What It’s Like to Play is a column that describes how videogames are played, to an audience that doesn’t necessarily play a lot of such games. It is inspired by the series of the same name that ran on CultureRamp in late 2012 , and its basic premise is explained by L. Rhodes here. The name is used with permission.

As an adult, how does one learn to play elec­tron­ic games? With no older sib­ling or friend down the block to teach, no com­mu­ni­ty of mates to check in with, no mem­o­ry of games from child­hood, how does one begin, how does one progress? The uni­ver­sal advice is, “Just play.” Or “Find a game you love and play till you’re adept.” A wel­com­ing thought — how­ev­er, for me, it’s not been that easy, and I think the rea­sons might be inter­est­ing.

In my late fifties, my per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life both con­front­ed me with how very much I didn’t know about elec­tron­ic games, aes­thet­i­cal­ly and oth­er­wise. So I set out to explore, and set the arbi­trary goal of get­ting to know fifty games (and a wide range of them). I am still at the begin­ning: in three months that began with casu­al and occa­sion­al play, I’ve intro­duced myself to some twenty-nine games, so far fin­ish­ing or get­ting seri­ous­ly into about ten.

I can hurry past two ini­tial demands on a new play­er: my new boyfriend, an expert and thought­ful games­man (yes, he’s younger than me), has spared me ini­tial expense by shar­ing his Steam account and hook­ing me up with Blizzard, loan­ing me a track­ball mouse, and doing basic rec­om­men­da­tions and coach­ing. As for the sec­ond task, find­ing peo­ple to play with — no such luck. None of my friends play, and the dread­ed Beginner Shame blocks me for now from play­ing with either my few advanced game-player acquain­tances or with online strangers. “Games,” for me, for now, more or less means solo-player PC games.

So far, every­thing I know I owe to alter­na­tive games — inde­pen­dent, eccen­tric, arty, small, non-competitive, lower-stress games: Monument Valley, with the charm of its unflap­pable heroine’s tiny, method­i­cal steps as she traipses through gravity-defying Escher struc­tures; the restrained, meta-gaming wit of Cameron Kunzelman’s Catachresis and Epanelepsis; the sim­ple but snide world of Loved; Two Queers in Love at the End of the World. Of course, for a book­ish chap like me, inter­ac­tive fic­tion has been the most involv­ing form, so thanks go to Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home, and The Walking Dead. And — make no mis­take — this is an awe-inspiring way to enter gam­ing. But my project requires me to go fur­ther — across a great divide, main­stream games are star­ing at me, expec­tant­ly.

So now let’s talk about my one and only, tiny, area of exper­tise, my spe­cial POV: learn­ing to play elec­tron­ic games with­out the ben­e­fit of any prior expe­ri­ence. So far, two major obser­va­tions: first, as nat­ur­al as game-playing comes to feel for the vet­er­an play­er, none of this is sim­ply “nat­ur­al ” — or, at least, human nature, what­ev­er that may be, has to adjust to these amuse­ments: there is more habit­u­a­tion and shap­ing of desire here, more re-arranging of affect and excite­ment and, indeed, of val­ues, by the very act of play­ing, than any­one accus­tomed to video games may real­ize. And, sec­ond­ly, play­ing a game is a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence if you’re inex­pe­ri­enced . And thus, when you’re just start­ing out, there are real, and reveal­ing, hur­dles to “just play­ing,” to shar­ing what a more know­ing play­er feels.

The first hur­dle, and it’s huge, is unfa­mil­iar­i­ty with game­play itself — and with the very process of learn­ing a game.

Start with the con­trols. For me, not being good with con­trols almost derails the whole exper­i­ment. It means lots of not suc­ceed­ing; more, it means hes­i­tat­ing at the thresh­old of the deep­er, more involv­ing expe­ri­ence of the game. This is true even with appar­ent­ly sim­ple games: I would have more fully enjoyed Gone Home — its story, its mood and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and sweet queer love story — if it hadn’t been the first time I ever moved a character’s POV with WASD keys and a mouse. I also had things to learn about the puz­zle logic of tra­di­tion­al adven­ture games. Struggling with these, I was too pre­oc­cu­pied by the game­play to get involved in the game.

