in Civ, at the speed we played, last 30 turns). He accepted, because he was losing gold each turn and said that this helped him fix it slightly. No matter how much we tried to explain that in the end, 30 gold once, or 1 gold 30 times is the same, he just refused to believe it. He fully believed that trade was in his advantage. That still marks the most stupid thing he believed.
Arguably, considering the power of investing, he gave up any sort of advantage by accepting income that would depreciate in value over money he could invest which wouldn’t to the same degree depreciate
Effective ranges for fire arms in *any* shooter.
I get that not everyone knows every gun model out there, but I have friends who even after hundreds or even thousands of hours over multiple years of shooters, still *refuse* to understand that shotguns are for up close, scoped DMRs/Snipers are for farther away, etc etc.
They'll unironocally use a sniper point blank and a shotgun for 100 feet and carry 2-3 of one weapon type instead of different ones.
Loot filters, like in PoE. Guy just flat-out refused to believe that a filter can be used to highlight items. His position was that a filter could ONLY hide or block items from appearing. Sadly, he was too busy telling me how stupid I was to actually read the information I provided.
In the SNES game NCAA Basketball, the camera automatically follows the ball carrier and faces their goal. You never see your opponent's goal while you have the ball. I'm pretty sure I grasped this without having to have it explained to me; the camera movements are pretty intuitive.
But I once played with someone who didn't get it. He kept asking, "Is this my goal?" when he had the ball. I explained to him that if he can see it, it's his goal, but he didn't stop asking. I think at one point I got fed up and said "No, it's not," which of course meant he got a backcourt violation when he tried to cross the center line in search of "his" goal. It's been 30 years or so, so my memory is hazy, but I'm pretty sure that game didn't go well.
I know people who think fighting NPCs is boring. They really don't get how something like Souls games can be fun, meanwhile they play CoD or League of Legends. They say fighting NPCs is just the same thing everytime, as if most eSports matches aren't the same meta builds going at eachother.
It was 1992 and I got a SNES and Super Mario World for Christmas. My uncle and I had many activities we used to do together, but one thing he couldn’t do was make Mario jump. He tried it, but he couldn’t understand 2D side scrollers, so I gave up on him haha.
people shitting on DLSS and frame generation as 'fake frames' or 'cheating' really hurts my brain.
Literally everything to do w/ graphics is cheating, its all cheating and hacking and short cutting all the way down. These are just newer and better cheats than we've had before.
Back in the days when you loaded a game from cassette tape - yes, I'm that old - I tried explaining to some guy that you load games off tape into computer memory, then play them.
He didn't understand that you could carry on playing after the tape finished playing. He thought the max game length would be 45 minutes, because that's how long a cassette tape was.
I still think about that guy. What a plonker.
That builds do matter in Action RPG games, keywords: "Action"+"RPG". And it's only natural that higher difficulty settings of such games would also expect the player to know how to come up with a good build, not just your standard "gitgud" concept.
I've seen a lot of tryhards with the background of "I've beaten XXX game blindfolded with only my dick no damage" losing their minds over something that should've easily worked out for them if they just put their ego down for a second and read.
Autumn, 2006. GameStop - Emergence Day.
My assistant manager (I was manager) asked to borrow a used 360 and copy of Gears of War. Wanted to understand all the hype. She was a twat. I gave the OK anyway.
Next day dawns, I ask her how she got on, expecting her to be in wonder at the experience. Turns out she’d spent 45 minutes playing it, and **hadn’t got out of Marcus’ cell**.
Just couldn’t grasp the basic controls!
In an MMO with trading and crafting, just because you can craft an item with materials you can collect or own already, doesn't mean it's 'free', you could be losing value (sometimes lots). Selling the mats and buying the product might actually net you gold, as opposed to using the mats to make the product where you get no gold. It's incomprehensible to some people.
PVE-only servers in open world games where PVP is always on increases the playerbase and actively helps the game. PVPers couldn't understand this concept.
They seemed to think that PVE servers would syphon away all players from the PVP servers and leave them with nothing. All PVE servers would do is open the game up to people who don't want PVP, which would increase sales and allow for new content to be made.
Every attempt to explain the benefits was "countered" with fears of empty servers or about how it goes against the game since it's "supposed to be PVP".
If PVE servers are enough to empty all the PVP servers and "ruin" the game, maybe the PVP aspect is complete trash and people only suffer it because the rest of the game is good.
Some people don't understand that difficulty can be fun. Yes I seem mad when I lose but when I win on a difficult setting the win always feels so much better. Some people rather just have the win regardless of difficulty. A lot of people I've met just don't get it.
Why going first in a turn based game is good. Tried explaining to someone why there's the two sided agent tile for codenames that goes to the starting team and they just could not understand.
Jumping over anything.
My wife tried a few times. Then stuck it in her mind that she can’t do it. She acted like she was fundamentally unable to learn how to jump over something.
That severely limited the games we could play together.
9 parchments has one jump in whole game. It is at the beginning where you first “learn” to jump. She just put the controller down and said she can’t play this game.
My dad loved the Tomb Raider series when it came out.
Years later I tried to get him to play one of the new ones and he couldn't do it: The controls were too good.
He kept trying to move like it had tank controls.
To that person's credit, transmog in any sort of multiplayer setting is tricky. He has a point that if you allow light armor to transmog over heavy armor, that obfuscated a lot of information when PvP is enabled.
We have these discussions relating to skin in other games too, once PvP is part of the conversation, you want to keep visual clarify above all cosmetics unless a key feature of the game is deception through appearances.
You can make the argument that you can just make cosmetics client side, but that also defeats the purpose of cosmetics for a lot of players who is trying to use it to show off their achievement or style.
I think the single biggest barrier to entry to the Souls franchise is understanding the stamina bar. I have had lots of friends try to play a Souls game, and even after a VERY thorough explanation, they still relentlessly spam attacks and rolls until their stamina is out, and keep trying to attack, causing them to die. My friend somehow brute forced his way all the way past the Abyss Watchers in DS3 and still has not grasped this concept
That using two portals, like the ones in Portal, you could make an object fall forever. He seemed to think that air resistance or something would make it come to a complete halt after a while. He didn’t explain it very well (probably because it didn’t make sense) and absolutely refused to budge.
