My introduction to Batman was reruns of the Adam West TV series, so I definitely can’t take Batman seriously at all.

I’d have to say that the Burton films make better desert island movies, which was the comment made in the video. The Nolan ones are deeper, but The Dark Knight isn’t something I would want to pop in every day as video wallpaper.

On the other hand, Batman Returns is just a lot more fun to have running in the background while I do other stuff. 

Eurogamer had an article a week or two about the loss of instruction manuals. Man, I used to read those things like literature, and now there’s almost nothing in them. All the instructions are in the games themselves, which means that not only are we incapable of figuring out puzzles, we are also incapable of putting meaning to words on a page. I think this might be the simplest solution to overlong tutorials and in game “hints”.

Also, not to keep harping on about Demon’s / Dark Souls, but they put the instructions on the ground in game, for you read or ignore. A nice system. And after that, you figure out by exploring. There’s a couple games that actually need someone to play them.

Fine points, all. And to think that all of this could have been avoided so simply and so elegantly by allowing players to turn hints off.

But more to the point: regarding the idea that frustration is what causes players to quit. I believe it was Jenova Chen, of thatgamecompany, who came up with the “Flow” theory of game difficulty. Basically it states that for every game, and every individual task within a game, there is a difficulty “sweet spot” of sorts. If a game is too difficult for the player, they become frustrated, and are likely to give up. This is the problem being addressed by this game, and so many others, by implementing hand-holding (mandatory hand-holding!) tutorials and hint systems. But it totally ignores the other half of the theory, which is that if a game is not difficult enough, the player becomes bored, and is just as likely to stop playing. You know who gets bored easily? Kiddies.

It’s a pretty interesting read if you’re into that sort of thing. Incidentally, this theory was the foundation of the game with the same title. The cornerstone of that game was the idea that the player can adjust the difficulty of the game mid-play to suit their needs, without having to choose between static “difficulty levels” or whatever. All interesting stuff.

 Child psychologists say that children learn composition, problem solving and generally spatial logic by playing with and initially failing at simple educational toys. That is why they should receive positive reinforcement for success, but not be told what to do.
Putting the star-shaped peg into the star-shaped hole is only an achievement if the child wasn’t told to put it there, but instead figured out that it doesn’t fit into the other holes. That aspect of learning and a sense of achievement doesn’t change throughout our adult life.

The problem is that certain areas of society have come to fear frustration and failure as something that is to be avoided at all costs in order to stop people from giving up. That has lead to teachers not allowed to fail students for bad grades or missed tests anymore, for example. People who grow up with everything designed to be easily achievable will never know the pride and feeling of self-worth that comes from succeeding against the odds, which is not only harmful but also sad.

My oldest niece is 12 and she played Assassin’s Creed for a good 2 hours
(we didn’t let her murder anyone by telling her she had to run away
from guards) and became so fluent in the certainly complex controls after falling off roofs for a while that she actually beat some of my times at roof-races. Every time she fell off a roof, she was convinced that she now knew what was wrong and tried again. After a fairly short time she executed complex skips from walls and was proud of herself for figuring it out. I think the greatest aspect for her was that the way she was playing had stopped the conversation in the room and more or less enthralled 5 grown-ups enough to just stare at the screen and watch her play, encouraging her with the odd command. I would argue that this did wonders for her self-esteem and her beaming smile every time she got a bit of positive feedback after an especially complex sequence is something that made her parents quite happy. No game holding your hand would garner the same response, because a 12-year old pressing a button when told to isn’t a budding creative, but a potential sweatshop-worker.

Games may have become more complex and therefore sometimes require a quick hint on how to do something. But maybe having a fictional character pointing at things and saying “Do that” isn’t really teaching at all. Trial and error is still the main process our brain uses, especially at an early age, to solve problems. Without trial, there are no errors and no learning. The game basically teaches you how to follow commands, not how to think creatively. “Asteroids” may be a vastly simpler game, but I would argue that its utterly unassisted gameplay teaches you a lot more about spatial awareness than a complex modern game does.

One could also argue that any game developer who thinks you need to constantly be reminded of how to play the game isn’t terribly convinced that their game is all that well designed. Any game that has its shit together, so to speak, will become fluent very quickly.