How to Suck at Another Game Part 1: "I just had to go and touch it..."

I remember a suggestion I once read about graduate students, in which the science writer in question* suggested that a way of training grad students to be better at teaching others was an addendum to their requirements for graduation: in order to receive their degree, the grad student had to accost a layperson on the street and explain to them exactly what their dissertation was about.

Having gotten my degree in the sciences, and having had more than my share of obviously brilliant professors who couldn't explain their way out of a paper bag**, I became enamored of this idea. And decades later, having tried --and failed-- to explain to coworkers in IT that they need to write better documentation, I sometimes feel like a lone swimmer going against the tide of shitty wordsmithing.

My experiences with IT documentation is just like that in gaming. I've had the experience of reading wonderful game instruction manuals which I detailed a year or so ago, but I've also read my share of "manuals" that were abjectly terrible at explaining the basics. 

And of course if you wanted to learn how to play MMOs, well... Don't bother the official website; go visit a third party side such as Wowhead or Icy Veins (for WoW, naturally). Those sites will be... kinda sorta better... at explaining the game from a certain point of view (mostly raiding, some PvP), but even then they make a ton of suppositions that a newbie won't get.

***

To understand my opinion on the matter better, when I was at my old position at work last year, I had a big argument with several of my coworkers about documentation. I'd put together a document with extensive screenshots, detailing all the steps people must take to get an account created on our LINUX servers, and my overseas coworkers basically laughed at the document. "You don't understand," I told them, "but I see this every goddam day. People who have never touched a LINUX server and only know the words Red Hat or SuSE from some sales pitch expect to get access to these servers, and they don't know shit about the process that their own company put into place to do that. If you don't want them contacting you at all hours of the day and night because they got your name from somebody who knew somebody and 'They want access NOW because they WANT it', you need to give them the explanations and tools that will help out. NOT just a three or four line instruction set, because they don't understand the underlying assumptions. YOU all know LINUX, so this isn't an issue for you, but THEY DON'T."

My boss understood what I was trying to accomplish, and before he left --a few months before me-- he was pushing to get this doc published. But bureaucracies being bureaucracies, it never did.***

Still, that experience, which was repeated by watching people be clueless in MMOs with only the "Get gud scrub" or "Go read Wowhead" guidance over the years, had me stewing for a long time. 

Then I saw the beginning of this series by Razbuten on YouTube:

And I thought, "Hey, that's a good idea!"

I mean, I know it would suck for a complete noob to figure stuff out on their own without guidance, but it also would provide --front and center-- what I was complaining about with the lack of good instruction in video games. Processes such as figuring out how to jump in Shovel Knight that we --as gamers-- could easily figure out, aren't as intuitive as we might think. And likewise, understanding MMOs may come naturally to an MMO player, but a new player doesn't have that to lean on. They have to figure it out themselves, based on what the game provides. Or be told where to get a game manual outside of the game itself in order to figure this out. 

After all, people perusing the Mystery or Horror section of a bookstore might remember that "Hey, there's probably a magazine or book about this video game I'm interested in" and go check to see if there's a "Complete Manual" there to buy. 

I got this for my oldest's SO about a year
ago, who'd been perusing it, only to
discover afterward that it was already out
of date. So it sat on our coffee table since
that point. And no, I've never looked inside.

But when was the last time someone checked out a print manual of, say, World of Warcraft, let alone going to an actual bookstore?**** Or maybe they'd try to find something online, but can you imagine going to Wowhead for the first time and trying to figure out the basics of World of Warcraft from it?

This design practically screams
"busy" and "early 2000s". 

You could say "Hey, there's a 'Guides' tab, let me select 'Classic' on there and see what happens."

Uh... Right.

I looked at the "Lore" section and, well, you kind of have to know what's going on already to get much out of that area too. 

Look, I could go into more detail on Wowhead and other sites and how a completely new player can end up more confused than before, but that's not the point. The point is that there is data online, but the underlying assumptions are such that you have to know what to look for, or at least understand the context of what is being presented. If my wife were to suddenly announce that she wanted to play WoW in the same way that she did when trying out Breath of the Wild*****, I suspect that unless I held her hand all the way through she'd never make it much farther than the starting zones (Classic or Retail), much less max level. Besides, the easier game of the two, WoW Classic, requires a game time commitment at minimum; there simply is no way of trying out Classic for free.

But this video series did give me an idea. Why don't I try this out myself?

After all, I'm not a fan of online guides (or add-ons such as Questie) when playing video games, but I do have a long history of referencing official documentation, so why not try a video game I've never played before, using only what the game company provided me, and see if I can figure it out. 

Enter Minecraft. 

***

The game had come with my PC, and it was merely sitting there, unused. I'll admit there was a bit of snobbery involved with my reluctance to pick it up, because the game wasn't what I typically play. Sure, I do play builder type games, but none so wide open as this. Usually there's a more defined structure to the game, such as with My Time At Portia or Sim City or Cities: Skylines.

Plus Minecraft is also incredibly popular, even among people who don't play video games, which means that there's a ton of resources out and about on "how to do things right".

Which I'm disinclined to use anyway, as guides aren't what I'm interested in. 

