Two months ago, I mentioned in my Discord introduction message that five games had really left an impact on me as generally a non-gamer: Mario Super Sluggers, Picross 3D, Pokémon SoulSilver, Snake, and Sudoku. All of these were games I first encountered before the age of ten, but most are fairly basic- Snake and Sudoku are sold on their simplicity, Picross 3D a similar puzzle game for the DS, Mario Super Sluggers largely a sports game (with a few adventure elements). Only one of these games, Pokémon SoulSilver, is a narrative feature, and is a much more complex experience than any of the rest of these.
It was also way harder for my 7-year-old brain to interpret. When I was given the game as a gift from my aunt on my 7th birthday in 2009, I played the game for hours on end whenever allowed. I distinctly remember telling my friend at school during recess about the move Ember, and how it was the most powerful attack in the whole game (it’s actually an early and relatively weak move).
Despite my inexperience, I progressed through the early sections of the game with relative ease. In a game where achievement is measured by the player’s ability to defeat a series of eight gyms, I defeated the first seven within a month of receiving the game. However, my progress would soon hit a brick wall: Mahogany Town.
The game does prompt the player regarding Team Rocket’s location, but I must not have paid attention when that information was communicated, because I found myself stuck behind the Mahogany Town wall for the next two years of real time. I continued to play the game at roughly the same rate as I did in that halcyon first month, but being stuck in the main story, I retraced my steps and did my best to complete any minigame SoulSilver had to offer in a vain attempt to discover what my next move needed to be. Eventually, when the game seemed to exhaust all prior achievement resources, I began to create metagame challenges for myself to complete, such as trying to catch all of the Pokémon in a given area or talking to all of the people in a given town, naming them and giving them backstories.
Finally, after years in the wilderness, I stumbled upon the right combination of actions that would take me to the secret hideout, which I eventually overcame, and soon after (with my extraordinarily overleveled Pokémon) I completed the rest of the game. This was, of course, thrilling and novel compared to what I had been trapped in, and the world of Pokémon SoulSilver is expansive enough that beyond the world I had experimented with for years there was still a great deal to explore. Since that blessed day for 9-year-old me, I have probably dedicated roughly the same number of hours to the game as I did in the trapped period.
Was I having any less fun in my purgatory? I might have been having even more, although the novelty of finally making progress again was the greatest feeling of all. Pokémon SoulSilver is not a “difficult” game in the vein of some of the others we’ve discussed in class, as while it can be challenging at times, the player ultimately has a fairly simple path to overcoming the game. But the difficult-ization of the game, which came entirely from my missing a key instruction, opened novel modes of play that ultimately cemented SoulSilver as my favorite game of all time.
I think that situations like these, where a young child plays a game slightly out of their depth, actually serve as some of the most fertile grounds for emergent metagaming. The boredom quotient for a child is often out-of-step with an adult’s, and that serves as an interesting medium for game exploration that otherwise might be missed. Put more simply, when exposed to the right audience, a simple game can become a difficult game and then become a metagame. Our categorization of these games is dependent on these unique and subjective perspectives.
Wow, this was really interesting to consider. When you mentioned a child’s quotient for boredom vs an adult’s, I immediately thought of Minecraft. When you start the game, you pop into a world with no instructions or narrative. If you were coming into the game completely blind, I would imagine interest in the title fizzling out very quickly, as there’s no objective at first glance. However, for a child, its an open invitation to compose your own challenges and objectives – it makes sense as to why this game is so often referred to as a video game version of Legos; the player is not given any direction, but for the most part is only limited by their imagination and creativity.
The split in the modern-day player base of Minecraft is pretty interesting to me: many players create worlds to share with friends, others play alone with their own goals in mind – “master builders” create huge structures, hardcore players try to survive for as long as possible, and speedrunners try to beat the game as fast as possible. Though the latter example is focused on the objective of the game, the mode in which a player is trying to achieve that objective is heavily altered by rules that the player community makes themselves.
Where adults may have found Minecraft’s openness unappealing, it opened the door for creatives of all ages to make it the cultural icon it is today.