#2: How to learn video games
Gaming
Earlier this year, I took a break from Patreon and related work and spent the entire time playing video games. Or most of it, anyway. (If you're curious about what I was up to, I marked my return to Patreon by reviewing a lot of the ones I played.) The nice thing about the way I play is that I can also listen to audiobooks or watch movies/TV at the same time, but the game is the main activity. This doesn’t mean I’m good at video games, necessarily. Just that I have enough familiarity to get through the genres I like without too much difficulty (or to know where the difficulty settings are).
Recently, I’ve decided that I want to play some of the Hitman franchise, which involves murdering targets on a scale from “using a garotte quietly” to “dropping a chandelier of antlers on someone’s head while you’re wearing a clown outfit”. The games give you a small amount of levels and a giant amount of challenges and play styles to get through them.
My problem is that the way I want to play—and the way the franchise rewards most, especially at first—is one at which I suck: the stealthiest possible.
When I play games, my style has been developed by two genres I most enjoy: shooters and life sims. (The irony doesn’t escape me.) What these two have in common is a certain level of forgiveness. In shooters, I can take health damage and find more health later. In sims, I can forget that I wanted to harvest my food on the farm and use them as particular ingredients and just come back to that recipe another day. I do get more precise as I play, but I don’t freeze up if I am what I perceive to be sloppy.
Unfortunately, Hitman isn’t quite as kind. If you kill someone who isn’t your target, you lose points. If you knock out someone who isn’t your target and get spotted near them, the difficulty level jumps up. If you get caught by NPCs and have to fight your way out, you will either die quickly or ruin whatever plans you had. (Usually both.) I tried another stealthy game, the first of the Dishonored franchise, a couple weeks ago, and had very similar problems. I didn’t have the skills to play the game in the more moral way, and they said at the beginning that you’re way less likely to get a good ending if you kill a bunch.
Usually, my reaction to moments like these are to go back to games I can actually play. It’s hard to get through a game when your reaction to a perceived fail is to quit and breathe through your anxiety. But I want to play Hitman, and I’ve been wondering how to consciously develop skills in a game you don’t mesh with naturally.
Remember how I said I also watch things when I play video games? I didn’t mention it specifically, but one of my biggest sources of things-to-run-in-the-background-while-I-traverse-the-underworld-in-Hades is YouTube. It was just my luck that I came across Razbuten’s series on Gaming for A Non-Gamer at the same time I was frustrated with Hitman. In this series, the YouTuber gives their spouse (and, at one point, their parents) a variety of video games and sees how their approach differs from their own video-game literate one. Obviously, it’s all anecdata, and the creator doesn’t pretend otherwise. But I have noticed some similar observations from my own experiences over the last couple years, and there’s one tidbit that’s stuck in my mind from the video in particular.
One-player games are a communal experience.
If you’ve played video games your whole life, like I have, you take it for granted. One of my earliest video gaming experiences was found my sisters and me watching my dad play classic Doom. But even when he played alone, he preferred to play with cheat codes, something which he found both online back in the AOL days and from a physical player’s guide I liked to flip through. When I got older and started playing games more myself, I would seek out help when I got stuck. Asking people in-person was my favorite, but it was common to search for text-only walkthroughs online with ASCII art and print them out.
Now that I’m a full adult, things have expanded but haven’t really changed much. On one hand, I play Stardew Valley with the wiki open after a thousand hours of playing because it’s easier than taking notes. When I play games with my sister’s kids, I look up YouTube walkthroughs on specific points I get stuck on so I don’t play past the point where they get bored. On the other hand, I was playing Hades with my sister’s youngest the other day. I was doing the physical playing, but letting him make all the decisions. Through this, I found a useful mechanic in Nyx’s mirror that I hadn’t really tried…and I’ve played the game enough that I have all the achievements through Steam.
Naturally, social connection isn’t magic. I can’t watch two Let’s Plays of Hitman and immediately solve all of my problems…and I wouldn’t really want to, either. But if you’re not really good at games, throwing yourself against the wall over and over only goes so far. It’s easiest to learn from someone who’s been there before and you can ask specific questions without getting drowned in knowledge. But videos are really useful, too. If you just don’t think the way the developers do and can’t twist your thinking their way, getting directions is a major part of the culture. And I think it’s important for everyone even vaguely interested in video games to know that.
Learning status
Since learning’s a continuing process that stretches beyond the occasional essay, some short updates on areas of interest:
-Writing: It’s mid-September, and that means the main NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. I didn’t end up doing anything for Camp NaNo (as mentioned in the last newsletter), and I don’t know if I’ll do much of anything for main NaNo, either. But I want to.
-Drawing: No big projects, but I’m mostly enjoying drawing human faces and wanting to get better at them. My main area of focus at the moment: noses. My current references for practice: Quickposes and Line of Action.
-Sewing: It’s likely sewing will be one of my big 2022 goals, both because of interest and because of discomfort with my fashion options as they currently stand. I’ve been enjoying emmarubisonofficial’s demonstrations on Tiktok, and especially the small paper patterns scaled down as examples. I want to start making some tiny patterns myself and hand sewing using old fabric I have around, both to get used to more ideas and to learn a couple hand stitches until I can figure out access to a sewing machine. Will I remember anything from the sewing class I did in middle school? Only one way to find out!