Exposing a Non-Gamer to Computer Roleplaying

My wife doesn’t play RPGs. What happens if I throw her in blind?

PSEUDOSCIENCE GANG

Dear God, there is no more nightmarish endeavor available to free men than moving house. And despite the fact that I have to move every twelve to thirty-six months like every underemployed Millennial, I somehow manage to underestimate it every time. Let me open this week by thanking you all for your patience with The Spieler’s wide variance in length and organization lately. Might take another week to pull myself all the way back onto the saddle, but then we should be back to bigger and better things. I mean to use the rest of 2025 to push our cozy little publication towards an elite standard of quality, and I’m delighted to have y’all along for the ride.

Alright, venting over. While I continue to figuratively and literally get my shit together, let me tell you about a groundbreaking experiment I ran last month.

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Long-time readers may recall that, several months ago, I ran a performatively robust experiment seeking insight into the accessibility of modern video game control paradigms. Or, simply put: I sat my wife down at my computer, booted up Hotline Miami, and watched entropy have a field day. My hypothesis was that she, having never played a serious action game before, would struggle tremendously for a few minutes before eventually settling into a groove as the unfamiliarity of the experience gradually dissolved away. I was correct only about the “struggling tremendously” part — after about an hour of play, that comfort still hadn’t materialized, and she made progress by instead embracing chaos and flailing at the controls. Luckily for both of us, Hotline Miami turns out to be playable by those means, and perhaps optimally so.

But what would happen, thought I, if HLM were swapped for a game focused on systems and player expression? Would the intricate, player-centric design of a modern computer roleplaying game encourage a more rapid acclimation to the unfamiliar process of interfacing with a game using the whole brain? Or would the added complexity just further loosen the already strained connection between mind and machine? There was only one way to find out.

Disclaimer: my education is in computer science. The computer-scientific method is marginally different from the classic scientific method — rather than organizing rigorous evidence to support or refute a supposition, you need only insist that your supposition is correct and the wider population will usually take it at face-value. It worked for AI scaling laws, so I figure it’ll do for my purposes today.

So, in search of new wisdom, I developed the following experimental procedure:

1. Sit subject down in front of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind¹

2. Start a ninety-minute timer

3. Observe until timer expires (or until further play is impossible)

4. Repeat steps 1–3 with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

My rationale for choosing those two games was roughly as follows:

• Morrowind’s focus on character skill would make for good and relatively controlled exposure to roleplaying systems without too much need for novel coordination

• Skyrim’s focus on player skill would, by contrast, test the cognitive impact of modern first-person control paradigms

These selections ended up demonstrating unforeseen weaknesses, but were still good for some data-collection. More on that later.

Finally, my hypotheses were thus:

• Morrowind will be largely inscrutable, and she’ll barely get off the ground

• Skyrim will be considerably easier, given its famous concessions to accessibility

• Observed improvements in skill/comfort will be roughly logarithmic

Much to my surprise, all of these were proven substantially incorrect. Allow me to elaborate:

I: MORROWIND

In the interest of maximizing subject’s freedom of expression, I decided to offer limited guidance during character creation. This hands-off strategy immediately showed its flaws when she selected a female Nord character, whose intrinsic malus to Personality caused nearly every single NPC to bombard her with hateful abuse whenever she drew near. My limited guidance then backfired altogether when she selected the Healer class. Easily the weakest of the standard classes, the healer has minor skill with blunt weapons and no other combat skills of note.² I decided to begin a parallel experiment into what happens when one tries to play Morrowind without the ability to properly defend oneself. Spoiler alert: you end up failing to stab a rat for several minutes at a time.

As soon as character creation was complete, it became apparent that the process of navigating an unfamiliar 3D interface was occupying most of subject’s attention. After a reminder of the keybind for consulting the quest journal, she noted the city of Balmora³ as her objective and immediately set out in its approximate direction, leaving Seyda Neen almost completely unarmed and still clad in her prisoner’s rags. This was surprising — as any Morrowind veteran will tell you, the game thoroughly telegraphs the local tradehouse at which the player is expected and encouraged to outfit their character with basic equipment. Subject later explained that she noticed this, but intellectualized no reason why this should delay the fulfillment of her quest objective. Interesting.

Subject cleared Seyda Neen and began traipsing through the dense, swampy mires of southwest Vvardenfell. Despite the game’s decades-old presentation and low-fidelity artwork, alongside the general hideousness of the Bitter Coast, she was palpably engrossed by the process of exploring the game’s 3D playspace.

“This is… beautiful! It’s like taking a hike,” she remarked aloud. I figured this must have reflected the genre’s exploration focus working as intended. This was confirmed when she exited the ashen ravine separating the swamp from the verdant landscapes of the Ascadian Isles — the land flattened, enabling a panoramic view that stretched nearly to the horizon. Her jaw physically dropped. It was at about that time that she was attacked by a large rat. I adjusted myself in my seat and prepared for the slapfight to come.

