What Casual Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

Not long ago, my wife, more popularly known as the lady I live with, made the mistake of agreeing to be the subject of a series of informal experiments in which she would try out a handful of titles for me to see

what

games

are for those who They don't spend much time

play

ing them. Through these informal experiments, I have gained a better understanding of the challenges that come with learning the language of video

games

for the first time. There are many barriers for those unfamiliar with typical gaming conventions and mechanics, as most titles are designed in a way that assumes

play

ers have a basic understanding of how games work, making it in a difficult hobby for new players to learn.

That said, many of you have noticed that the titles I've had you play aren't always so beginner-friendly. And well, yeah, that's a good point. So I decided to continue her video game education, and in turn mine, by conducting another informal experiment, this time having her try out some of the games I probably should have made her play in the first place. Some less focused on fighting enemies and overcoming difficult platforming challenges, and more focused on relaxed gameplay that somehow aligns with your real-life interests. So I asked him to play 4 titles, all of which were roughly in the life simulation genre.

These are Stardew Valley, The Sims 4, Slime Rancher and, of course, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I chose these games partly because many of you highly recommended them as excellent entry points into the game and also because they share the core loop of obtaining resources that are used to build and customize the player's base of operations, which was an aspect My wife enjoyed. I play Minecraft a lot, so I thought these titles would give it a similar feel. Ultimately, I wanted to see

what

it is about these titles that makes so many people consider them good entry points into gaming, while also examining the ways in which they may fall short for new players.

As usual, I watched as a mostly silent observer, she only occasionally reminded him of mechanics each game had already gone over and sometimes she taught him mechanics the games never taught. So, that's how it was. Overall, she had a much easier time figuring out how to interact with various things in these titles, and when I asked her about it, she said it was because she knew how to do most of the things the games wanted her to do. in real life. While bouncing off things with a shovel to reach higher places or killing an enemy up close for health drops only happens in video games, things like gardening, building relationships, and paying off debts are activities she's experienced. in his own life. which made it easier for him to figure out how to interact with those mechanics.

The same goes for fishing in Animal Crossing; While the game didn't explicitly tell her when to press the A button, she knew to wait until the fish dragged the cork underwater instead of when it first nibbled on it because she had fished before and was able to use her knowledge of that in the game. By focusing the core game mechanics on simple, familiar activities, she found it easier to understand the basic concepts of those games. On the other hand, Slime Rancher, which focuses on sucking up slimes with a vacuum gun, storing them in a pen, and then collecting their droppings to then sell them for money, took a little longer to understand.

Obviously, I don't think new players should limit themselves to just titles that are reflections of real life, but I do think that for

someone

just starting out, it can be a good way to get familiar with the controls and navigate a digital space without being overwhelmed. for somewhat obscure concepts. Besides the fact that she now has a little more experience with games, it also helped that none of these titles had as much urgency. She had the time and space to figure things out without the threat of something killing her. At least in most of it. Lady: Are you serious?!

While her not being able to figure out a mechanic in many games can lead to death and losing a lot of progress, in these, that was a minor factor, so she figured out how to do things without as much frustration. That's not to say there wasn't frustration in figuring out the controls and mechanics, as these titles still fell victim to many of the same problems that exist in the other games she played. The Sims 4 tutorial bombarded her with too much information in a small window and also made her engage in some of the more mundane aspects of the game.

By contrast, Stardew Valley's tutorial boiled down to this, leaving it with little direction. Slime Rancher gave a lot of useful advice that was on the far right of the screen, and since she normally had tunnel vision for anything that was directly in front of her, she sometimes missed important information. And Animal Crossing, despite over-explaining almost the entire game,

doesn

't tell players certain information, the most important of which is how to run. As a side note, since running in previous Animal Crossing games caused the grass to fade, I assumed it would do the same in this one, so I decided not to tell him that Springint was even an option to maintain our island. looking impeccable.

I later learned that that's not a mechanic in New Horizons, so wow! Lady: Really? Now you tell me that? While I've talked quite a bit throughout this series about how unexplained mechanics like these can act as a huge barrier to new players, throughout this experiment, I noticed a few cases where unexplained mechanics actually benefited my wife's experience. . Like in Slime Rancher. One of the first challenges of the game is figuring out how to best store the different slimes. There's really no indication explaining how it is that when my wife picked up several slimes, she threw them into pens without much nonsense or reason.