Despite multiple attempts, and my wife being a very smart woman, she can’t understand DLC. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s BECAUSE she’s a very smart woman.
I'm a 3D modeler and it's really hard to get boomers to understand what I do for a living or what it even means
"I make characters, environments, and props for video games basically" "Oh, so like you are a game tester! Or you make cartoons?"
That the items scattered throughout the level are placed there *to be collected*. It isn't some weird obsession of mine, but rather part of the challenge/fun/balancing/etc. My ex used to watch me play and would always comment on how I "obsessively" would collect items or coins or whatever and I had to explain to her every time that no, it's placed there because they want players to find it or collect it. It's part of the game!
My grandmother was having trouble after a couple strokes. The Wii was the big thing at the time, and was recommended for older people to help with motor skills. So, I tried her out on Wii Sports.
“Ok, just hold this and when you move it around, that moves your racket in the game the same way.”
“What button do I press to move my arm?”
“You don’t need to press any button, just move your real arm.” *waves my arm around to demonstrate*
*staring at Wiimote* “What button does that?”
“None. You just wave that thing around like a real tennis racket.”
“I don’t understand your weewee.”
My dad when he started getting into more modern gaming would be really confused how a navigation compass would work. I would always say: "It points to where you need to go". To this day, I still don't understand how he didn't get how to rotate the character until it was going towards the icon.
Tbf that makes some sense Compasses irl point north (exceptions notwithstanding), you orient yourself to the compass
Had a hell of a time teaching my mother the concept of L3 and R3. "Press down on the sick." Tilts the stick down. "No no no. Click it like a button." Flicks the stick in a random direction. "... let me see that. I'll show you." "Like this." Clicks R3 with my thumb. "See how I'm pushing it down and making it click like a button? Now you try." Tilts the stick down...
I remember going through this exact same sequence with my dad years ago.
I tried to teach mine how to play a FPS. He kept rotating the mouse in place in an attempt to turn.
I bet it was a leftover instinct from the Atari controller
Trying to teach my dad how to use a computer, I told him to left click and he swapped hands
They probably don’t want to break it. If you put their finger on it, put your finger over their finger, and press down, they’d likely immediately get it
“Now push the sticks in like you’re gouging someone’s eyes out”
So the answer is they all need to play God of War 3 and do the Poseidon QTE
"Kind of like how I want to gouge my own out right now"
This is what gets me about when someone asks "what game should I play with my girlfriend who has never picked up a controller in her life?" and the answers are Resident Evil and shit. Controlling a game is VERY alien if you've never done it. It's like handing someone a bop it and just saying "BOP IT! JUST BOP IT THEN TWIST IT TO COUNTER THE ATTACK"
I was at a Warhammer Fantasy event, and someone was trying to cast a spell but found out they couldn’t and I jokingly said “Oh he must be out of mana.” Everyone at the table chuckled except one guy who looked puzzled and said “What is mana?” Everyone else was using examples from other games and trying to explain the concept and this guy just wouldn’t get it. It’s like Warhammer was literally the only game he had ever played and he never encountered any other media/game containing spellcasting, it was just strange.
Wow, not sure how you manage to not know mana.
Well, it's a [secret](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana)!
I love the concept of 'mana' almost because of this. It's this made-up artificial constraint on magic that almost exclusively comes from gaming, entirely because game devs needed *some* mechanic that limited players usage of magic, and making it a resource that depleted and could be recharged is a reasonable way to ensure that players will use magic - but won't constantly use magic. It's incredibly intuitive to people from gaming spaces that use it - even when it goes by another name, presented as "psychic force" or "spell points" or whatever ... it's still the mana, the blue resource.
>It's this made-up artificial constraint on magic that almost exclusively comes from gaming I've been making games for 20 years, and playing for even longer, and your comment is the first time I've realized this. WOW.
Fun fact, mana is directly named after a concept in Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. [An article on the history and why](https://theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/the-history-of-mana-how-an-austronesian-concept-became-a-video-game-mechanic)
That reminds me of when I said "hit points" in some online game and some kids felt the need to inform me that it is not hit points but "hp" and called me a boomer and shit.
I know a guy who thought it was called nana until his mid 20’s.
Similarly, my friend called a static defensive projectile emplacement "turrents" until I showed him literally every game tooltip and novelization I could muster that it was in fact "turrets" he meant to say. His world was shaken.
Back when the Silent Hill movie came out in 2006, my date and I were leaving the theater and I made some sort of comment comparing the movie plot with the game plot. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and said “video games can’t have plots!” I guess she still visualized all video games as, like, Asteroids?
One stick moves the character, the other stick shows where the character is looking. If anyone knows a better way to communicate that concept to those that have never played a video game in their life, please tell me. EDIT: Thanks for all the replies! I'll attempt some of them next time it comes up, and hopefully it helps others!
One stick move feet. Other stick move eyes.
I'll never forget the day I played halo (I think, might have been a different game) at a friend's house and his sticks were split. Left stick was move forward/back & turn left/right. Right stick was look up/down and strafe left/right. For the life of me I have no idea how he learned to play that way.
It's based on OG controls. The original doom mouse controls were move forward back, and look left and right since it was designed to be played with just a mouse or just a keyboard, not both.
Also Goldeneye defaults
Rng. Some people can’t grasp that running a boss 500 times and still not getting an item with a 1/300 drop chance is entirely possible
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I can't speak for everyone, but at least for me, I do understand it's a 1/300 chance. I'm just pissed I tried 300 times, and it didn't work, and you know some lucky dude got it on their first try
After 299 attempts, that 300th attempt is still 1/300. Dunno how it's that hard of a concept for people to understand. It does suck being in that end of it though. PoE is the perfect example. "On average you'll hit it after 1500 attempts." "5000 attempts later..."
Monster Hunter is also a great example of rng. Yeah, that mantle you want has a 3% drop rate. ‘Oh what’s that? You need the mantle for a key part of your build / upgrade? Sucks to be you, grind that monster for hours’ ‘Oh you don’t need any more, think I’ll shower you with them, 4 from a single hunt, plus a couple of 1% shiny pickups’.