Fortunately, subject had retained a dagger taken from a table in the Census & Excise office while the game was tutorializing item interaction. She equipped it and began repeatedly clicking on the rat to no discernible effect save a periodic swishing sound as steel repeatedly failed to meet flesh.⁴ After about thirty seconds and several dozen attacks, we finally heard the wet crunching noise of a successful strike. Subject, pleased with herself, carried on attacking. Thankfully, the rat was unable to deliver substantial damage, and was finally brought down after a few minutes of whiffing.

Invigorated, subject returned to the road and continued the journey to Balmora. She remained unharassed throughout the rest of the jog, arriving at the city before dusk fell. Morrowind’s still-unequaled exploration systems gave us one last encore as she asked chance passersby for the location of the club at which she sought her contact. Barely half an hour had elapsed on our timer, which astonished me — even I’ve never made it to Balmora that quickly. Navigating the club’s narrow interiors made her vertiginous, so we concluded the experiment early. I controlled for this in Experiment II by moving the chair back and giving her a controller, which worked pretty well.

II: SKYRIM

First, a brief aside: good God, I’d forgotten just how slowly this game starts! About fifteen minutes pass in real time between clicking New Game and getting control of your character. Having seen this introduction myself around a dozen times before, I’d have been bored to tears were it not for subject’s surprisingly enthusiastic engagement. Once it was over, I asked whether she’d preferred Morrowind’s brief and to-the-point introduction or Skyrim’s more languid approach. She preferred the latter: she liked being eased into the story and setting, and appreciated that it finally gave her a shred of context into all of those “YOU’RE FINALLY AWAKE” memes — even the normies couldn’t escape Ralof’s glassy-eyed stare back in the day.

Above: The first line of spoken dialogue in Skyrim. Most of you are now imagining what it must be like to see this for the first time in 2025.

Anyway, back to my learned, scientific tone: Skyrim was fucking hellish for the poor woman at first. Seriously, I couldn’t believe how stress-inducing it became as soon as control was turned over. As expected, she had tremendous difficulty coordinating camera direction and character movement, which was clearly exacerbated by all the noisy action going on in the ruined streets of Helgen.⁵ I thought about relieving her and taking care of the first few minutes on her behalf but, channeling my inner Zimbardo, chose instead to prioritize the acquisition of experimental data. Scientific discovery is no pursuit for the sentimental (don’t worry, we’re good).

She strafed and backpedaled rather than turning, and left the camera pointed either straight down or straight up to minimize visual stimuli. She ended up following Hadvar into the keep over Ralof, having not heard either of their entreaties and never realizing that she was being offered a choice.⁶ The first combat encounter that followed would have been difficult to watch if not for some unintentional humor — she could swing her sword but not aim it very well, so observing the fight was like watching Buster Keaton trying to pass the Three Stooges in a narrow corridor.

From there, exploration proved remarkably challenging. Skyrim’s prominent objective markers, a holdover from TES4 famously derided for supposedly cheapening the series’ sense of exploration, actually made things more difficult: the problem was that she’d see a marker projected onto the screen in 2D space, but assumed it was a 3D object in the room with her. That caused her to misintuit an interior wall as her objective, rather than the room on the other side. She spent about a minute carefully examining the masonry before needing to ask for help.

Above: An illustration of our trouble with Skyrim’s objective markers (circled). Sometimes, a marker’s meaning is clear and intuitive, as at left. But the marker’s 2D projection onto 3D space often creates confusion, as at right — a new player will tend to think that the cupboard is marked, but the actual objective is somewhere behind it.

Once she was clear of Helgen and the world opened up somewhat, navigation became a bit easier. The hike to Riverwood was largely uneventful, as was the subsequent trip to visit Jarl Balgruuf at Whiterun. We had some trouble getting from there to Bleak Falls Barrow, because the objective marker on the compass inclined her to travel as the crow flies rather than on the marked roads and pathways. This resulted in several delays as she came across impassable terrain, but she finally made it to Bleak Falls as the sun began to set. About an hour of real time had passed.

We concluded the experiment when it became apparent that the three bandits awaiting her at the Barrow simply couldn’t be overcome without the ability to move and attack simultaneously. Even on the easiest difficulty, the game expects the player to maintain awareness of enemies’ positions relative to the player character and to adapt as the melee evolves. Absent that ability, she was almost continuously surrounded and unable to retaliate or flee. As we shut the game down, I asked her to hazard a guess at how much practice she would theoretically need before being able to play the game as intended.

“Hundreds of hours,” she responded, without a moment’s hesitation.

So, then: what the hell can we learn from all of this?

ANALYSIS

Can someone who’s never played an RPG or a first-person adventure before pick up and play Elder Scrolls games? It would appear not. Like, at all. Nevertheless, I think we came away with some fascinating data.