More com­pli­cat­ed games, like MOBAs, expo­nen­tial­ly increase the obsta­cle, adding time-urgency in bat­tle and the demands of mul­ti­ple focus­es of atten­tion in a screen flood­ing with visu­al infor­ma­tion; for the first while, naïve play­ers like me will play with­out much con­trol or even much sense of what’s going on. It leaves me pre­oc­cu­pied by my own incom­pe­tence.

Plus I find that I — more a deduc­tive than an induc­tive thinker — do not eas­i­ly learn from the trial-and-error method of just jump­ing into a game to see how I do. Once lost, I might stay lost. “Just try it, you’ll fig­ure it out” must work bet­ter for other peo­ple.

The sec­ond hur­dle is the chal­lenge of, yes, get­ting involved in the game, but only in the right way. The fact is that one who enters the world of game­play is asked to mas­ter a strange dance of simul­ta­ne­ous attach­ment and detach­ment: stay unmoved if you are lost, if you fail repeat­ed­ly, even if you fic­tion­al­ly die in the attempt — but, con­trar­i­ly, if you level up, sur­vive, or win, cel­e­brate! I’m told to be emo­tion­al­ly open to the music, art and ani­ma­tion, to the sus­pense, the whim­si­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of char­ac­ter cre­ation, the fan­ta­sy, the story — to just get into the game — but in that very state of open­ness and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty, I’m some­how not to be dis­mayed by the gloomy, even dystopi­an, sit­u­a­tions of so many games, the vio­lence, the insis­tence that I kill strangers, or even the fun­da­men­tal help­less­ness of trial and error (and error, and error), as these, after all, are just the givens of play and not to be felt or thought much about. To expe­ri­enced play­ers, to prob­lema­tize this is pre­pos­ter­ous: “What’s wrong?” they ask. “You can’t enjoy the game if you keep get­ting upset about the wrong things or don’t enjoy the right ones!” Just so. But know­ing the dif­fer­ence is not auto­mat­ic — it has to be learned.

The third, and, to me, the most res­o­nant, chal­lenge is the fact that, for a new play­er, each game stands by itself. Michael Lutz wrote acute­ly in First Person Scholar (empha­sis added):

I would con­tend that in the con­text of videogames, each per­for­mance is dou­bly haunt­ed: first by our mem­o­ries of other games and expec­ta­tions of new ones, and then by our expe­ri­ences of play­ing the game itself.

If that’s so, then some part of the fun an expe­ri­enced play­er enjoys is not inher­ent to any par­tic­u­lar game: the exhil­a­ra­tion my boyfriend feels as he plays is not inspired only by the game at hand, or even because he knows it as one of a type or sequence of games, but, because he already loves games, always-already val­i­dat­ing each par­tic­u­lar one with­in a larg­er, famil­iar delight. Lacking that con­text, a new game for me can be a shal­low­er expe­ri­ence, even a strange shot in the dark that I’m not sure I’m get­ting the point of. A good rela­tion­ship with any game can depend on know­ing things beyond it.

So, hope­ful­ly, with more play-time logged in, more get­ting the whole process under my skin, and (fin­gers crossed) some more suc­cess, my ease, my con­fi­dence, and, thus, my engage­ment and delight will increase. But John Vinson, in an Examiner​.com arti­cle, “How to Play First-Person Shooters”, gives the hard word:

The world of video games requires a lot of expe­ri­ence … FPS games in par­tic­u­lar have a nuance which requires tons of prac­tice in order to even be decent at them. … No one said it was going to be easy. … When you first pick up a game, whether it’s FPS or not, you’re going to be pret­ty awful at it. Don’t get dis­cour­aged. No one truly becomes ade­quate at play­ing a game until they can put the time in nec­es­sary. It’s eas­i­er said than done when you keep dying on the same stage over and over again. … The key is to sim­ply look at it as an obsta­cle which needs to be con­quered.

For a new play­er, the obsta­cle that needs to be con­quered is being a new play­er. As such, and for all these rea­sons, I — fierce­ly deter­mined to get some­where in this explo­ration — am not yet get­ting to the fun, at least not the fun an expe­ri­enced play­er knows. Curiosity (and some­times teeth-grinding stub­born­ness) has to moti­vate me instead. And that works.