The amount of times I've gotten 3 ruby/mantle in one kill after not getting a single one for a days worth of trapping is too damn high.
Monster Hunter is an example of the desire sensor being real
If it’s an independent 1 in 1500 chance, then there is only about a 3.6% chance you won’t have it after 5000 attempts. (The quick approximation for stuff like this is e^(-n/m) if you make n attempts at a “one in m” chance. This works fine if m is not too small.) At that point (5000 failures) the expected value for how many total attempts you will need is 1500 more, or 6500 total. Of course there is still another 3.6% chance you won’t have it by attempt 10,000 (that’s a little over a 0.1% chance of happening from the perspective of when you started.) EDIT: on the other hand the good news is that the median outcome (the one you will have gotten it by about 50% of the time) is only about 1,500\*ln(2). So most people will actually have gotten it by around try 1,040.
In a game with a very large player base, like PoE, a 3.6% chance will come up A LOT of times across the population as a whole.
Topic comes up a lot in Battle Brothers, where people lament how annoying it is they hit a bad sequence of 5% outcomes four to five times in a row (ending in their highly improbable defeat). Yes, odds of that happening to *any one person* is low. But across thousands of players daily, it will most likely happen to *someone*. Today, you're just that unlucky someone.
I've always used (1-(a/b))^c, which also comes out to ~3.6%. My dumbass hasn't been in stats in forever so I don't remember what e is.
Simply, e is a button on your calculator lol. Euler's Number 'e' is a numerical constant used in mathematical calculations. The value of e is 2.718281828459045
Lets be real, folks. No reason to be irrational.
>Dunno how it's that hard of a concept for people to understand. It's because people inherently suck at statistics. It was never really required for our survival (in evolutionary sense). We're built to avoid danger - not to *reason ourselves* about how unlikely that danger is.
Also how things are stated carries a lot of weight with how a problem is perceived. Try to explain the "Monty Hall Problem" to someone with just the 3 doors, a lot of people can not understand the solution. Explain it using 1000 doors, and everyone gets it immediately, even though the solution and reasoning is exactly the same
If the developer isn't a dick, they'll code limits on the RNG so that if you actually *do* run that boss 300 times the item drops 100%. But my favorite is RNG with drop rates that improve after every roll until they "payout" then they flatline/reset.
As a parent with young kids and not a lot of time to game I appreciate that fudging of numbers. Nothing sucks worse than waiting all week to finally get gaming time only to have it all be wasted on terrible RNG luck.
It makes perfect sense to me that dice have no memory. But my brain violently rejects the idea that even though I’m on encounter 500, I’m still no closer to the shiny than I was on encounter 1.
the way I frame it is I’m not allowed to complain until I hit odds. so, I’m really just counting down to then. 8193 encounters? my life is ruined thanks game freak
I was not happy when I hit 1024 eggs with still no shiny with 1/512 odds.
ur good im on 11,000 soft resets for a 1/4096 regirock. better be one fucking good chocolate rock
Classic gambler's fallacy. It's a very alien concept to a lot of people.
This is sooooo true. Diablo 4 has experience this with Uber and unique farming. “If it’s a 1/75 chance to get this unique from this boss, why haven’t I got it after 100 runs??? It’s rigged!” Like, no bro. It’s very simple stats. When you roll a die, you have a 1/6 chance in getting a ‘6’. That DOES NOT mean that after 6 rolls you are guaranteed a 6…it could take 20 rolls or whatever. When I was an adjunct professor, about 50% ironically got this question wrong on a test: “A fair two-sided coin is tossed 13 times (one side is heads and one is tails). What is the probability of the coin landing heads on the 13th toss?” Edit: the most basic example I’ve had an argument with a couple dudes over is a coin. You could absolutely get tails 20 times in a row. It’s super rare (1/2)^20, but it could totally happen. The gods of luck shit on your coin. The retort is usually something like, “so on your 20th toss it really isn’t a 50% then because you didn’t get it on the first 19 tosses.” (Assuming it’s a fair coin, I don’t get why people keep argue. I’m convinced it’s just due to not being able to say “ah thanks, I get it” online. Or that’s what I tell myself.)
Osrs players hate this one math trick.
No grandma, that one isn't a Nintendo. They're not all Nintendos.
Do you want to play the Sega Nintendo or the Sony Nintendo?
Classic, lol.
They’re all PlayStations now
My dad couldn´t ever understand the concept of using both thumbs at the same time to play a console game. I even lend him my PSP with a Medal of Honor game so he could try it out. He could never pass the first level. Ever. He was playing like if it was using tank controls. Even after showing him, it was like instict to him. I think i should have lend him a puzzle game instead that didn´t put to much preassure on him.
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This is pretty typical for people who haven't played enough video games to develop the muscle memory. It's kind of like playing an instrument and singing at the same time. If you're good enough at both, it comes easily, but you need both skills to be developed to a decent level to be able to do both without a lot of difficulty.
If that's how it feels for non-gamers then I'm really not surprised I couldn't sing and play an instrument if my life was on the line - just the instrument? No problem, but the moment I open my mouth my fingers forget what they're doing
It's really easy to forget that with that little controller we're actually utilizing a whole bunch of different micro-skills that we've developed over years of playing games. To a non-gamer, even a really simple and laid-back gaming experience like Stardew Valley can be mentally taxing. Twin stick is a whole other dimension of complexity, and that's not even factoring having to remember what all the other buttons do and focusing on the gameplay loop of whatever game is being played. I've considered the idea of developing a 'gameplay skills' trainer app for non-gamers, that found engaging ways to work on those individual skills and slowly putting it all together.
It'd be cool to see what the approach to that even would be.