Most shocking of all was that Morrowind, despite its reputation for crunchy and perplexing design, was very clearly the easier of the two games, and I think I can point to a couple of reasons why this must have been:

• Its more limited presentation (e.g., simpler graphics, quieter sound design, low density of dynamic objects...) makes it easier to visually absorb, and there’s generally fewer things competing for the player’s attention

• Its old-school, dice-based combat mechanics were significantly more forgiving than Skyrim’s pivot to player skill (at least in the very early game), because combat is necessarily slower at low character levels

Second-most surprising was that Skyrim, for all its much-lampooned concessions to accessibility, was borderline unplayable. Again, I can list a few reasons for this:

• The modern engine and presentation allow the game to bombard the player with stimuli (the first fifteen minutes are arguably the loudest and busiest sequence in the entire game)

• In contrast with Morrowind’s combat system, a hit registers when a weapon hits a body, regardless of character skill. Combat necessarily becomes faster, and the player has to be considerably more reactive in order to adapt

• This might be a hot take, but what Skyrim’s environments gained in visual fidelity and overall beauty was lost in readability and navigability

It was also very interesting to note how thoroughly objective-driven she was in each game. In Morrowind, she understood that she was supposed to travel to Balmora, and was so motivated by that alone that she completely ignored almost everything else. In Skyrim, she walked right past every last attention-grabbing setpiece in Whiterun. When I asked about this, she speculated that this was because she’d only really played a handful of Mario games growing up, and those were also very objective-focused. Mario never stopped running and jumping just because he was solicited by some Alik’r rabble, right? To me, this all emphasizes the importance of clearly signposting that interacting with NPCs and other dynamic game objects is worth a player’s time. There’s a balance to be struck, of course, and I’ll want to consider it in more depth later on.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

My foremost takeaway from this experiment — and I’ll be curious to hear whether or not you agree — is that us gamers underrate how fundamentally unnatural it is for the human brain to coordinate precise movements on each hand toward the deliberate, planned causation of macro-scale effects on a two-dimensional screen. Or, more to the point, interfacing with modern video games often represents a cognitive burden to which a player must acclimate before the intended experience is made available to them. I’ve described video gaming as a “whole-brain” activity in the past, and this is essentially what I mean by that. Nearly all other popular forms of media, from literature to cinema to podcasting, require little more of an engaged consumer than to sit relatively still and to look at and/or listen to the media as it’s delivered automatically, or at least at the consumer’s own pace.

In this regard, playing an action-heavy video game is almost more like practicing a sport than consuming a piece of media. “Consumption” hardly even feels like the right word for playing these games, since “consuming” implies a certain passivity of experience. For as much as the core gaming audience has clowned the likes of Skyrim over these past fifteen-ish years for reducing the barrier to entry to the point of abandoning the spirit of installments past, it is simply not a media object to be passively consumed as one would consume a piece of food or an anodyne TV show. Even games with relatively straightforward gameplay loops require focused engagement and a honed intuition for interfacing with controls. No wonder this exercise kept reminding me of our similar experience with Hotline Miami.

I think about these things a lot because, as I keep repeating, I believe that the medium of video game design — by nature of its whole-brain engagement, intrinsically multidisciplinary presentation, and the artistic opportunities created by each — can produce novel experiences and corresponding mental states in a player that are unique among other extant forms of art (I’ve written about this again and again). We’re living through an era of cultural stagnation from which video games are uniquely well-positioned to extricate us. Of course, that only works if the experiences in question aren’t gatekept by interfaces, control paradigms, and mechanical decisions that lock out large swathes of people. Just ask any of the Hollow Knight: Silksong players who’re being filtered by the first or second boss fight even as we speak.

I can think of no other way to improve upon this than to continue exploring and iterating upon the means by which we engage with video games, and the success of any such effort will scale in proportion to the respect enjoyed by video game design among the broader popular culture. Here at The Spieler, we’re diligently working to advance it. If you’re with me, we’d love to have you along for the ride.

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Thanks so much for reading to the end! Thanks also to my wife, who was a real great sport throughout this goofy experiment. I think I’ll try her on an isometric RPG with a lower skill ceiling next time.

What game would you recommend to an RPG neophyte? Why? Tell me about it below!

1. You need not have background knowledge on these games to follow this writeup. I’ll sprinkle in detail where necessary for clarity.

2. Unless of course you include Hand-to-Hand, but I wasn’t counting on a total neophyte to figure out Morrowind’s unorthodox pugilism mechanics in a blind playthrough.

3. For the uninitiated: Morrowind begins with the player character being released from bondage in a village called Seyda Neen, after which they’re told to navigate to the nearby city of Balmora to receive new orders. It’s on the player to figure out how to do so by asking for directions and orienteering.

4. For the uninitiated: Morrowind’s simulation of melee combat is famously old-school. When an attack physically intersects with an enemy, a hit is scored only if a hidden dice roll resolves in the attacker’s favor. This roll’s success rate is proportional to the attacker’s skill with the active weapon which, in our case, was as low as possible.

5. For the uninitiated: Skyrim begins with the player character narrowly escaping execution when a big-ass dragon attacks the village in which it was to take place. The tutorial then proceeds amidst a chaotic backdrop of destruction and terror.

6. For the uninitiated: during the tutorial, the player can choose to accompany either a fellow prisoner or a member of the guard that was about to execute them. Regardless of their choice, a brief melee with the unchosen faction takes place immediately thereafter.