I think the biggest hurdle for most players starting a new genre is what I would call 'simultaneous input.' The best example is in using a controller for FPS games - watch any 'my grandma tries Doom' style video and its immediately identifiable exactly what they're doing, even once they grasp the basic controls. In almost every case, you can see them manipulate the left stick, to move their character, and then the right stick, to turn in place, and almost never together. Managing a binary separation between movement and orientation is an inherently unnatural mental feat, like the classic 'patting your head and rubbing your belly' test. Obviously, you can do both, it's easy to demonstrate yourself doing both, but the real point is the amount of lag time where people don't immediately perform it flawlessly, despite it just being an incredibly simple application of motor skill. It makes perceptible the process by which humans can mentally adapt to novel demands.
I think the act of manipulating a virtual avatar is like any other motor skill adaptation, just typically bottlenecked through hand-eye coordination, and requires just as much mental re-wiring as learning to ride a bike or eat with chopsticks, and each control scheme and perspective requires at least some adjustment period even if the 'controls' are technically the same. I remember a friend of mine who was a pretty avid gamer, but had virtually never tried anything in the first person perspective, trying Metroid Prime for the first time, and getting utterly turned around and confused constantly. He tried to remain in ball form, which gave him a third person camera, for as much as he could, only changing when he absolutely needed to jump or shoot.
But eventually he stopped needing to do that, and was able to build mental models of 3D spaces from a first person perspective, at least well enough to play online shooters, and the reason wasn't a change in format or the controls being simplified - it was because he wanted to keep playing Metroid and so endured until his brain could rewire itself to grapple with the world of the game. I think this 'rewiring' process is fundamental to what makes games an engaging and rewarding experience, and I think it's something people miss when it comes to differences in taste, difficulty, and especially 'accessibility.' Sure, there are some games that have poorly designed controls, and there are people who have physical or mental impairments that can and should be accommodated, but a lot of the time I see claims that a game has 'accessibility' problems and think, are these people just frustrated that their coordination isn't keeping up with their conscious understanding of the mechanics?
So, in conclusion, I think while being able to identify and stratify games of a genre based on ease of control might be helpful in deciding a recommended entry point for a neophyte, far and away the most important factor in them overcoming the mental, physical, and design obstacles is simply if they otherwise engage strongly with the game. If throwing a crowbar into the back of a man's head as they whizz in a toilet cracks a smile on your wife's face, she'll be making angular momentum diagrams on the fly like a pool shark after a few sessions. If not, she'll probably continue to struggle with the format. Hope you both have fun!
I reckon you're absolutely right about this idea of adapting to novel motor demands. Hotline Miami in particular is basically "Managing Separation between Movement and Orientation: The Game." The story about your gamer friend who initially struggled with Metroid Prime resonates, because the GameCube version was the first console FPS that I seriously got into — I specifically remember the aiming controls feeling awkward and stiff, but I stuck with it because it was still a big step up over GoldenEye's FPS controls. But now that control paradigms are largely standardized within mainstream genres, we don't really see such palpably significant advancements anymore.
The question for me is whether we've truly reached a point of diminishing returns, or if there might yet be undiscovered developments that could widen the pool of gamers who can enjoy games as designed without lengthily struggling against the bare fundamentals. It's entirely reasonable for game designers to expect a certain minimum of patience and resilience of their players while they develop the necessary mental maps and intuitions, but less so when their patience is being tested by unintended inconsistencies of gameplay more so than by the intended, game-designed challenges.
But hey, she very much *did* enjoy stoving in dudes' heads while they stood at toilets. I'll see if I can get her to try Intravenous II — maybe the enjoyment curve would get even steeper with modern input mechanisms.
Glad to hear it, and I hope the experimentation works out.
As for developing more intuitive control schemes, I suspect we have plateaued due to the bottlenecking of hand-eye coordination and convergent development - nearly every game controller now features twin-stick with triggers handling the majority of inputs, or mouse and keyboard doing the same job of dividing tasks between two hands. This fundamentally means that the expectation is two hands, working nearly equally, and usually simultaneously to perform as intended, with most of the feedback part of the cycle being audio-visual [tactile feedback has been experimented with for decades but is still mostly relegated to 'immersion' rather than having any gameplay relevance]. There are people with physical disabilities who can still play quite well with modified setups, but the baseline for the foreseeable future is necessarily going to be very similar until there is some standard of more integrated mental interface.
Unfortunately, I think a more direct mind-machine input method is actually going to be a lot harder to work with and design around than one routed through physical manipulation through motor control, because the diversity of neural connectivity is almost certainly more variable than people's ability to manipulate physical controls. Everyone lives in the same physical space, after all, so if you take driving a car, for example, you turn the steering wheel with the same force and to the same angle no matter how long your arms are, how physically strong you are, what your eyesight is like, and so on, while I suspect those differences would impact how your mental processing of the task functions. So, while there's an optimistic view that at some point people will be able to 'just think' of what they want their interface to do and it will be done, the problem is it's going to be a lot harder to parse every individuals thoughts correctly than it is to ask them to parse their own thoughts into motor input and then have the system designed to respond to button presses or analog movement.