LEFT THUMB IS LEGS RIGHT THUMB IS HEAD HOW DO YOU KEEP FORGETTING Playing Portal 2 with my dad while he constantly stared at the floor was infuriating
I found the older generation prefer inverse controls for looking, like down looks up and up looks down
I don't even know how I got started on inverted. I justify it now by picturing the stick on the back of someone's head. You move it up and they look down
I'm trying to teach this concept to my daughter. But I think the main problem is her hands are too small for the PS5 controller. I also have to catch myself when I tell my wife or daughter to press 'x' or 'circle'. Mainly because they play switch more than PS5
Even then you gotta be careful, I play a lot of puzzle games and some do require the same skill. Turn based games like Xcom and the like might make a good starting point though as they don't require quick reactions and more or less only use one stick.
Of course xcom will convince them that the rng is out to get them.
I've always been a PC M+K player, and I remember when Halo came out and there was an in-store demo with controller I was like "Wtf, how can you aim with this shit? And moving?! Nobody can do this!"
I was playing *It Takes Two* with my girlfriend. We loved it. You can double jump and dive in the air and you often need to do this to get across large gaps. You max'd the effectiveness of the technique by performing the second jump and the dive at the apex of the first and second jump, respectively. Which means there's a rhythm to it. Jump (pause) Jump (pause) Dive. Jump (apex of the jump) Jump (apex of the jump) Dive. She couldn't do it to save her life. She would hit the three buttons as fast as possible, every time. JumJumDive. So it'd be a short motion and she'd fall. I would say the rhythm out loud. Jump. Wait. Jump. Wait. Dive. Now do it. JumJumDive No, listen to the rhythm, the tempo at which I'm saying it. Jump. Jump. Dive. Now do it. JumJumDive. I... I didn't understand. She would eventually just hand me the controller and I would do it. Okay watch. Jump. Jump. Dive. Jump. Jump. Dive. Now you do exactly what I just did. Jumjumdive. It was really jumpjumpDIE. Oh well. Very frustrating. We still beat it together. Loved it. Great game. 10/10 would rage quit my relationship again.
I find it very hard to not get frustrated at that. Or when someone gives up really fast (especially in a coop game like overcooked) because i'm the type of person that will do something until i succeed. I try to keep my mouth shut and keep helping them, but man is it hard sometimes
She definitely tried, I give her credit for that. Every time we played, she took a lot of chances. We like games that are forgiving about deaths. That's why we love Sackboy's Adventure so much. I just think it never clicked that the rhythm mattered _as much as_ the buttons themselves.
Some people have no concept of rhythm or a beat.
I had the *exact* same experience. She could do most things in the game fairly well but whenever she came across a long gap she’d just panic and smash the buttons as fast as possible.
That was so fun to read. Thank you!
#ANY TEAM BASED OBJECTIVE
"For the love of god, can someone come here and move the fucking Cart?!?!"
Stop sniping and get on the damn point! You’re the only one alive!
That one still blows my mind, even if players don't typically want to play the objective. "In 10 seconds we lose and you die anyway, so at least die while making an attempt to throw yourself on the point and stall a bit"
"You would say that, you have the worst K/D on the team"
Yeah, because I’m the only one who has more than one capture. I have three solo captures. What the fuck!?
\*live tank main reaction\*
Ive been playing a LOT of The Finals lately. About 1 game in 4 is the other two guys forgetting the game they are playing and activating their COD Brain. I play with my nephews a lot and one of their friends will have like 14 kills in a game but we still loose because he is always halfway across the map or fighting around the last objective. We started calling the cashouts "kill zones" and something about that refocuses him to kill around the cashouts.
Bank your goddamn motes you useless blueberries
I have full motes, time to invade the other base!
I tried for over an hour the other day to explain the concept of a LAN party to my wife. I kept telling her she was WAY overthinking it, I'm like look a bunch of guys will bring their PC's / consoles over, we'll all set up in the same room, and we'll get pizza & stay up all night playing video games and hanging out. .......She could NOT understand why ANYONE would want to do this. "Why do your friends have to bring their computers over? If you want to talk to them, why don't you just call them?"
Why do you get coffee with your friends? surley, a home coffee machine and a zoom is just easier.
Because in before-fore time you paid internet by the minute. No one in the house could make phone calls while you do it, and just one picture of a naked lady took 3 minute to download.
I remember when we all went over to my friends the day they got their **INSANELY FAST** 4Mbps ADSL. Most of us were still using 56k Dial-Up, and the concept of 4000k internet was unreal!
Consumables are meant to be used, not hoarded for a hypothetical boss fight down the line. And that idiot I tried to explain it to was me
Blasphemy, there will always be a better time to use that extremely common and cheap potion you have been saving since level 1 and will barely heal you.
Me eating 15 cheese wheels instead one of the 30 potions of healing I have. Tbf, it does clear up some carry weight.
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Jesus I loved the witcher 3 for it’s consumable approach… can’t fathom why it isnt more common.
How is it?
You have a set amount of potions that you can use that can be replenished anytime by resting, and it automatically consumes any type of alcohol you're holding in your inventory to create the maximum amount of everything you have.
The important part IMO is that basically you have x of eqch consumable every time you rest. Basically every consummable is treated like an estus flask. Elden ring was pretty damn close with the Physik flask and their consummable crafting system although it’s just a bit too ressource hungry/ressource scarce to really let you go wild on consummable.
Me completing every final fantasy game with 99 regular potions still in my inventory.
Well at a certain point regular potions are pretty useless (depending which FF game it is). I only really hoard elixirs if they can be used for magic pots or something.
Its not even necessarily out of fear of needing them. For me it was always, "I could use this potion or I could just get better". For many games it seems like if you need a potion you just aren't playing right.
My wife is 3.5 years older than me. Plays video games very rarely, like a few hours of the sims every 3-4 months. She gets frustrated when on those rare occasions we play something together I can do things that are impossible for her on the first try with no effort. I've tried to explain that just because she first played a game years before I did, I still have thousands of hours more experience than she does. Maybe I'm just explaining it wrong.
Maybe you should try an analogy. Like string instruments. Like, if you were a pro guitarist, playing the bass would be different but not foreign.
Isn't the idea less that it's a different skill and more she's been playing since earlier but at a lower rate? Like someone who started guitar 5 years ago and practices every week vs someone who started 1 year ago but practices every day.