Her first attempt resulted in a massive escape of slime, leading to an intense moment of panic and excitement as she tried to gather them all together before they got too far away. If the game had said exactly what would happen if she mixed slimes in the same pen or put too many in one, she would have been more careful and would have missed out on an entertaining moment. The good thing is that the mistake didn't have huge consequences, she taught her to be more careful. So it ended up being a much more interesting learning experience than I might have indicated.

If important information is not communicated to the player, there should always be a reason for this other than the assumption that he already knows how it works. Really, the biggest barrier for new players is how games communicate information, and that's not just about teaching them controls or mechanics, but also properly communicating why they should continue playing. And that is done by establishing something that has been pretty consistent throughout all of the experiments is that my wife likes to have a specific objective to complete when she plays. Beyond that, she also likes it when there are multiple ways to complete that goal.

Having a clear motivation is important for any gamer, but it's especially useful for those who don't know enough about games to set their own goals. Of all the titles she played for this experiment, Animal Crossing did the best job of communicating her ultimate goal along with the various ways to achieve it. He got a tent, racked up debts, and was told he had to pay them off. That made it clear to her what she had to do and why she had to do it. With The Sims 4, Slime Rancher, and Stardew Valley you were given a more open goal: build your farm and/or house.

While these 4 games essentially have the player do the same thing: earn money to unlock new things, Animal Crossing made it much easier to quantify your success by seeing how much you had left to pay off your debts. Because the other titles didn't have such clear reference points, she felt a little disoriented when playing them. Every activity in Animal Crossing had meaning to her because she was working to pay for her house, but the activities in the other games didn't have the same sense of purpose because the goal was more nebulous. She knew the idea was to improve her farm, ranch, or home, but it was a little harder to know where to start.

To be honest, when I watched her play Stardew Valley, she surprised me how much she had a hard time finding purpose because when I played it, I didn't have a problem with it. However, when I thought about it more, I realized that before I even started the game, I had specific goals in mind because it had been pitched to me as a spiritual successor to Harvest Moon, a series I had spent countless hours on throughout. from my childhood. I knew what the main goals would be due to my understanding and nostalgia for the series it paid homage to, so finding motivation in Stardew Valley required no effort on my part.

Obviously, since my wife didn't grow up with the same experience, she had nothing to draw from when she jumped into it. I'm sure that not all inexperienced players will have trouble finding direction and setting their own goals in games, but especially for those just starting out, it helps a lot when games set several clear goals for players to work towards. In the end, I decided to tell him some of the most important things he should work on with each game, and once I did, he found it easier to get into the core gameplay of most of the titles, with the exception of The Sims 4 She really loved the idea of ​​building and designing an amazing house that we could never afford in real life.

However, the actual act of earning enough money to build the house she wanted to build was tedious and boring. It consisted of her choosing jobs for each of us and then sending us to work for about 8 hours, which made the game fast forward for about a minute while she waited for us to get home. While in the other games she earned money by participating in the main game, in The Sims 4 she earned money through no gameplay, which led to boring downtime and no real connection between her actions and the reward. . On top of that, the amount of money she earns in a day of work is quite small, so in order to build the kind of house she wanted, she would have had to play for a long, long time.

Lady: I ​​made 136 dollars. Killing him! Hoping to prevent our Sims characters' lives from becoming an eerily accurate reflection of our own, we decided to speed up the process so she could interact with the element of the game she found most interesting using, you know, codes. tricks. . Once she earned a whopping $9,999,999, The Sims 4 went from a game she quickly grew bored of to one where she spent nearly a dozen hours designing houses. While I'm glad the game had a way to play the way she wanted, I couldn't help but think this kind of thing should have just been a game mode instead of an option hidden behind a cheat code.

Cheats are probably more useful to inexperienced players, but given their lack of knowledge, they are unlikely to know or assume that a game may have codes they could enter. Obviously, this isn't as common of a problem since cheat codes have largely disappeared from games, but that actually leads to a bigger problem: many titles don't offer enough options for players of all types. I think many games would benefit from following the lead of titles like Celeste, which has an assist mode that allows players to adjust various game mechanics to suit their needs, while making it clear that this is not the intended way to play. game.

When we talk about accessibility, we often talk about it in relation to making a game less difficult, but I also think it's important to think about it from the perspective of making a game more interesting for certain players. This sort of thing

doesn

't work for every title out there, but it does work for something like The Sims 4, which has two quite distinct phases of the game, living and building, which allows for some sort of option that allows the player to focus on one of them. they. It would be nice to do those things without them being tied to a cheat code.

