I’ve been watching a channel on YouTube recently called SuperJoeBros. He focuses primarily on Donkey Kong games and has been doing a series where he plays through the SNES trilogy for the first time. It’s been fun to watch, but it was also a little frustrating at first.

He’d make silly mistakes or have difficulty with a boss, and I’d start to think “how can you be struggling this much?” But then I had another thought: “is it actually as easy as I think?” There was a time when I too didn’t know the “obvious” things, didn’t know what to look for, and didn’t even know how to go about learning such things. All of this and more is needed to get good at games, but none of us started out with them. Acquring such knowledge and skill takes time and energy like anything else, and today I want to reflect on that a bit.

I can’t say how long it took me to get good at video games, but I can say that was a slow process. The memories are fuzzy now, but I still remember struggling with games like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country 2, and A Link to the Past on SNES. It feels odd. All of those games, and those like them take little to no effort to beat now, but I remember all of them being really tough in the early years. It’s really no wonder, though, because even “easy” games require certain skills in order to clear them.

Platformers require players to learn timing and develop dexterity in both their fingers and their thinking. You also need to learn how levels are structured and how they tend to develop from start to finish. Adventure games like Zelda require something different. They need players to learn how to read context clues, recognize patterns, experiment with items, and understand puzzle frameworks. There is a lot more implicit knowledge needed in these games than we realize, and the same is true for every genre.

I remember diving into serious FPS games for the first time with Halo 3 on Xbox 360 and how much of challenge it was at first. I had decent dexterity from all the platformers and action games I’d played up to that point and I could also recognize enemy patterns to a degree but I wasn’t prepared for the higher level AI and faster reaction times, and I didn’t know how to do things like prioritize targets and position correctly. It was a big adjustment, and I remember it being a long time before I could do anything in the online multiplayer besides feed other players’ kill counts.

(I’d played Metroid Prime before this, but the Prime series is comprised of adventure games first and foremost.)

I also recall my first experiences with RPGs and JRPGs. I’m not sure how it is that I’ve kept playing these over the years because I I bounced off of more than a few back in the day. The one that most comes to mind is Final Fantasy VII, but I feel like I unsuccessfully tried to get into several. I think it was an issue with giving up early due to not managing stats well or properly targeting enemy weaknesses. I also recall being unable to overcome certain bosses and longing for real-time movement like I was used to at the time, and I just couldn’t do it for whatever reason.

I probably still can’t say I’m a JRPG fan despite having played and enjoyed quite a few now. But I can say that I’ve become more of a fan after learning how to play them properly. The same goes for Metroidvanias, roguelikes and twitch-shooters, All of them were once out of my league or comfort zone and are now among my favorites. This isn’t because I learned them but rather that I came like them more as I became more familiar. There are genres that I still dislike despite learning how to play them, though; sports games come to mind here.

The point is, I think, that getting good (or even just competent) at games is often a very long process. You do it one genre at a time, game by game, until you wind up with a lot of incidental knowledge and wealth of technical skill. Is it worth acquiring? Probably not compared to things like job skills, language skills, and social skills, but it’s fun at least.

Would you call your self “good” at games? What do you remember about the early days when you weren’t?

Image from the Donkey Kong Country box art