But that's all theoretical overreach anyway, and I'm sure you just mean some games are too hard to pick up because of unintuitive controls compared to other games, which is true. But I also think that's arguably a case of a bug becoming a feature, or rather that the quality of control setups isn't necessarily on a universal sliding scale, but specific to each title. There's a concept in fiction writing and screenplays of 'cracking' a story, or a character - that is, not to refer to some formula or logic to determine core elements, but to experiment until something 'clicks' and becomes compelling or believable. I think the same applies to the physics and controls of games - each game is its own universe, with its own physical laws that are defined entirely by the programmers, but if you attempt to just do a direct, unaltered, and perfectly realistic simulation of real-world dynamics, it simply doesn't work for a lot of titles. It's actually more intuitive for Mario to be able to jump several times his own height, for example, and the specific acceleration and momentum values involved had to be tweaked until they felt right... for Mario. Maybe having more precise or intuitive controls in Hotline Miami would give some players a smoother on-boarding, but would it necessarily make the game feel right for Hotline Miami? Incidentally, what did Hotline Miami 2 do about that? I never played it.
Glad you asked — Hotline Miami 2 tweaked the acceleration curves and made aiming smoother, so it feels more polished than the first. But the controls are otherwise identical and the game is more difficult overall, so if anything, it's probably even harder to learn from scratch.
I think you're right that it comes down to the general expectation of two-handedness, which has me wondering whether there's an intermediate step between the current standard and a theoretical mind-machine input mechanism. As you say, some folks with physical limitations develop alternative setups that are "just as good" for all practical intents and purposes. Back in college, I knew a guy with dystonia who couldn't use standard controllers, so he had a special joystick with a matrix of large buttons that all plugged into an Xbox Adaptive Controller. I suspect that the set of technically suitable (mechanical) input mechanisms is almost infinitely large.
Perhaps there's a timeline not far from our own in which gaming systems are controller-agnostic and allow players to deliver input however they prefer, as with the Adaptive Controller. One imagines an entire secondary industry based around bespoke input devices. Sounds far-fetched in this reality, though, so maybe there's a happy medium to be found.
Congrats on the unemployment! Yes, I think that's right...
I think the biggest hurdle for most players starting a new genre is what I would call 'simultaneous input.' The best example is in using a controller for FPS games - watch any 'my grandma tries Doom' style video and its immediately identifiable exactly what they're doing, even once they grasp the basic controls. In almost every case, you can see them manipulate the left stick, to move their character, and then the right stick, to turn in place, and almost never together. Managing a binary separation between movement and orientation is an inherently unnatural mental feat, like the classic 'patting your head and rubbing your belly' test. Obviously, you can do both, it's easy to demonstrate yourself doing both, but the real point is the amount of lag time where people don't immediately perform it flawlessly, despite it just being an incredibly simple application of motor skill. It makes perceptible the process by which humans can mentally adapt to novel demands.
I think the act of manipulating a virtual avatar is like any other motor skill adaptation, just typically bottlenecked through hand-eye coordination, and requires just as much mental re-wiring as learning to ride a bike or eat with chopsticks, and each control scheme and perspective requires at least some adjustment period even if the 'controls' are technically the same. I remember a friend of mine who was a pretty avid gamer, but had virtually never tried anything in the first person perspective, trying Metroid Prime for the first time, and getting utterly turned around and confused constantly. He tried to remain in ball form, which gave him a third person camera, for as much as he could, only changing when he absolutely needed to jump or shoot.
But eventually he stopped needing to do that, and was able to build mental models of 3D spaces from a first person perspective, at least well enough to play online shooters, and the reason wasn't a change in format or the controls being simplified - it was because he wanted to keep playing Metroid and so endured until his brain could rewire itself to grapple with the world of the game. I think this 'rewiring' process is fundamental to what makes games an engaging and rewarding experience, and I think it's something people miss when it comes to differences in taste, difficulty, and especially 'accessibility.' Sure, there are some games that have poorly designed controls, and there are people who have physical or mental impairments that can and should be accommodated, but a lot of the time I see claims that a game has 'accessibility' problems and think, are these people just frustrated that their coordination isn't keeping up with their conscious understanding of the mechanics?
So, in conclusion, I think while being able to identify and stratify games of a genre based on ease of control might be helpful in deciding a recommended entry point for a neophyte, far and away the most important factor in them overcoming the mental, physical, and design obstacles is simply if they otherwise engage strongly with the game. If throwing a crowbar into the back of a man's head as they whizz in a toilet cracks a smile on your wife's face, she'll be making angular momentum diagrams on the fly like a pool shark after a few sessions. If not, she'll probably continue to struggle with the format. Hope you both have fun!