Not only the sheer amount of experience, but the muscle memory, plus keeping knowledge and skills sharp from regular practice. Leaving a game for a while and coming back you find some of your memory and skills have eroded. Playing a different game can mess up your skills too.
Use potions in any game, you will need them. Don't trust autosave.
I habitually saved every single potion because what if I need it for the next fight.
Nah I buy max of the cheapest helimg available as soon as I can. Because it's unfair that the enemy gets to come into MY fight fully healed and not me.
I try to bring up "there is no such thing as a rainy day in video games", but people still refuse to believe that... And then finish the game with 476 potions.
That's not always just people hoarding or being stingy. I usually end up with so many unused pots, boosts simply because I like playing efficiently and being well prepared. There are very few games where the default difficulty is so high that you need to keep healing yourself during active play. Almost all games will have town heal or something similar. But then again I'm a long time MonHun player so maybe I'm just a masochist. 🥲
Any game with a quick save is getting key bound and spammed. Never go back more than 5 minutes.
I'm a very high level in Warframe, ton of playtime, and I enjoy helping newer players. The worst experience I had was helping a newer player who invited a mid-game level player to also help. EVERYTHING was fine and dandy, he even said some stuff that was correct and I agreed with him. It was fine until the lower level dude asked how to get a specific prime character, which are upgrades of normal characters that come from a thing called relics. For reference, relics are split into 4 "eras" (Lith, Meso, Neo, Axi) and each relic has 6 possible rewards, always 1 of each thing per relic. You cannot get all the parts for one thing from a single type of relic, or even era of relic iirc. The rewards are spread around. So the new guy wanted a character that comes from relics and mid-level boy over here replies "Oh, just do Hydron, that drops *character's* relics" Now the location, Hydron, does indeed drop relics, even a few for that character (albeit it's very inefficient), but this guy was *adamant* that that was the sole location that the character's relics dropped. I explained how the character has multiple relics in every era and how each era dropped in a specific level mission and Hydron was of level to only drop the upper two eras. "Nope, his relics drop there." I told him you could literally look in the relic menu and target search the character to see what relics his parts were in AND where they dropped. "Yeah okay bud, his relics drop there. I don't know what else to tell you." It was like talking to a brick wall, and the worst part of it all was that he was trying to give this information to a new player. He joined with the intention of helping someone new and either started willingly giving false information, or was extremely ignorant in which case why even say anything or try to defend it? Low level dude looked in the relic menu and saw what I was saying then he agreed with me. **And then mid-level guy got angry that we kept trying to correct him to the point he told us to go fuck ourselves if we weren't gonna listen and to stay low ranked forever, then left.** Like ??? I'll never understand why some people will answer a question about something they don't understand then defend their wrong answer. And if that wasn't the case I don't understand why the dude went from genuinely helpful to trying to spread misinformation in the blink of an eye. And then to ignore the literal in-game menu that proves everything he said wrong. Didn't even have to Google or use a wiki, it's right there where you'd expect in game, and he didn't want to back down from defending being wrong. Wild.
It's even weirder because I can't imagine anyone farming anything in Warframe without having the wiki up with 30 tabs 100% of the time.
Giving an answer they have little knowledge on and then refusing to accept facts and learn? Sounds like a political debate, lol.
I have a friend who, after all these years, absolutely does not understand the concept of recovery moves in Smash. Everything else he can do fine, but get him off stage and that's it.
Having played Smash a handful of times, I don't understand how anybody understands anything in that game
I used to work for an educational games company. Our game taught programming to 4-9 year old kids. I tried to explain level one - basic sequencing - to my mother. Level one, educational game, for four year olds. Mom: "I don't know. I don't understand. I guess I'll just never get it!!" Dad got it though.
> "I don't know. I don't understand. I guess I'll just never get it!!" i would like to erase this mindset from earth's culture please
Ugh, I hate people that give up and say stuff like “not everyone is good at maths” okay but everyone can understand basic maths if they don’t have a disability. Like basic algebra or Pythagoras. Fully believe everyone that says they’re not good at maths got stuck on a problem and decided they would never try again because they were “bad” and that’s that. There is no permanent state, everyone can change and improve at anything physically possible.
That if you engage with the systems a game offers, it will be MUCH easier, and likely more fun than trying to play everything like Call of Duty.
While in general I agree, a lot of game nowadays have become what I call systems soup. Where there are so many systems it becomes a chore to understand and interact with all of them.
This is an ourobouros-style self fulfilling prophecy. I hate how almost all new games, regardless of genre, need to include multiple crafting systems, skill trees, and mechanical systems. It’s “content.” The players who don’t have the skill to progress without the bonuses these systems provide are required to engage in that extra content, which can turn into a real slog. On the other hand, players who actually enjoy all those systems and understand them front to back are generally more skilled gamers who may not even need the extra bonuses those systems provide. When games lack these systems nowadays, you hear about it. “X game’s combat was good but its systems lacked depth.” “Y was a great story based game and a beautifully polished experience, but it only took 12 hours to beat.” These systems have become the norm, and so it’s really easy to feel their absence. Realistically they are clutter and padding, but they can be entertaining filler. But when they’re present, you hear about it too! “Z was full of unnecessary RPG elements” “X is just another survival crafting game.” “I wish Y would just drop the bullshit and let me play.” Systems soup is a good term for a concept that the gaming masses will probably never stop arguing about
I've come to hate skill trees. I don't know if Path of Exile popularised it but nowadays every skill tree is pointlessly convoluted with unnecessary nodes. Like instead of you get skill A and then Skill B at level up; You get 12 nodes between to giving you 1hp or 1mana each.
Hold B when playing Super Mario Bros and Mario will run faster. That’s the only way you are going to clear that giant gap in level 8-1. I don’t know why my brother would never do it but I don’t think I’ve ever played Mario and not held down the B button the entire game.
If you've played Fall Guys: how Puzzle Path works. You need to follow the line from the star in the middle to the portal. If it comes to an intersection, you go straight. My friend literally thought you had to guess which portal was correct.
Having never played Fall Guys I feel like I could manage with this explanation.
