Product Strategy & Video Games
During the pandemic, most people took up something simple and straightforward like baking bread. I took up playing video games.
Sure, I’d spent my youth trapping unlucky Sims in pools with no ladder and releasing banana peels in my go kart to the dismay of unsuspecting gorillas, but I’d never been one for games with a murderous bent. Not until the pandemic at least.
I started with Animal Crossing. Before you come after me, Animal Crossing does not include murder. But Animal Crossing is the reason I bought a Nintendo Switch, my first gaming system since my beloved Nintendo 64. (I guess I’ve been a secret Nintendo fangirl for decades. Who knew?) The Switch opened up a world of evenings where my husband and I played video games side by side but in wildly disparate ways: him usually on the run after executing a perfect heist in the old west, me carefully placing a hard-earned customized stool perfect for the holidays in front of a grumpy bear’s pink home. And it stayed that way for months and months. Animal Crossing is mostly a game of collecting and deliberate progress, and in the pandemic while everyone was home, I’d stand my little character on the beach and look up at the stars. It was mine and I adored it.
If you do any research on the Switch, you’ll find glowing reviews for a game called Breath of the Wild. It’s inescapable, even for someone who was still convinced that Zelda was the title character. I began to wonder if I could play this open world game and explore, if I could master the dual mechanics of running and controlling the camera.
My first steps in Hyrule were tentative. Link would often get lost in the trees hiding from monsters and I made no attempt to engage the bad guys when I could just run instead. I found the mechanics frustrating, and my early attempts felt like the button pushing of Mortal Kombat as I tried futilely to access my cache of sticks and eat an apple to prevent my own death. I was a mess and I’d get cornered and killed before I even knew I was in danger.
There’s a whole language of video games, commonly repeated tropes and themes, that drive most mechanics forward. Right hand moves the character, left hand moves the camera. X does something different than Y. It’s visual and auditory and physical, and it’s mostly unspoken except for the early game tutorials.
It reminds me of when I was first learning to drive and I found highways stressful. I grew up in California and folks like to speed out west. I’d get so frustrated and caught off guard when someone would merge into my line and my mother would say, “ah, it must be harder for you because you can’t read the cues yet”. It’s in the subtle way a car will edge over first, a predilection to the left, before a blinker turns on. You learn to make room before a driver indicates.
In video games, the subtle cues build a video game experience before you’re even aware that you’re being subtly directed to your first foe. The learning curve for me was steep but I got there eventually.
From Breath of the Wild, I progressed to The Witcher. I’d read reviews that said the game play was similar enough and it was, to a point. I still found the enemies difficult and the tense moments a little too much for me. I was more hesitant than other players might be with more background in that unspoken language. And I got lost a lot.
Like in real life, I tend to approach situations cautiously. I’ve never been reckless, not even when my peers were daredevils. I’d think of the potential consequences and choose to go home. In video games, this translates to prolonged battles full of eating supplies to maintain health and endless restarts that made me want to never play the game again. When I was expected to forge ahead quickly, I would carefully pick my way through a course. I worried about the cost even when I knew I’d saved constantly.
This hesitancy has never been more clear than watching my husband race through No Man’s Sky, a game I’d picked up on the basis of collecting resources without the need to directly confront battle. I started playing the game sometime in 2021 and have put over 100 hours into the title, mostly enjoying myself, but always avoiding the scariest of scary, the Sentinels. In No Man’s Sky, you’re tasked with landing on planets and scanning the world around you both for discovery purposes but also for resources. And some planets have buzzing black guards that do not appreciate your curiosity. When you scan a planet from your spaceship, you’ll get a funny little descriptor for the prevalence of these terrors from scarce and harmless to out for blood and yours in particular.
I do not land on planets with active Sentinels unless I absolutely have to despite reducing my difficulty settings until they’re merely confused hovering pests. I don’t enjoy being chased even when I know I can win and I’ve had the pants scared off of me often enough to avoid engaging all together.
My husband takes the opposite approach. He’s by all accounts a video game type of guy and I recently watched him hunting down the big baddies for sport. “You can build a tunnel in the ground and they can’t find you,” he told me excitedly. Twenty hours in a game and he’s already far exceeded my own progress to the point where he taunts the things that give me nightmares.
And all of this makes me think about how we acquire a lifetime of knowledge in a short, painful span of time. How do we rewrite our brains to understand the tools we need at our jobs? And as a company, how do you improve the onboarding experience so you can frontload all of those years of knowledge into the kind of tutorial that makes an AI-driven tool feel like a ballpoint pen?
When I first started playing video games, I felt frustrated and hesitant so often I tended to quit playing for days at a time until the lure of mastery drew me back in. In product adoption cycles, that’s an engagement killer. So when I sought out information on what I was missing, I didn’t want some lengthy tirade on the meaning of life. I wanted a quick, clean answer to my question. I wanted someone else to have had the same challenge and to have already gotten there because most answers are a quick search away. And if I felt alone in my frustration, if I couldn’t find my how-to fast enough, I tended to move on.
I don’t have the perfect answer to rapid knowledge acquisition unless one of you would like to borrow my ADHD and hyperfocus your way into mastery like I’ve spent years doing. But I do know that sometimes talking about the problem can lead to new solutions. It’s at least better than dying at the hand of a digital challenger for the ninth time in an hour.