Learning as You Go

This weekend I got Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii.

Something you might notice is that I pretty much stay a consistent 2 generations of games behind everyone else. This is partially because it saves a hell of a lot of cash, partially because I'd rather let everyone else wade through the garbage and let me know about the top 10% of games. I recommend it. It works great with games, too, because it's pretty rare that someone is going to spoil a video game for you by accident. Plus, an unfortunate truth, spoiling story usually has very little effect on videogames.

Anyway, I get this game, and I'm excited, man. I'm thinking how rad it's going to be to swing around the remote like it's a sword. Just the night before I had walked home from the grocery store with a tube of wrapping paper, and I couldn't help but carry it sword-style, swiping at all kinds of bad shit. If a tube of bright red wrapping paper can be a sword when I'm wearing athletic shorts and carrying a pint of ice cream in a plastic sack, then doing the virtual sword thing should be a hundred steps up.

I have now played three hours of Zelda: TwiPri, and I have not once swung an actual sword.

It's like they're fucking with me. See that picture at the top? THAT'S what I wanted to do.

First, you have to do a few nonsense missions. Find a lady's cat, destroy a beehive. You know, that stuff that is meant to be an in-game teacher for all the various stuff you're going to be doing in the game. I DID enjoy sic-ing a hawk on a monkey. Nothing better than fatally wounding a screeching monkey. But beyond that, I started to get frustrated.

I wanted to swing a sword around, dammit. I did not want to locate a lost cat. I don't want to locate a lost cat in real life. Not even for money. You know where every lost cat is? Either dead from being struck by a vehicle or living in someone else's house with no memory or emotion about leaving you in the lurch.

I don't want to fish. I don't want to fish in real life. Because I think it's boring. And, as someone much smarter than me has said, It's insane to impale a worm on a metal hook and then use it to trick another thing to being caught and gutted alive.

But this is the way of most games.

Old games, you could read the instructions if you were a dork or someone with Crohn's disease who spent a lot of time on the shitter. But you really didn't have to. There were two goddamn buttons. What's to know? The big discovery in Mario is holding down the B button to run. That's pretty much the end of technical discovery there.

Then games started having a tutorial level. I guess things were getting too complicated, and they didn't expect that you would get to everything on your own. There was a part of me that liked these, but it kind of spoils the game. In Army Men 3D, which was fun as hell, you started off in a boot camp that taught you how to use every weapon in the game.

What the fuck is the point of the game if I've seen all the cool shit before I've even started?

So, more recently, they try to integrate the tutorial into a first mission. This ranges in style, everything from a text scroll popping up and saying "Push X to punch heads in" to a character, usually an old man, instructing you in that bizarre blend of gamespeak and actual direction: "My son, this is a very dark time in the world of elves. You are our only hope. But first, you must learn to defend yourself. Start by pressing B."

I don't get the point of that shit. Once he says press B, I imagine myself in a forest, pressing B on a remote and looking around for something to happen. Who am I, Captain N? (good lord, that sounds like a Richard Pryor album)

There are games that are simple enough that they don't require a tutorial, or they only dole out occasional advice. New Super Mario Bros? You pretty much just go. Although every time you get to a bonus level, it instructs you, again, on how to play the very, very simple mini games. This is akin to sitting around in the morning, watching a 10-second video about shoe-tying every time you go to tie your shoes. It's helpful the first few times, then mind-melting the next 230 times.

At some point, in Twi-Pri Zelda, I got a sword. A wooden sword.

I hear there is a rich tradition of this in Japan. I also hear there is a rich tradition of buying panties from vending machines.

To my American mind, there is nothing more almost-there-but-not-quite than a wooden sword. Except, possibly, for panties vended in a little plastic egg.

But I kept playing, and finally the game was getting somewhere. I was at least killing things and swinging my arm wildly and with complete disregard for the fact that I would be super-sore the next day. It turns out that flailing wildly and jerking your arm around for three hours has some potential negative effects that I would like to complain about not being aware of, although I wouldn't have done a damn thing anyway.

Then, finally, I get a sword.

Only problem is that in the course of getting a sword, I've been transformed into a wolf. Not the were kind either, not a wolf with six-pack abs and a cunning expressed as romantic entanglements with teens. No, a wolf. With earrings.

I don't know much about wolf anatomy, but I do believe that this game accurately portrays wolves as unable to wield swords.

Damn it. Damn your accuracy, Nintendo of America.

How do we solve this problem? How do we get me from screwing around and chasing a cat to decapitating dwarves in under three hours?

There is the God of War Method.
In God of War, you're dropped into the middle of the action and given little pieces of advice as you go, just enough to get you to the next part. This is awesome, but the problem for me is that I get a couple dozen different moves in my brain, and that's already far above my retention limit. It's a short time before I select a couple favorite attacks, and all of a sudden when a bad guy requires a specific type, I'm fucked. Kratos might not have an iPhone and google access, but if he did he would find a lot of helpful guides (with an unholy number of banner ads that slow the sites down to glacial speed) fairly easily.

There is the Angry Birds Method.
Angry Birds doesn't really tell you much. You just start, figuring things out as you go.
The obvious problem here is that it only works for pretty simple games. If your game involves any of the following, forget it: Leveling Up, Mana, HP/MP, Inventory, Materia, Stealth Mode, or over one hour of unique play.

There is the Wii Party Method.
In this method, you are given an information dump. Here's how to play. You can practice if you want as well. But, being a complete idiot, I can never remember anything until I've actually done it. It's like sex. Seeing millions of stills of pornography did not do anything to inform my sexual tactics and or form. I had to do it once to realize that I was very, very bad at it.

There is the Derk Method.
This method involves watching your older brother play, claiming the controller immediately after him, and running over the same ground that he just did himself. The downside is that it's embarrassing how quickly you die the moment you surpass his progress. He doesn't want to beat the guys for you. You could let your younger brother do it, and you could also gift him your nutsack right there on the spot.

I guess I don't know the best method, and games aren't getting simpler. But I think the key is ratio. If your game has too much to learn, there's really no way to deliver the knowledge that doesn't make it feel like you spent the entire game learning. Too much learning (of how to play, mind you, not learning in general) kills the replay value as well. That old man lecturing you on how to check your wallet is fine the first time, maybe necessary. But starting from the beginning again, my god, you want to stuff the wallet in his mouth while you torture him tied to a chair.

Key: Game developers, for the love of god in heaven, give us the option to skip, fast-forward, rewind, and so on. If you're teaching us, let us learn. I spent a half hour looking for fishing bait that didn't exist because I didn't read the dialogue from some fool in TwiPri. I mean, how many times do you have to talk to these idiots?

Also, if I have to talk to characters time and again, don't make them repeat themselves. If they're going to repeat, give me some signal. That way, I won't waste my time, and I won't waste the time of the kindly shopkeeper who simply wants to knock down his bee's nest in peace.