But that doesn't mean I'm some macho type who doesn't read the instructions before assembling something, I just believe in following the instructions as presented, as opposed to having to go find "the REAL manual" from people who wrote guides and posted YouTube videos on how to "properly" play a game. 

You get the idea. Except for the Folding
Ideas video, which pointed out the underlying
assumptions to the game that look suspiciously
like Colonialism. Which is fine, because at the
time I watched it I had no interest in actually
playing Minecraft.

Of course, if there's confusion out of the instruction manual for a video game, the stakes are a wee bit less than if you're putting together office furniture (don't ask how I know that), so if I screw up in a single player game the only person I hurt is myself. 

But hey, Minecraft is beloved by kids and adults, so it ought to be fairly easy to pick up and play, right?

Right?

Yeah, about that...

***

"I think you ought to play in Creative mode."

My oldest informed me of that when I mentioned about trying Minecraft to her. My wife had no opinion at all, since she doesn't play video games much, but I value my kids' opinions.

And I did briefly consider it, but... Come on. I've raided in Classic WoW. I finished Baldur's Gate back in the day, and I regularly play (and win) at Civ IV and other 4X games. 

Yeah, why not?

So I went with a "Normal" Survival World.

What, you expected another name?

Ignoring that yes, I've been sitting on this post for a while as I've delved into the game, I figured that there'd be some sort of tutorial or something. Failing that, there was likely a Help section that I could use to figure things out.

Well...

As you can tell, I figured out the Dressing
Room portion of the game. I didn't
like the semi-gray beard option, so I just
ran with the ol' Redbeard look.

In the Settings section I found what I was looking for:

Between that and the Keyboard
and Mouse settings, I should be good.

It was at about this point in the game where I discovered the first big revelation about Minecraft: the game does not pause when you bring up a window such as this one.

How did I learn that?

Yep. That's where this came from.

Apparently time continued --at a rapid rate-- and the next thing I knew it was dark in my world and the Zombies came out. Oops.

So... I remembered that first stanza of the How to Play section, saying "At night monsters come out, so make sure to build a shelter before that happens."

I figured that I died, so go restart and build a shelter. 

But I respawned into darkness and was immediately chased by Zombies and things that I can only describe as "Explodies". And in the time it takes you to try to get something --anything-- mined or chopped down or whatnot, I died.

Over and over and over.

WTF.

So I spent my entire first half an hour in Minecraft running for my life.

The second big revelation about Minecraft came when dawn broke: while most monsters may die in sunlight, they can hide under a tree --or a forest-- and still live.

Because naturally I spawned in a forest, so the Zombies laughed in the face of the sun and ran after me again.

Which led to my third big revelation about Minecraft: not all monsters die in the Sunlight, and monsters can jump in the water and survive.

The Explodies --officially called Creepers based on my numerous deaths to them-- survive in the daylight. And they love to come up to you from behind while you're busy getting resources and suddenly BOOM! You're dead.

Double WTF.

I decided I was going to at least live long enough to make a shelter --any shelter-- and survive the night just to prove I'm not an idiot. So I chopped down some wood, if "chopping" is the right word for using the left mouse button to thwack a tree until a block pops off, dug up some dirt, and started learning how to place blocks. But because I was in a forest, I still had fatal issues with monsters coming after me even in the daylight, so I ran until I found a (relatively) clear space near a river's edge. I then began to emulate the Dwarves, digging into a hill, and then I decided to enclose myself in said mine/hill/whatever as sunset was upon me.

And there I sat for about 5 minutes, feeling very foolish. I could hear grunts outside, and I realized that they might try to break down the "walls" of my dirt hideout, so I began digging further into the hill.

Sorry, I don't have any screenshots of this because I was too antsy to get away from the monsters who were more deadly than what I've encountered in quite a while. But trust me, I was digging frantically enough that eventually I realized I had to take a peep outside if I was going to leave my cocoon. So I came over to where I sealed myself in and hacked out a block.

Daylight. 

It was raining, but it was daylight.

So I mined another block and went outside.

Which is how I had my fourth big revelation about Minecraft: monsters don't despawn in the rain.

This again.

Sigh. This was harder than I thought. But it was what I wanted, wasn't it? Learn the hard way, with the tools that Mojang (aka Microsoft at this point) provided, trying to emulate what it's like if you don't rely upon external Wikis and YouTube videos and whatnot to play an open world game.

*Boy, did I try hard to find this, but no dice. 

**One famous time in an after school seminar, one of the professors brought in a bunch of overhead slides and was alternately bumbling over and droning on about his research, the chair of the department who was sitting next to me leaned over with a sly smile on his face. "Perry Potpourri..." he whispered, making a play on the professor's name.

***What I've heard is that they never distributed the doc after I left, and they've come to regret that. I still have my original copy, but even if they came crawling back and asked me for it I'd be inclined to tell them I deleted it. Let them figure it out for themselves.

****Before people get pissy at me, I go to bookstores all the time. It's just that I know I'm very much in the minority these days.

*****My kids gave it the ol' college try and worked with her during her attempts at playing, but after a couple of weeks she simply gave up and went back to Mario Kart.

EtA: Corrected a few items.

EtA2: Corrected a couple of more things.