YOU WANT TO BUY AN OUTBOARD MOTOR
BUT THEY'RE EXPENSIVE OBJECTS,
PRECISION MACHINERY,
AND IT'S REALLY CONFUSING READING THE BROCHURES.

YOUR FRIEND JACOB KNOWS ABOUT THEM
BUT HE'S HARD TO PIN DOWN EXCEPT ON WEEKENDS
AND WHEN HE TALKS ABOUT MOTORS
HE GESTICULATES WILDLY AND YOU LOSE TRACK.

YOU LOOK ON THE INTERNET TO FIND OUT
JUST A FEW BASIC THINGS YOU CAN ASK
IN THE STORE, WHEN THE CLERK
LOOKS AT YOU AS IF YOU AND HE APPRECIATE THE FINER THINGS.

HORSEPOWER AND TORQUE AND THRUST
AND ANTI-VENTILATION AND FUEL EFFICIENCY
AND ALL THE GREAT GODDAMN TIMES YOU'D HAVE
OUT THERE ON THE LAKE.

Having recovered from the associated fit of rage, I’m now able to think a little more clearly about my experience configuring and re-confinguring and re-re-configuring the routers in our house, trying to come up with the best home network. The process makes me think about the ever desirable, ever kind-of-elusive status of learning with/through/because of games.

First of all, it occurred to me as I changed settings, restarted devices, and observed the (generally poor) results that it felt a hell of a lot like playing a game. I might be tempted to compare it to Limbo but with highly realistic graphics and animations – you know, reality. It was like dying over and over again while trying to figure out one of those puzzles in the game – but instead of being chopped up by a saw-blade, our internet would stop working. Which is worse.

In other words, this is the classic claim that games tap into that obsessive-compulsive in all of us who want to figure it out, get it done, move on to the next puzzle, tick the box. And so on. What was interesting to me was that the non-game task of router configuration felt most of all like a game. Could be a draw the comparison most easily because I think about game a lot, of course.

The other facet of the experience is that, naturally, I was reconfiguring routers because of games. Specifically, I’ve been experiencing the fairly well-known hell of a “restricted NAT” in XBox LIVE which means I can’t play games like Red Dead Redemption with certain other people. My reconfiguration attempts were initially triggered by the desire to fix this problem, then ballooned into a more general fascination with how our routers actually work together and the kind of network they create and the kinds of networks they could create.

This feels like a slightly under-explored area of games and learning. Not so much that games themselves teach us something, but that there’s a serious peripheral learning involved (if you want) in playing games. The routing example is one of them, another classic is the level of knowledge PC gamers over have about system specs, particularly graphics cards. How much more often did I end up opening my PC to fiddle things because of video games? More. Likewise, even trivial-seeming learning such as setting up a television to display games is often motivated by play – HDMI, RCA, SCART, and so on tend to be meaningless to people other than videophiles and… gamers. I don’t particularly want to argue that this is some amazing hidden strength of games, but it’s interesting that the requirements to play a game, from routing to registry editing to video setup, can often motivate quite a serious amount of learning.

So, obviously, we should require people to do higher order calculus and write an essay on moral philosophy in order to unlock Modern Warfare 3, right?

I continue to play Legend of Zelda 2: A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as part of my project to play through some of the classic games that I never had a chance to experience (for whatever reason I went the SEGA path in the old console days). It’s a pretty great game for many reasons, not least of all that it is still a pretty great game today.

I guess I’ve played a few hours of it now, mostly just when I have time, and one overwhelming impression I’ve had is of the strange bigness and foreignness of the world it presents. I spend a great deal of time really having very little idea of what to do, constantly being shocked by the behaviours of new enemies, unsure of how to use my weapons effectively, and on and on. In other words, the game has bucket-loads of the “contingency” that is often regarded as the secret sauce of great play.

Today, though, I realised that games like Zelda probably have manuals. So I looked it up and, lo and behold, you can get the manual online. I read it through, and now I feel a little conflicted. The manual has greatly reduced the sense of strangeness and uncertainty I’d been feeling about the game. It explains a lot of the nature of the game, including items I’ll get in the future and how I’ll get them. It offers strategic tips for how to defeat particular enemies. It chips away at my sense of an alien world with its friendly, older-brother style of instruction.

I rather wish I hadn’t read it. It drew me back into the gaming tradition of a player being provided with ample information and preparation for the world to come. In contemporary games, of course, they rarely expect us to read manuals and instead they ply us with often highly detailed tutorial introductions (I hear Final Fantasy XIII’s is epic – haven’t started it yet). In a way, these tutorials, or the manual for Zelda are a way of tilted the playing field in our favour – specifically they aim to lead us to a certain level of competence before we have to engage with the game proper. I think that these days such a condition of competence is regard almost as the fair and natural state of gameplay – you shouldn’t be utterly bewhildered, for instance, or fighting for your dear life from the get-go.

This is not to say that the Zelda manual is a problem, however – it’s a really nice document and it evokes warm feelings for the game. The tone and loving attention to the nature of the world you’ll be encountering can also serve to make the coming experience all the more exciting – like a warm-up for the main event. And I think some contemporary manuals still sometimes achieve this – I still recall the deep fascination and joy with which I read the manual for Grand Theft Auto III when I first got it, for instance. Largely, though, manuals and tutorials are a device that can make the initial experience of a game somewhat blasé – you know what to do, you “pre-recognise” special objects and entities, you hit the right button the first time.

There’s a sense, perhaps, in which I had the “wrong experience” with Zelda by jumping in without any preparation – but it was a great wrong experience. Specifically, it felt like a more “real” experience – a world where the very fabric of reality wasn’t straining to help me know what to do, where my enemies hadn’t allowed themselves to be carefully cataloged, where I didn’t even know what button did what (requiring the primitive gaming equivalent of extensive “rehab” for Link).

Given the extent to which game literacy has presumably increased in the past years, it surprises me in some ways that there isn’t more of the “throwing you in it” style of game. For some reason Forbidden Siren springs to mind as a game which was unapologetically scary and confusing when I played it – though perhaps I just didn’t read the manual.

It’s not always appropriate to begin games with a blank slate, I’m sure, but I sure could use it more.