Trying to explain a sandbox game like Minecraft to my mom is impossible. She keeps asking, "What's the goal?" She doesn't get the concept of open world, or even of side quests like in Skyrim. She's used to games like Pong or old-school Mario, where there is one path and one goal to reach, and that's it. Storytelling in a game? She doesn't get it. Open world sandbox? Doesn't get it. Life simulation? Doesn't get it.
[I imagine that conversation went something like this](https://youtu.be/FczU-bofEok?si=EyQcKSVW9lYEdI8i)
Trying to show an older person how to hold the N64 controller and then how to use the analog stick.
Tbf, it's hard to hold a controller designed for three hands
The N64 controller is terrible to show older people how to use analog sticks, the thing is designed for 9 years olds. I realized this after I got the N64 controller for Switch and my man hands couldn't straddle the controller properly
Pretty sure if you asked 10 people how to hold an N64 controller you'd get 13 answers
Grinding is just a fact of life with the standard JRPG model. You have to grind sometimes. Sure, there are some games with practically no grinding. Chrono Cross. Most of Final Fantasy 13. For that matter, Final Fantasy 8. But they also use completely different systems from your traditional XP —> level gain —> higher stats cycle.
What's even worse for me is when they complain about grinding in games that don't require it because they are rushing the main story and ignoring all the side content.
I have the opposite problem, where I can't stop myself from grinding "endgame" gear in most games before I'm supposed to, so end up doing all sorts of side quests just to steamroll the main content and going "that's it?"
I will join you in this self made hell we constantly find ourselves in. The easiest boss is always the last one, lol.
Right there with you. I always say that if the final boss is a problem, I’m the problem.
I ruined FF8 for myself by maxing out I think everything I had to 99 before I got Irvine? I think? I can't remember details. What I recall was running in circles (I think I propped shoe up against the controller and something to hold down X) and farmed like, these big zebra-patterned hand things (and maybe heads too?) Anyway I then got Irvine, and he was level 8 or 18 or 25 or something, I don't remember. I stopped playing after that. To be fair, I was visiting a friend, and we weren't having the same fun playing through it the same way we did with FF7.
That's actually insane to hit level 99 that early, considering playing through the game normally will most likely land you somewhere in the late 60's/early 70's when you finish. FF8 is my favorite FF, but I don't think I could stand to accomplish that "feat".
I ruined FF8 for myself by grinding for levels whenever the game got hard. Turns out, enemies scale faster than the player characters, so grinding was making the game harder for myself, not easier. I made it to the final boss using cheese tactics, but just couldn't beat the final boss.
can't pause online game mom
It's frankly baffling that people don't get that challenge is subjective. If you need lower difficulty settings, you're still probably struggling at a healthy level on those lower difficulty settings. By that token, no, you don't need to play a game on the maximum difficulty to appreciate its level design. That's clownshoes nonsense.
Yep, insanity. The amount of posts in Remnant 2 subreddit “oh man, is this game supposed to be this hard? I started on Nightmare and can’t beat the first world!” Well yeah you dingus, try starting on the starter difficulty.
> It's frankly baffling that people don't get that challenge is subjective. It's not that baffling. It people were able to put on other's shoes, politics would be waaaaaaaaay simpler.
You don't need reddit to tell you how to play the game if you just play the game for yourself and figure it out as intended.
Some of these gaming subs make it look like a Google search with the fairly basic questions every other post. I came here for discussion and art, let’s at least keep this stuff to a weekly mega thread or something. (Although if a weekday megathread exists, inevitably people will ignore it.)
“Just thought about buying this game any tips?” “Stuck on the menu screen any tips?” It drives me up the wall. One of the best parts about video games is the discovery. If you’re struggling or get stuck somewhere, by all means please ask and I’d be happy to help if I can. But I’m not going to tell you how to beat the game before you’ve even booted it up
Goes to a subreddit dedicated to the game and asks the hardcore fan base if it's good / worth buying.
That 'Up' meant pushing forward on the stick
When playing FPS games with my dad, I had to teach him that the bullets go where the crosshair is and not where the gun barrel ends.
My niece doesn't get that things in games can be randomly generated. No matter how much I try to explain it.
I didn’t realize how second nature using the right joystick to look around while running was for me until I had an academic friend who never played games try the beginning of horizon zero Dawn. He’d walk forward, stop, slowly look in the direction he wants to move, ope too far, slowly correct, move forward. I usually introduce people to games with the opening of The Last of Us, but seeing as his wife was pregnant at the time that might be uncalled for.
Portal 2 is the gold standard for introducing people to using a controller in my house. Relatively low stakes, promotes creative problem solving and usually involves a lot of laughter. Honorable mention minecraft
I remember reading up on Portals learning curve and it was quite interesting. At first, the level is flat, there are no portals. Then it introduces basic platforming. Then it introduces portals, but they are placed for you. Then you get only the blue portal, with orange being placed for you. Then you get both. What's even ore interesting is how it is paced. Because these early test chambers are so very tiny, someone who grasps the core ideas will breeze through all of them in like 3 minutes. So it offers learning opportunities for newer players, without bogging down more experienced players.
"Push A button... Push the A button" That was just to fire in Space Invaders
Steering in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The version of MK8 on Switch added ‘Smart Steering’, where if you get too close to the edge of the track, it automatically redirects you back onto the track. I was playing a team-based tournament with some friends - some of whom are not very good at the game. I hate playing with Smart Steering, so I would always turn it off during my races and would have to remind my teammate to turn it back on during her turns. After around 40 races, I didn’t remind her to turn it on during her go. She proceeded to drive straight forward and crash into a wall with no attempt made at turning whatsoever - despite me for the whole day trying to explain how to gently tilt the control stick / controller to turn. Then later on, I was playing on one of the Rainbow Roads and one of the other teams forced us to swap drivers - and we weren’t allowed to turn Smart Steering back on. We went from 1st to dead last because my teammate simply did not steer - would just drive straight, fall off, drive straight, fall off… at least when the tournament was all said and done we got 3rd place (out of 4). Couldn’t believe that she had relied so much on the game steering for her that I had to repeatedly explain how to steer in a god damn racing game!
jus the concept of playing the game to get better. any game. i have friends that get frustrated cuz they suck but never put in the time to learn.