I've found that people who play often are much more willing to stick with a game they're not entirely sold on than

someone

who doesn't, so it's hugely important to give inexperienced players a reason to want to keep playing. and really only one of these games did that for my wife. So are

casual

titles the best way for new players to get into gaming? The answer is definitive: probably. These types of titles offer a relaxed environment for inexperienced players to get used to moving in a digital space and learn the basics of the game. While my wife never felt the same levels of excitement that she did when completing certain tasks in more difficult games, she also never had to deal with the frustration thatarises from continuous failure.

That said, there are many other factors that go into choosing a good starting point that go beyond the gameplay of a title. The most obvious is to find a game that fits your interests. In the first experiment, I put my wife through a handful of titles with settings and stories she had little interest in. I guess if someone has gone their entire life without really getting into video games, they're probably more likely to be drawn to video games. interested in the scenarios and concepts prevalent in

casual

life simulation titles. There are also many reasons on the more technical side of things.

As we continued doing these experiments, I noticed more and more that my wife gets quite nauseous while she plays first-person titles and that became extremely evident while she was playing Slime Rancher. Lady: I ​​just don't like these types of games. Raz: What's up with that? Lady: Simply, yes, because they make you nauseous. Simulation sickness is something that a large number of people suffer from while playing first-person titles, and while it can affect anyone, people who play games regularly are less likely to be constantly bothered because they've spent more time acclimating to it. that kind. of stimulus.

So, even though Slime Rancher has many qualities that make it an appealing game for new players, the mere fact that it is in a first-person perspective can be really difficult for a new player to adapt to without the proper aids. After some research and experimentation, I found that playing in windowed mode with a still image in the background ended up helping quite a bit. In general, though, first-person titles are probably a little riskier to begin with than third-person ones. Beyond that, even the appearance of a game had a direct influence on his interest in it. In general, you have found titles with a more retro art style much less appealing than those with more modern graphics.

One of his main complaints about Stardew Valley was that he couldn't tell what things were (I can't tell what anything is). Pixel art is often a bit abstract, meaning it requires viewers to extrapolate meaning from the blocky edges and lack of detail. For people like me who grew up playing games in this kind of style, it's probably become second nature to do this, but that wasn't the case for my wife. Obviously, it wasn't impossible for her to figure out what certain things were supposed to be, but it wasn't always immediate and she had a harder time telling what things she could and couldn't interact with.

So, she preferred games where she just didn't need to think about that kind of thing. While everyone has different tastes and responses to art styles, when trying to engage an inexperienced player in a game, it is important to consider not only what type of style is most appealing to them, but also what will communicate information in the way more easily understandable. Lastly, I think games that have an optional co-op feature can be incredibly useful for new players. Through these types of modes, they can capture various things that someone more experienced does while playing and implement them into their gameplay.

It's a much better teaching tool than standing back and simply telling them what to do. My wife and I ended up playing quite a bit of Animal Crossing together, and while I'd never say I think it does a perfect job in local co-op, having to stay within the same screen ended up teaching her a lot about how I play. So, yeah, look, what I'm trying to say, if it hasn't already become obvious, is that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the perfect entry point into gaming for someone with similar tastes as my wife. You've spent more time on New Horizons than all the other games you've played throughout this series combined, and unlike any other title, you've continued playing even when I wasn't around to see it...

So, I thought Instead of trying to overanalyze why, more than I already have, I would simply ask: Raz: So why do you think you've played Animal Crossing more than any other game so far? Lady: I ​​think because everyone likes Animal Crossing. Everyone plays it and oddly enough it makes me feel part of something exciting that's happening, and that's what makes it fun. And it makes me spend, apparently, more than 50 hours playing it. Raz: 60 Lady: 60. Great. And speaking of segways, cables? I'm right? As someone who listens to things constantly, it's really nice to not be tied to a device all the time, so I really like using things that are wireless, and the sponsor of this video, Raycon, offers just that.

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And if you click the link in the description, you can get 15% off your order. All in all, Raycon are a fantastic pair of headphones that I use all the time, so if you're looking for a really great pair of headphones, you should check out Raycon. Anyway, thanks again to Raycon for sponsoring this video. To everyone still watching, I appreciate you very, very much. There's more on the way, so stay tuned. So yeah, I hope you have a great day and/or night, and I'll see you next time. Lady: Have you ever played so hard it hurts?

Raz: *laughs* Lady: What? I'm being serious! My thumbs hurt. Really. I'm not kidding. Can you stop laughing at me?