Soapbox: Some Games Assume You Know How to Play Them, and It's Kinda Weird

Stephen laments unwritten rules that might alienate newcomers. Video games can be difficult to get into — or at least, they might appear that way from the outside looking in. Within the last five or 10 years, though, it's an industry that has opened up in a lot of ways. Technology like motion controls and smartphones have broken down barriers and made gaming more accessible for more people, and that's great. However, when it comes to console games, or what you might call more traditional games, they can be a bit presumptuous about the player. One very specific thing about modern games has been bugging me lately, and it was brought on by something my partner experienced a few years back. To cut a long story short, we sat down to play Onrush at EGX Rezzed a few years ago, and as she hasn't played a racing game since the PS1 days, she came a little unstuck. We joined a group for a round to try the vehicular multiplayer game out, but she couldn't accelerate. The game never told her how. The rest of the group and I were flying along merrily enough, while my partner sat on her ATV wondering how to go. A developer did tell her that R2 was accelerate, and she got moving, but it made me realise: some games just skip over the fundamentals sometimes. Read the full article on pushsquare.com
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