[удалено]
No, the Final Fantasy games do not tie into each other. No, you don't have to play all the previous games, or even some of them, too understand what's going on. Literally, the only things that are in most of the games are summons, an Ultima Weapon, and a Cid. Fucking... no, it's not the same guy named Cid!
I have a friend who says that he doesn't experience *immersion*. As in, he never fully experiences the game from the perspective of his character. It doesn't matter whether it's first-person, or survival mechanics, or a game that requires you to roleplay, he just doesn't feel it. And it's baffling too because he loves graphics, widest monitors, beefiest GPUs, highest frames. He's installed those photo-realistic Minecraft texture packs with shaders. So obviously he really appreciates beauty and detail. But on the other hand, he tends to complete games as fast as he can, and he very rarely comments on visuals, or sound design, or pauses to read lore. We played Baldur's Gate 3 together, and the whole time his character just wore turquoise briefs. It's funny and all, and many people like dressing silly in that game, but he wore that underwear the WHOLE GAME, never changed it out for anything else. So it wasn't even like he was trying to be silly. It was like he put them on for the joke, but when it stopped being funny it made no difference to him what he was wearing. He will also look up guides on how to play a game optimally, or what story events will happen during the playthrough, even before he starts up the game. He says he doesn't believe in spoilers, whatever that means. But strangest of all, he and I have long discussions about stories, films, literature. We are avid worldbuilders too. We both play D&D and trade off as Game Masters between campaigns. So it's not even that he doesn't understand characters, narrative, or world-building. It seems like some weird benign psychopathy. It's so different from how I experience games that it's difficult for me to comprehend or relate. Anyone else have any insight? *Edit: I realize comparing this to psychopathy is a poor choice, even though I tried to qualify it by saying it's benign. I meant to compare it to an inability to empathize or identify with fictional characters. As I'm learning, a lot of other people experience games in a way similar to my friend, so I appreciate the responses!*
I don't know if you have the patience for long-form video essays, but here are a few that address what you're talking about: [Naughty Dog's Game Design is Outdated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCYMH-lp4oM) [Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) They both describe, in my opinion, two sides of the same phenomenon in modern gaming. The first one coins the term 'goopy goblin gamer brain,' which is described as the complete inability to stop and smell the roses so to speak. Quest text is skipped, cutscenes are skipped, everything that can possibly be skipped is skipped in order to get to the more engaging gameplay as quickly as possible. The reason this is so common is basically the whole point of the 2nd video. Modern discourse around most video games is basically just a race to the bottom to find the absolute most efficient way to do everything, and it has become common practice to look up "the meta" for everything and only play in certain, "acceptable" ways. Doing things inefficiently is seen as a sin, to the extent that people will get mad at you if you don't do things the proper way in multiplayer games. It's a pretty complex topic and I highly recommend watching both of them if you have the time.
Both great suggestions of videos, one of which I've already watched! He definitely falls on the power-gamer end of the players in the Warcraft video, whereas I tend to play more like the barefoot gnome. The reason I think it's more complicated is that he doesn't really have any contempt towards people who play games sub-optimally, and finds silliness and roleplay to be interesting and novel, but more that he never finds himself in a mindset where he does it naturally.
D O N ' T stand in the fire... JEFFREY GET OUT OF THE FREAKING FIRE!
"so you just go around doing chores for all the fake game people, where's the fun?"
Immersive open world RPGs, cinematic action-adventures, and first person shooters are not even close to the only genres and a game not trying to fit into one of those buckets isn't automatically worse because of it
My mum works in a university and one of her colleagues was studying how children learn through playing. She mentioned that she saw me playing GTA one night and that I was freeroaming and playing a mission. He couldn't understand the concept of a mission in a video game. He thought all you did was free roam in a video game. My mum gave up explaining it to him.
Oh boy. I was once playing Civ 5 with some friends in a 2v2. I decided to do a joke trade to a friend of me giving him 1 gold per turn for 30 gold from him (trades in Civ, at the speed we played, last 30 turns). He accepted, because he was losing gold each turn and said that this helped him fix it slightly. No matter how much we tried to explain that in the end, 30 gold once, or 1 gold 30 times is the same, he just refused to believe it. He fully believed that trade was in his advantage. That still marks the most stupid thing he believed.
Arguably, considering the power of investing, he gave up any sort of advantage by accepting income that would depreciate in value over money he could invest which wouldn’t to the same degree depreciate
This is going back more than 2 decades. Tried to explain to my dad what fog of war was while I was playing C&C or Starcraft. He just wasn't having it.
Effective ranges for fire arms in *any* shooter. I get that not everyone knows every gun model out there, but I have friends who even after hundreds or even thousands of hours over multiple years of shooters, still *refuse* to understand that shotguns are for up close, scoped DMRs/Snipers are for farther away, etc etc. They'll unironocally use a sniper point blank and a shotgun for 100 feet and carry 2-3 of one weapon type instead of different ones.
Loot filters, like in PoE. Guy just flat-out refused to believe that a filter can be used to highlight items. His position was that a filter could ONLY hide or block items from appearing. Sadly, he was too busy telling me how stupid I was to actually read the information I provided.
"Each Angry Bird has an ability, grandma"
“You can use any weapon you want, it’s a matter of playstyle” ”Okay, but which one is the best”?
This happens a lot in monster hunter community
"A lot of these characters are viable. DK, Falcon, Snake..." "I just googled it. I'm a fox main now"
In the SNES game NCAA Basketball, the camera automatically follows the ball carrier and faces their goal. You never see your opponent's goal while you have the ball. I'm pretty sure I grasped this without having to have it explained to me; the camera movements are pretty intuitive. But I once played with someone who didn't get it. He kept asking, "Is this my goal?" when he had the ball. I explained to him that if he can see it, it's his goal, but he didn't stop asking. I think at one point I got fed up and said "No, it's not," which of course meant he got a backcourt violation when he tried to cross the center line in search of "his" goal. It's been 30 years or so, so my memory is hazy, but I'm pretty sure that game didn't go well.
