A New View

It was a little funny to watch someone else play my game!

To start off my gamer interviews (I interviewed two people separately), I observed the participants playing a video game for about 10 minutes to actually "observe" learning while they played. Okay, well, that was the idea, but how much learning could I really observe? How much could I physically see? Not much. But at least it did give us a common gaming experience which we could refer to as the interview progressed.

But I digress. One of the participants played The Movies as a sample game. I started the participant off with a new game and she took it through to the completion of the first movie. She is a fan of SimCity and The Sims so she was pretty familiar with the concept of managing the building of buildings and managing the characters of the game. It was actually quite interesting to watch her play. Sometimes she listened to the prompts, but mostly she interrupted the prompts and went ahead with playing based on her experience with games similar to this. She eventually got moving pretty quickly and I'd say that her learning curve was quite quick in comparison to mine!

Perhaps what was most interesting (at least to me!!) was the progression of how I was feeling as I watched her. Before she clicked on "start game," after so many hours of playing The Movies I felt pretty confident that I was a good player. I felt a sense of pride in what I'd accomplished in the game and, with this new person playing, I was overcome with this sense of... hmm... entitlement? Was I lording my experience over her? I guess I was!

She started placing some buildings and I thought to myself, "Ha! That was really silly to place that building over there! She doesn't know the first thing about The Movies!" [Of course, in that moment, it didn't occur to me that, given that it was her first time playing, she literally didn't know much about The Movies.] But as the game progressed, I could see that she was getting it. She understood what she was doing and started to anticipate the next move--something that did not happen for me for quite a while. It soon became clear that I was outmatched and my arrogance was definitely unwarranted. This young woman, from the 10 minutes of gameplay, made it obvious that she got it and that I was not as great as I thought.

Were the competitive juices flowing? I guess they were. Did I delude myself to thinking that I had more skills than she did? Yeah, I did. Was I humbled? You better believe it. Did I tell her about the internal monologue going on in my head? I definitely did not.

Hmm... maybe it wasn't a fair fight. (Is it a fight if my opponent doesn't know it's a competition?) I started at age 8 on Nintendo and now don't play video games that much. She started at age 4 and mostly played on N64. I missed a few generations in between my Nintendo and Xbox, which I rarely played. Most of all, she's younger than me. She's supposed to get it!

Well, at least that's what I'm going to tell myself.