Newbie

So here’s a quote from my very first entry in this blog:

“I try a few different solutions and nothing works. I don’t like being wrong. I try some more. Again, nothing works. I wonder what age group this game is geared toward. I look at the box, but it doesn’t say. After awhile, I go make a cup of tea and start in on some other work.”

Funny, huh? I was describing my experience playing a game called “Crazy Machines.” As a Newbie, I had absolutely no idea what was going on with the game. The whole thing might as well have been in another language - and I guess in a way it was - as far as I was concerned.

Now it’s almost a year later. And I sometimes still have some of those same feelings around playing digital games. But the truth is… well, maybe I’m no longer really a “Newbie.”

I began contemplating this when I recently played the prototype for the Learning Games to Go game. This is the digital game around which our entire LG2G project is built. And it’s very, very cool. The folks at MIT and FableVision have done an amazing job of building the prototype, and I’m sure the game will only get better as it goes through the testing and evaluation process.

Here’s a screen grab from the game:

This particular puzzle is called “The Cafeteria.” The idea is that the player takes on the role of a lunch lady who must figure out what kinds of food the monsters want to eat for lunch. Sounds simple, right? But the tricky thing is that each food item is labeled with a number. Players have to figure out the correct ratios among the numbers in order to know which food items to place on each monster’s tray. I have to say that it’s very satisfying when you get it all right. The monsters slobber away at the food and make a mess that would have made John Belushi (in his “Animal House” incarnation) very, very happy.

Now when I started working the puzzle, I had no idea how to “get it all right.” And I had that horrible “Newbie” feeling again. It’s that kind of lost feeling where I can’t even imagine any possible point in the future when I might be capable of understanding the game (see first blog entry above).

But it didn’t take long before I cracked the code. And then I had that wonderful feeling: I couldn’t imagine not understanding the game. It all seemed so very obvious to me. The game revealed its inner workings and I was savvy enough to use the data it provided and make sense of it. Things clicked in my mind and I understood the language of the game.

And it didn’t take very long, either.

Now you may say that this doesn’t seem like such a noteworthy accomplishment. After all, the game’s intended to be played by middle-school students. And here I am, a well-educated 46 47-year-old man.

To which I reply – a year ago, I would have walked away and been lost.

I just have to accept it. I’m not a “Newbie” anymore.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.