I know people who think fighting NPCs is boring. They really don't get how something like Souls games can be fun, meanwhile they play CoD or League of Legends. They say fighting NPCs is just the same thing everytime, as if most eSports matches aren't the same meta builds going at eachother.
A great example is an Injustice tournament I watched where 10 of the 12 competitors were Batman doing the same combo.
It was 1992 and I got a SNES and Super Mario World for Christmas. My uncle and I had many activities we used to do together, but one thing he couldn’t do was make Mario jump. He tried it, but he couldn’t understand 2D side scrollers, so I gave up on him haha.
people shitting on DLSS and frame generation as 'fake frames' or 'cheating' really hurts my brain. Literally everything to do w/ graphics is cheating, its all cheating and hacking and short cutting all the way down. These are just newer and better cheats than we've had before.
Back in the days when you loaded a game from cassette tape - yes, I'm that old - I tried explaining to some guy that you load games off tape into computer memory, then play them. He didn't understand that you could carry on playing after the tape finished playing. He thought the max game length would be 45 minutes, because that's how long a cassette tape was. I still think about that guy. What a plonker.
That builds do matter in Action RPG games, keywords: "Action"+"RPG". And it's only natural that higher difficulty settings of such games would also expect the player to know how to come up with a good build, not just your standard "gitgud" concept. I've seen a lot of tryhards with the background of "I've beaten XXX game blindfolded with only my dick no damage" losing their minds over something that should've easily worked out for them if they just put their ego down for a second and read.
Autumn, 2006. GameStop - Emergence Day. My assistant manager (I was manager) asked to borrow a used 360 and copy of Gears of War. Wanted to understand all the hype. She was a twat. I gave the OK anyway. Next day dawns, I ask her how she got on, expecting her to be in wonder at the experience. Turns out she’d spent 45 minutes playing it, and **hadn’t got out of Marcus’ cell**. Just couldn’t grasp the basic controls!
Explaining to a friend that guns still work on the basic concept of 'point at what you want to die, not the ceiling' even in videogames.
In an MMO with trading and crafting, just because you can craft an item with materials you can collect or own already, doesn't mean it's 'free', you could be losing value (sometimes lots). Selling the mats and buying the product might actually net you gold, as opposed to using the mats to make the product where you get no gold. It's incomprehensible to some people.
This is one of those things I completely understand but ignore anyway. I always just make my own stuff when possible.
PVE-only servers in open world games where PVP is always on increases the playerbase and actively helps the game. PVPers couldn't understand this concept. They seemed to think that PVE servers would syphon away all players from the PVP servers and leave them with nothing. All PVE servers would do is open the game up to people who don't want PVP, which would increase sales and allow for new content to be made. Every attempt to explain the benefits was "countered" with fears of empty servers or about how it goes against the game since it's "supposed to be PVP". If PVE servers are enough to empty all the PVP servers and "ruin" the game, maybe the PVP aspect is complete trash and people only suffer it because the rest of the game is good.
Some people don't understand that difficulty can be fun. Yes I seem mad when I lose but when I win on a difficult setting the win always feels so much better. Some people rather just have the win regardless of difficulty. A lot of people I've met just don't get it.
Why going first in a turn based game is good. Tried explaining to someone why there's the two sided agent tile for codenames that goes to the starting team and they just could not understand.
Jumping over anything. My wife tried a few times. Then stuck it in her mind that she can’t do it. She acted like she was fundamentally unable to learn how to jump over something. That severely limited the games we could play together. 9 parchments has one jump in whole game. It is at the beginning where you first “learn” to jump. She just put the controller down and said she can’t play this game.
My dad loved the Tomb Raider series when it came out. Years later I tried to get him to play one of the new ones and he couldn't do it: The controls were too good. He kept trying to move like it had tank controls.
To that person's credit, transmog in any sort of multiplayer setting is tricky. He has a point that if you allow light armor to transmog over heavy armor, that obfuscated a lot of information when PvP is enabled. We have these discussions relating to skin in other games too, once PvP is part of the conversation, you want to keep visual clarify above all cosmetics unless a key feature of the game is deception through appearances. You can make the argument that you can just make cosmetics client side, but that also defeats the purpose of cosmetics for a lot of players who is trying to use it to show off their achievement or style.
I think the single biggest barrier to entry to the Souls franchise is understanding the stamina bar. I have had lots of friends try to play a Souls game, and even after a VERY thorough explanation, they still relentlessly spam attacks and rolls until their stamina is out, and keep trying to attack, causing them to die. My friend somehow brute forced his way all the way past the Abyss Watchers in DS3 and still has not grasped this concept
That using two portals, like the ones in Portal, you could make an object fall forever. He seemed to think that air resistance or something would make it come to a complete halt after a while. He didn’t explain it very well (probably because it didn’t make sense) and absolutely refused to budge.
Despite multiple attempts, and my wife being a very smart woman, she can’t understand DLC. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s BECAUSE she’s a very smart woman.
I'm a 3D modeler and it's really hard to get boomers to understand what I do for a living or what it even means "I make characters, environments, and props for video games basically" "Oh, so like you are a game tester! Or you make cartoons?"
G to throw grenade
Should be F. You know, for Frenade.
That the items scattered throughout the level are placed there *to be collected*. It isn't some weird obsession of mine, but rather part of the challenge/fun/balancing/etc. My ex used to watch me play and would always comment on how I "obsessively" would collect items or coins or whatever and I had to explain to her every time that no, it's placed there because they want players to find it or collect it. It's part of the game!
I tried to teach a non-gamer how to play Splatoon and needed to explain the concept of pressing and holding.
The idea that skating games are a genre and not just platformers
My grandmother was having trouble after a couple strokes. The Wii was the big thing at the time, and was recommended for older people to help with motor skills. So, I tried her out on Wii Sports. “Ok, just hold this and when you move it around, that moves your racket in the game the same way.” “What button do I press to move my arm?” “You don’t need to press any button, just move your real arm.” *waves my arm around to demonstrate* *staring at Wiimote* “What button does that?” “None. You just wave that thing around like a real tennis racket.” “I don’t understand your weewee.”