Shallow End of the Pool, but No Floaties, or: Robert Talks At Length About Videogames

Foreword: I would just like to say that it has been extremely hard for me to write this blog post without geeking out over the particular videogames that were used as examples. This is primarily because many of them are my absolute favorite games, and because the arguments about video games being a “waste of time” are almost verbatim what I experienced growing up. The Tomb Raider (particular TR1 and TR4/Last Revelation . . . the whole Von Croy sequence was a long-running inside joke between my friends and me), Sonic the Hedgehog, Half-Life, Elder Scrolls, and System Shock (and their spiritual successors, Bioshock) series pretty much defined my childhood and adolescence. So please forgive me as I try not to ramble.

One of the most interesting synch-ups Gee makes between videogames and the learning process is in “Telling and Doing”, Chapter 5, regarding tutorial levels. He explains that the videogames he played and observed contained either explicit or implicit tutorial sequences that taught the player the rules of the game and essentially put them in the shallow end of the pool to muck about before pushing them toward deeper water. They begin relatively easily, even as they set up the premises of the game and its characters, plot, and atmosphere, and gradually give way to more and more challenging levels and tasks that assume your accumulated expertise. That doesn’t mean that the tutorials are always necessarily cakewalks (though some certainly are, as in Half-Life, where the tutorial is entirely separate from the main game), or that they are always necessary (if you’re an already experienced player, why can’t you just skip the “how to play” bits?), but they are always there for first-timers or people who have fallen out of practice, and they ultimately help a broader audience connect with the game.

So too do we have “tutorials” for teaching literature. Even the best English student in 9th grade will be lost if you stick Ulysses, or even A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, in front of him. You have to give him “Araby” first. And then “The Dead”. And so on, and so forth. That doesn’t mean that “Araby” is an easy piece to work with by any means, or that it is lacking in quality; quite the contrary, it’s one of the best stories ever written, and it’s relatively dense and difficult compared to, say, Animal Farm by George Orwell, which is dense and difficult in relation to other things, etc. But generally speaking, I’ve noticed a trend, at least with my education, of teachers prefacing longer, more difficult works with shorter, more accessible ones that contain the same qualities and patterns as those we might be expected to look for in the longer work (think: game controls and environments). It is important to challenge a reader, but not to destroy them. Don’t give them Orlando first; give them Mrs. Dalloway. Don’t give them Ninja Gaiden first; give them Super Mario Bros. They will surely have trouble with anything you give them if they’ve never read a book/played a videogame before, but some things act as tutorials that challenge without the intimidation of failure (even though failure is definitely still possible).

It is interesting then, to note that games in the 80s (and before) often did not have tutorial levels or tutorials of any sort at all. If you happened to play on an arcade cabinet, they would have a “demo” screen showing some pre-programmed circumstances in the game, and labels for the controls in front of you, so you could get some sense of what you would be expected to do. Beyond that, they threw you straight into the deep end, and you got better by continually putting quarters into the machine every time you died; obviously, this was done to make as much money off of the cabinets as possible, and (I would hope) is nothing like how we would want to approach teaching literature and reading skills. Conversely, we now have a phenomenon where games essentially refuse to end their tutorials; rather than escorting the player through the basics in the context of the game at the very beginning, many games now are guilty of “hand-holding”. For example, a game might continually prompt players to press the ‘E’ key in order to perform an action that they’ve performed thousands of times before, all the way up until the very end of the game, even though the player has known how to do that since 5 minutes into the game. It’s seen as “dumbing down” the games for a wider audience, and that could be analogous to teaching literature as well: if you assign students to read Hamlet, you should not expect to have to walk them, step-by-step, through the entire play. Ideally they’ll have had a “tutorial” of some sort with a previous play, and then a “refresher” with the beginning of Hamlet, but after a certain point, they can be expected to lead themselves, and have the game/instructor simply provide the framework and occasional game over/correction when necessary. Arin Hanson, an online game reviewer, voice actor, and comedian who goes by the name “Egoraptor”, famously criticized games for hand-holding and analyzed (in an effective, nuanced, hilarious, and extremely profanity-laden, adults-only manner) the phenomenal implicit tutorial of the first level of Megaman X, a game for the Super Nintendo, and used that analysis to point out flaws in newer games that “hand-hold” players through the entire game, depriving them of the challenge and learning experience that the game might otherwise provide, which in turn deprives them of the fun and enrichment they would have*.

What I’m trying to say with all of this is that there seems to be a balanced approach to teaching literature, the same way there is a balanced approach to setting up a videogame. Not every book requires the same style of tutorial, nor the same depth or length tutorial, but generally speaking, we should be able to provide one as instructors. Feeding answers and interpretations to students beyond a certain point becomes “hand-holding”; it defeats the purpose of reading in the first place, and prevents students from coming up with their own skillsets for a particular work and transferring those skillsets to other works.

*For those of you wondering, the review is called “Sequelitis: Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X”, and it’s great but, once again, it’s incredibly profane, so viewer discretion is advised.

One thought on “Shallow End of the Pool, but No Floaties, or: Robert Talks At Length About Videogames

  1. rgarner2

    Liked your post. Agree with everything you said. Just wanted to give ya’ a second here. -R-

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