The other day we had our first games hour at school. Three people showed up, including me. I only had half my ass in gear, so instead of being smart and having us take turns playing, I panicked that we only had two games in the school’s nascent “library” which could be played by more than one person at a time. And I set us up playing Super Smash Brothers Melee, the Mario fighting title.
Big mistake. Both of the other two people had showed up to learn about video games. One of them apparently hadn’t played much at all. Anyone who’s played Smash Brothers knows the game has a prodigious number of moves to master for each character, and there are dozens of characters. Not to mention beneficial and harmful items on the screen, and battlefields with a range of advantages and disadvantages. The game, despite its candy-coated look, is far too difficult for beginners. (One of my more skilled peers, when I told him I’d tried to start with this game, said something on the order of Are you kidding? In that game I routinely have my ass handed to me on a platter.)
As I watched the less-experienced of my two classmates spend five minutes trying to jump over a low wall while struggling with a stream of relatively slow-moving enemies, I realized what a long way we were going to have to go to bring many academics up to speed on gaming. In terms of video games, this person was functionally illiterate, and she’s not the only one in the department.
What is video game literacy? James Gee gave a surprisingly savvy description, for an outsider, in his book (d00d that is totally in teh paperback now). It was very general, and I think properly so in light of the way the field of literacy is heading, with an undertanding that the vast bulk of meaning signified by humans is relative.
But knowing that isn’t really going to help the average person pick up a video game and play it. There are conventions which have evolved for gameplay. They largely differ from genre to genre, but there are some universals, I think, and certainly within genres (which Gee might identify as semiotic domains — or sub-domains within the larger domain of gaming) there are well-established conventions. (These might even be mapped out against the multilayered model established by Lawrence Konzack and elaborated on by Nick Montfort.)
As I pondered the progress of my slow-moving classmate, I began to tick off a list of basic gaming skills and understandings in my head. I figure if you agree with most of the following statements, you can consider yourself video game literate at least in the sub-genre of adventure games on console gaming systems (GameCube, Playstation, etc):
I can play games with a keyboard
I can play games with a mouse
I can play games with a joystick
I can play games with a simple controller (directional buttons, A, B)
I can play games with a complicated controller (directional buttons, joysticks, camera angle buttons, A,B,X,Y or Playstation shape equivalents)
I can play games with a footpad or other non-conventional controller
I can identify where my character is on the screen
I can identify what effect my button presses have on the screen/my character
I can identify enemies as distinct from myself and status items
I can identify items which will affect my status as distinct from enemies and myself
I can identify the meaning of directional cues
I can identify if going in a given direction will automatically kill or hurt my character
I can read meters onscreen
I can find my way through a menu
I know what the start button generally does on my preferred platform
I know what the A button generally does on my preferred platform
I know what the B button generally does on my preferred platform
I can keep track of the function of more than five buttons at once
I know what a heart will do to my character
I know what a fireball will do to my character
I know what a weapon I can pick up is likely to look like
I know what 1UP means and what an extra man/life is
I know what a miniboss and a boss are
I can perform combos in a fighting game
I know the difference between magic and physical attacks/powers
I can aim and fire a weapon in a first-person environment
I can distinguish between perspective and weapon aim
I am accurate with targets in rhythm games
I can distinguish between short and long beats
I can customize the look of my character when possible
I can customize menus, backgrounds, or other strictly visual elements
I can customize/equip my characters abilities
I can customize game speed or difficulty
I know how to save my game
I know how to pause my game
I know the secret code that will get me to
I know how to unlock…
I can use a Game Shark and know when it is acceptable to do so
I know how to hack this game
I have created my own levels or step files
I have remixed game music or manipulated still or moving game images
I have produced my own machinema
I know where to find game tips and walkthroughs online
I know where to find emulators and ROMs online
I know where to find warez online
I know where to find comics about video games online
I know you are dumb/lame if you play X
I know you are cool if you can beat X
I know you are cool if you can perform trick X in game Y
I am familiar with the Mario franchise
I am familiar with the Zelda franchise
I am familiar with the Final Fantasy franchise
I am familiar with the Pokemon franchise
I am familiar with the Grand Theft Auto franchise
I am familiar with Starcraft, Warcraft, etc
or, conversely,
I will be baffled by a new game
Video games are violent
Video games are a waste of time
I don’t understand why people spend so much time playing video games
Caveats, caveats, caveats:
This listing should probably be broader, and I welcome additions and revisions, especially for other genres. Also, I don’t have much game jargon down, so I may be using linguistic workarounds or misnomers here and there; please let me know where I’ve done so.
