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[andrewducker]

Comments

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

how fast was that narration!!!

And the bit about "video game controller might as well be the cockpit of a jumbo jet?" true, so very very very true. One of the reasons I don't play games. I haven't got the 20-odd years of training it takes to make it not ALL about learning a new control system all the time. Or it that what you guys *like*?

well that and there never really seeming to me personally to be any compelling gameplay. I like to use my brain.... but strategy and puzzle games somehow don't do it for me.

[andrewducker]

It's not called "Zero Punctuation" for nothing :->

And yes, game controls can be fiddly. But good games introduce you to them slowly, over the course of the game, throwing new functionality at you only once you've absorbed the previous one.

I like strategy and puzzle games pretty much only when there's some adrenaline associated with them, and preferably a plot. When they become just "solve a puzzle" then I don't really care.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

:-)

It's not just that controls are "fiddly" or "different" it's the whole paradigm of mapping key/button presses / joystick/ball waggles to entirely dissimilar actions on a screen with only visual and audio feedback. I do not have the lifetime's training in such things that those who have always been gamers have. You think it's easy to pick up because you have done similar things. No doubt I think the same about various musical tasks or, oh, martial arts.

But, the key difference as I see it, between games and 'real world' sports/pastimes/skills/etc. is that in learning real-world physical tasks, you have sound, vision, touch and kinaesthetic feedback.(and even dependent on the task - smell, taste). You are interacting with a physical item(s) in the physical world - which is what we have evolved doing. So the 'real world' physical task is easier in a lot of ways (though you may be subject to your own pure physical limitations in some areas, of course).

In my own case, I suspect that games will not interest me unless and until there is proper touch/weight/gravity/balance etc feedback. Maybe. :-)

[andrewducker]

Even when a kid it took me almost no time for those kinds of interactions to make perfect sense. The first time I played Space Invaders it took about two minutes to get the hang of it.

The human brain is really good at this kind of thing, we can set up new associations without much difficulty.

I suspect the problem is that you have no impetus to spend even the modicum of time that you'd need to. If you don't enjoy things that don't employ the full sensory and haptic experience then you're not going to want to spend any time on them :->