I reckon you're absolutely right about this idea of adapting to novel motor demands. Hotline Miami in particular is basically "Managing Separation between Movement and Orientation: The Game." The story about your gamer friend who initially struggled with Metroid Prime resonates, because the GameCube version was the first console FPS that I seriously got into — I specifically remember the aiming controls feeling awkward and stiff, but I stuck with it because it was still a big step up over GoldenEye's FPS controls. But now that control paradigms are largely standardized within mainstream genres, we don't really see such palpably significant advancements anymore.
The question for me is whether we've truly reached a point of diminishing returns, or if there might yet be undiscovered developments that could widen the pool of gamers who can enjoy games as designed without lengthily struggling against the bare fundamentals. It's entirely reasonable for game designers to expect a certain minimum of patience and resilience of their players while they develop the necessary mental maps and intuitions, but less so when their patience is being tested by unintended inconsistencies of gameplay more so than by the intended, game-designed challenges.
But hey, she very much *did* enjoy stoving in dudes' heads while they stood at toilets. I'll see if I can get her to try Intravenous II — maybe the enjoyment curve would get even steeper with modern input mechanisms.
Glad to hear it, and I hope the experimentation works out.
As for developing more intuitive control schemes, I suspect we have plateaued due to the bottlenecking of hand-eye coordination and convergent development - nearly every game controller now features twin-stick with triggers handling the majority of inputs, or mouse and keyboard doing the same job of dividing tasks between two hands. This fundamentally means that the expectation is two hands, working nearly equally, and usually simultaneously to perform as intended, with most of the feedback part of the cycle being audio-visual [tactile feedback has been experimented with for decades but is still mostly relegated to 'immersion' rather than having any gameplay relevance]. There are people with physical disabilities who can still play quite well with modified setups, but the baseline for the foreseeable future is necessarily going to be very similar until there is some standard of more integrated mental interface.
Unfortunately, I think a more direct mind-machine input method is actually going to be a lot harder to work with and design around than one routed through physical manipulation through motor control, because the diversity of neural connectivity is almost certainly more variable than people's ability to manipulate physical controls. Everyone lives in the same physical space, after all, so if you take driving a car, for example, you turn the steering wheel with the same force and to the same angle no matter how long your arms are, how physically strong you are, what your eyesight is like, and so on, while I suspect those differences would impact how your mental processing of the task functions. So, while there's an optimistic view that at some point people will be able to 'just think' of what they want their interface to do and it will be done, the problem is it's going to be a lot harder to parse every individuals thoughts correctly than it is to ask them to parse their own thoughts into motor input and then have the system designed to respond to button presses or analog movement.
But that's all theoretical overreach anyway, and I'm sure you just mean some games are too hard to pick up because of unintuitive controls compared to other games, which is true. But I also think that's arguably a case of a bug becoming a feature, or rather that the quality of control setups isn't necessarily on a universal sliding scale, but specific to each title. There's a concept in fiction writing and screenplays of 'cracking' a story, or a character - that is, not to refer to some formula or logic to determine core elements, but to experiment until something 'clicks' and becomes compelling or believable. I think the same applies to the physics and controls of games - each game is its own universe, with its own physical laws that are defined entirely by the programmers, but if you attempt to just do a direct, unaltered, and perfectly realistic simulation of real-world dynamics, it simply doesn't work for a lot of titles. It's actually more intuitive for Mario to be able to jump several times his own height, for example, and the specific acceleration and momentum values involved had to be tweaked until they felt right... for Mario. Maybe having more precise or intuitive controls in Hotline Miami would give some players a smoother on-boarding, but would it necessarily make the game feel right for Hotline Miami? Incidentally, what did Hotline Miami 2 do about that? I never played it.
Glad you asked — Hotline Miami 2 tweaked the acceleration curves and made aiming smoother, so it feels more polished than the first. But the controls are otherwise identical and the game is more difficult overall, so if anything, it's probably even harder to learn from scratch.
I think you're right that it comes down to the general expectation of two-handedness, which has me wondering whether there's an intermediate step between the current standard and a theoretical mind-machine input mechanism. As you say, some folks with physical limitations develop alternative setups that are "just as good" for all practical intents and purposes. Back in college, I knew a guy with dystonia who couldn't use standard controllers, so he had a special joystick with a matrix of large buttons that all plugged into an Xbox Adaptive Controller. I suspect that the set of technically suitable (mechanical) input mechanisms is almost infinitely large.
Perhaps there's a timeline not far from our own in which gaming systems are controller-agnostic and allow players to deliver input however they prefer, as with the Adaptive Controller. One imagines an entire secondary industry based around bespoke input devices. Sounds far-fetched in this reality, though, so maybe there's a happy medium to be found.