Are EA’s games too hard to learn?
http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2015/02/eas-games-hard-learn-2/
During an on-stage interview at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, EA’s chief creative officer Richard Hilleman stated that he believes EA’s games might be too hard for players who are new to video gaming.
“Our games are actually still too hard to learn,” Hilleman responded to a comment made by interviewer and comedian Pete Holmes, who said he would like for control layouts to remain the same across games and even between games of different series. “The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game, and asking for two hours of somebody’s time is a lot for most of our customers between their normal family lives. To find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask.”
As a long time Battlefield fan, I’m not in the category of either someone new to video games, or an average player who rarely plays such games. There is a reason that games with depth and complexity end up doing well, even if they do have a learning curve. But I don’t think that this is an EA issue. There are a wide range of games out there, and they are designed to appeal to different audiences. This is not a new thing either. It even predates video games, with such games as chess and go considered hard to pick up by some people, even though the “controls” for the game are pretty basic.
Game Control Schemes Hard To Learn?
Now, there is a big valid point in the quote above, but it isn’t truly an issue of hard or easy to learn. Games in the same genre, with the same sort of actions to perform, often have very different control schemes. Even games in the same series can have the control layout change between releases. Why not try to standardize the common elements?
This is a bigger problem on consoles than PC, where it is more common to allow custom control layouts. But with both current generation consoles and PCs, and even older platforms, there is no reason that alternate layouts and a custom option couldn’t be offered for those who don’t like the “new, improved” version offered by default in the game.
There is a second issue, and it is even more important. Different games can offer different features, which need new controls in order to employ them. A new control interface and layout allows a new game to achieve innovation, and if successful, can become the new “standard” for future developers to try and use. Different genres have very different sorts of actions to take within a game, and there is no reasonably simple way to make them universal. Even the Wii and Kinect can’t make complex actions inherently intuitive. There are only so many simple actions you can map to obvious controls before you run out, and have to use something which requires learning how to use them.
Maybe It Is Just Different Games For Different Players?
People totally new to video games are likely to pick games which are simpler and easier to learn, rather than go for those which do require more effort to learn, let alone master. Still, this is an era where preschoolers (and perhaps infants) are exposed to video games. The basic skills of a genre of video games can be learned from the first game played, and then applied to others. Most gamers don’t take long at all to learn the control schemes of new games. Much more time is spent learning how to most effectively play the new game. Easy controls aren’t the same thing as easy games, either. There are many point and click games — a simple interface, works well on tablets and smartphones — which are frustratingly hard to master and win.
With games costing $60 US typically for a new release, a week or two to get comfortably familiar with a game and gain a sense of growing expertise isn’t much time at all. For that amount of money, we expect to play a game for months. The fact that so many of EA’s games develop an enduring base of dedicated players — people are still playing 2001’s Battlefield 1942! — says to me that any difficulty in learning the games doesn’t detract from the ultimate enjoyment of them.
There is a matter of being a newbie at a game, and being sometimes frustrated by a failure to grasp the goals and skills needed to succeed. But the control scheme is a minor aspect of that. The challenge of learning a game, and the quest for mastery, is itself part of the pleasure of playing games with complexity and depth.
EA — and other companies — offer a large catalog of new and older games which appeal well to casual gamers and are easy to learn. So easy, that honestly, saying a child could play them is both true and relevant. Children are part of the casual gaming crowd. Some of them grow up to be serious gamers, and a few years of game playing make most adults very familiar with both how to learn games, and how to learn new control schemes.