Though this reads like the standards that are being written for academic content (Grade 1, Standard 2A: “Student recognizes that words are made up of phonemes and can sound them out”), for the love of god, people, don’t try to use them for instructional purposes. Kids don’t need to be taught to play video games. OMMFG. It would suck the ever-living joy out of a game to try to use this listing for instruction. I could see maybe using these to assess how literate someone is with games, but hands-on, just-in-time, in-game learning is the essence of the domain. Better to assess players by their playing. I just wrote these out so the academic n00bs might get a better sense of what this literacy consists of.
Other notes:
I tried to attend to the point made by Lankshear and Knobel (and others) that new literacies are much more multisensory than older literacies. Frankly, it wasn’t hard, as someone who’s played video games since she was six. It’s second nature to us that you need to attend to graphics as well as text. Dad used to tell us to play with the sound off; it was never obvious to him that part of the meaning we were getting out of the game was the sound and music cues, but it was our extra lives on the line, so you’d better believe we were aware of them.
I went back to James Gee’s video game literacy book yesterday to see if there was precedent for my categorizations, whether most of them would hold. And, of course, many do not. Getting specific about the meaning of symbols like hammers, fireballs, and pieces of cake is problematic. As Gee reminds, all meaning is situational. It is dependent on context. While a fireball might harm Mario, it will not harm your fire-type Pokemon, or your RPG party if you have fire-protective charms equipped.
There are more general rubrics of symbol-reading which might prove useful here. For starters, being able to read the symbol or symbols on the screen which react most directly to your button pressing as “my character” is pretty much central in any game with some sort of avatar. Then there’s the understanding that symbols resting on the ground, hanging in the air, or shimmering are less likely to do you damage than symbols lying partially submerged, following you, or walking back and forth. In side-scrollers and their progeny, the former tends to be the convention for “beneficial element” and the latter for “enemy.” Obviously, there’s lots and lots of exceptions, and the context of an individual game is key. But I am guessing that people familiar with non-puzzle games will most likely proceed based on these gestalts of movement, responsiveness, and light and color cues; they will not suffer irreparable damage as a result, and will thus begin any game from a position of greater success than those who do not play games.
The ultimate test of video game literacy is this: Are you willing to die? The video game literate generally are (within a virtual world, mind you; I’m not interested in providing fodder for any more of these stupid media-effects claims about violence and the media). They’ll try any button until they figure out what works. They will walk over the shimmering circle which may be a land mine, may be a warp portal; they will chase after the bouncing ball which may turn out to be a health restorative, may turn out to be a bomb. They’ll try anything once. If it proves to be lethal, they’ll try not to do it again.
I guess Gee discussed this, but the generous room for error is a defining feature of the semantic domain of video games. So video game literacy is where scientific trial and error meet reading and writing.
Those who do not play video games are afraid to screw up, because they don’t know how slight the consequences are. When asked by my classmate who was having trouble negotiating the brick wall, I assumed the jump button was either B or A. I kept telling her to try those. She did exactly what I said. But the jump button in this case was actually Y. She kept pressing A and B and didn’t even seem to get frustrated when she didn’t make any progress. My guess is she wasn’t reading the effects of her button-presses that well– where was her character? What was it doing? And then she failed to experiment with the controller.
Me, I would have systematically mashed each button until I saw each potential move and considered its ramifications. Because I didn’t play too many fighting games as a kid, though, I probably would have pressed only one button at a time to judge effects. I am still not proficient at “reading” (observing) and “writing” (performing) combo moves.
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