There’s this video that I’ve watched several times on now on YouTube– it’s by this series called Sequelitis, and it talks about how Megaman X is basically the best sequel to a video game ever, and describes how it does an amazing job of teaching gamers how to play. I’ve played Megaman X and X3 (I’m not so sure about X2… I think I’ve tried it, but never got around to completing it. I don’t think I completed Megaman X, either… or rather, I think I completed it by exploiting Save States, which is kinda cheating.)
I’ve shared this video with multiple people on multiple occasions now, and each time I share it I tend to watch it again, and it tends to make me think again about many things. In this case, the basic idea of communication. (It’s tempting to try and write a vomit that structurally, conceptually communicates the idea I’m trying to talk about, but I know that that will be an endless rabbithole. Maybe I’ll do that after I write this first.)
What Megaman and Super Mario and other amazing video games understand that a lot of the rest of us don’t is this– people learn in little chunks. We start by putting together a sort of vague framework for thinking about problems. We look at what we have, we mash things together, we try different options, click around. We see what we have. Then we rub against the walls.
There’s a comic that somebody shared on Twitter about what it’s like to watch your customers try your product for the first time– it shows a person trying to drink water from a cup by licking at the base, pouring it over themselves, and so on. The point is that it’s obvious to any creator what the purpose of a thing is, but it’s never obvious to new users. The challenge is to design things in such a way that people can simply bump their way towards understanding. They should never have to digest and dissect something complex and/or complicated to make sense of it.
How Megaman X does this is really quite amazing. Your character is used as a cursor on the start menu, and when you select the “Start Game” option, your character fires a powerful bolt of energy across the screen– informing you that your character has the ability to shoot. When the game starts, you land at the left of the screen. If you press the buttons on your cursor, you’ll find that your immediate options are “go left, go right, jump, shoot”. If you try to go left, you run into a wall. So clearly you should move right. (For the rest of the game, you’ll be primarily moving right to progress forward.) You encounter one enemy at a time– the first ones you can kill by shooting right at them. After a while you encounter some enemies that can only be killed by shooting at sweet spots– for example, a tall enemy might need you to jump and shoot.
The game progressively teaches you new skills by putting you in circumstances where you can observe what the optimal case is. You can afford to make mistakes, you can try again, and it’s made incredibly easy for you to infer what you ought to do in a given encounter. If you feel like it’s too easy, the difficulty ramps up almost immediately afterwards, after you get it.
I highly recommend watching the video, I’ll probably be referencing it and quoting it a lot. The simple idea at the heart of it is– you teach people very simple basic skills that you can then build upon, build onto, over and over again into ultimately very complex behaviors. For example I remember in Megaman X you’ll be able to dash, and control your slide down walls. And then you’ll learn the ability to air dash, so after a while you combine these skills and you start doing amazing things like jumping over an enemy, air-dashing across to the wall, wall jumping more, so on and so forth.
On hindsight, this must have been a huge part of why I loved so many video games so much. Part of it was the narrative. Part of it was the promise of getting stronger, getting better. And part of it was the wonderful combination of all those skills. I enjoyed earning the stars in Bare Knuckle that would allow me to do more powerful attacks. I enjoyed successfully completing a stage in Metal Slug without losing any lives, getting all the bonus points at the end. I enjoyed developing combinable skills and getting more powerful weapons in Diablo 2 and other RPGs– DarkStone. The prospect of growing stronger and eventually destroying things much more powerful than you are– in a video game, that’s laid out for you in a very awesome way. I enjoyed winning people’s affection and loyalty as Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 2.
Of course, reality is a lot more complex than video games. Part of that is simply the way nature is. Life is complex, crazy, chaotic, open, random, arbitrary, cruel, messy. But part of it is human design. Perception. If we can design video games (closed systems– some of which open up into remarkably open systems, like World of Warcraft– a very addictive game that builds real human relationships, teamwork, skills, and orgasmic cries of joy when people successfully defeat a huge boss)– we can design a lot of things around us to be better. By better, I mean we can teach ourselves to live better the way Megaman X teaches us to play the game, and to get good at it.
We ought to automatically get very clear readouts of our sleep quality, our diet, our blood sugar levels, exhaustion levels, mental states, all of those things. If we can see these things regularly (I fantasize about being able to see it in real time– some day this will be a reality), and we can see how our actions affect them, then I think we’ll very naturally learn to masterfully manage our own meatbags.
I’ve definitely written about this many, many times– how I’d like to measure everything. Well hey, I’m wearing a Mi Fit tracker thingy now. I’ve been writing in a notebook for quite a few days. I’ve had a lot of practice at doing this thing, I just need to keep up with it. Keep going. And I need to recover faster. None of this is new, I’ve repeated myself a hundred times.
Why do I fail? I get tired and I lose the clarity of mind? Why do I get tired? I sleep late. WHy do I sleep late? I get distracted, I get scared, I lose focus, I try to rush things at the end. I should never sleep late ever again. Even if things are fucking up, I should probably just sleep early. I should meditate regularly. Every day. And I should write about it. I should experiment with my notebooks.
I suppose ultimately this is just one of many many reminders of the same thing. It feels like a regular tempo and a tie-in with other humans is part of what will make this successful.