There are cer­tain­ly pos­i­tive moments, gifts along the way — the dive bar’s ceil­ing mys­te­ri­ous­ly open­ing up to the sky dur­ing the torch song in Kentucky Route Zero, a moment of vic­to­ry when, after eight rapid deaths in The Walking Dead I fig­ure out how to sur­vive a par­tic­u­lar­ly tena­cious zom­bie by sneak­ing away behind a mov­ing car, a short sequence of chal­lenges in Portal 2 that proves sur­pris­ing­ly doable. I’m get­ting a lit­tle more patient, a lit­tle more accli­mat­ed — maybe even a lit­tle more amused. I’ve grown accus­tomed to giv­ing games some time, and rec­og­niz­ing that the start­up peri­od of learn­ing a game is never going to be the part I per­son­al­ly enjoy. And late­ly I’ve seen that the days when I am most bit­ter­ly frus­trat­ed, “hate-playing” and com­plain­ing to any poor soul who will lis­ten — those days are usu­al­ly fol­lowed by next-day break­throughs.

A few morn­ings ago I find myself play­ing through the tuto­r­i­al of Diablo III with my boyfriend, who offers tact­ful coach­ing and expla­na­tion (N.B.: the most impor­tant words you can say to a new play­er? “You don’t have to under­stand that part yet.” Instant relief.) As a team game, it’s a big change for me. And, to my sur­prise, I like it; for three hours of mediocre play­ing (my longest play ses­sion at a sin­gle game so far), I like it well enough — sim­ple game­play, a hope of sur­vival, a break from puzzle-solving, pleas­ing visu­als, a chang­ing land­scape, anoth­er play­er in the room … My son texts me, “I’d com­ment that it’s odd that such a smart guy likes such a dumb game, but I like Diablo a lot, too.”

I write as an out­sider, but one inter­est­ed in and sym­pa­thet­ic to games. What, then, might this out­sider account offer to insid­ers?

First, an appeal: I real­ly think this could be eas­i­er. Can’t some­one cre­ate a grad­u­at­ed list of games for adult-onset play­ers, a series of games to take on, in sequence, that would build famil­iar­i­ty and com­po­nent skills and even atti­tudes, in a con­scious way? Most play­ers I know have only the blur­ri­est mem­o­ries of how one learns this stuff, lit­tle sense of the parts that make up the whole: sort­ing it out might be an inter­est­ing project.

Second, a reflec­tion. I’d haz­ard a sur­mise for invet­er­ate play­ers: if play­ing these games feels nat­ur­al, it’s an acquired nature — because habit­u­a­tion to play actu­al­ly changes you. In par­tic­u­lar, you become desen­si­tized to some ele­ments of the game fic­tions and high­ly sen­si­tive to oth­ers, includ­ing the rewards and ener­getic stim­u­la­tions of play. You become crafty at the kinds of prob­lems games put for­ward; it comes to affect your rhythms, your imag­i­na­tion, your way of pro­cess­ing things. (Don’t get me start­ed on what it’s like to drive in traf­fic with a com­mit­ted MOBA play­er!)

Most impor­tant­ly, in a larg­er sense, I believe that games alter your sense of fun, includ­ing, cen­tral­ly, the very value you place on fun, the amount of time, money, effort you are will­ing to invest in its pur­suit. In short, alien vis­i­tor that I am, I have to accept that for you this fun is authen­tic and valu­able. In fact — here’s my pro­fes­so­r­i­al train­ing — I believe that the value you place on fun actu­al­ly con­sti­tutes an on-the-ground riposte to a lot of critical/cultural pes­simism (I refer espe­cial­ly to mid-twentieth-century Marxists, like Lyotard and Baudrillard, both very influ­en­tial on me, who saw all pop-culture habit­u­a­tions through nar­rowed, sus­pi­cious eyes). A thought­ful, crit­i­cal reeval­u­a­tion of play, of fun, could upset a lot of ortho­dox­ies. That’s part of the promise of games.