Outside of video games ‘nature vs nurture’ describes how people develop aspects or behaviors. The ‘nature’ part is something instinctual, something one is born with. ‘It is in their nature.’ No change in how a person is raised would undo what is natural. On the other end is ‘nurture’ which is the exact opposite. It is a trait or behavior brought about explicitly due to how someone is raised. Raising them differently would affect that attribute.
I think video games have their own sort of nature vs nurture. Let me explain.
Nature
I’ve played quite a variety of video games in my twenty-six years. Undoubtedly thousands of hours of my life have been in front of a screen participating in some variety of shooter, racing, turn-based, strategy, open-world, battle-royal, MOBA, MMO, RPG, first-person, over-the-shoulder, top-down, etc etc etc — video game. I’ve tasted a huge number of genres, and even started doing so at a fairly young age.
With the prevalence of gaming this describes many people, and something I find in common is that this develops a type of 6th sense. I don’t mean to say that one can be born with an innate ability to play video games, but this 6th sense develops like a ‘nature’ of how to play video games. What this could mean is someone pick up a game they have never seen or played faster than someone without such experience. They become skilled in the game at a more rapid pace than someone with a less developed game sense. Gaming nature comes off as a natural skill in playing games. Puzzles in games click faster, challenges don’t take as many tries to complete, new game mechanics that are introduced to the player are adapted to more readily.
Puzzles
The cause of this is easy to understand. From one video game to another, so many things can change, but ultimately one thing remains the same. The video game is designed to be beaten. No matter how difficult it is, or what genre of game you’re dealing with, the makers made it such that it could be conquered. The creators of the game will always give you the tools to succeed, even if using the tools are very difficult. All games are puzzles. Even games that aren’t marketed as obvious puzzles games are still puzzles. That first-person shooter is a puzzle game in its own way. Only the puzzle here isn’t what colorful matching blocks go together, it’s how you can use the game mechanics presented to you most efficiently to achieve your objective: Capture the flag, team deathmatch, king of the hill, or some more exotic game type.
When games are made well this will be a seamless learning session for the player. The game begins simply as point-and-shoot, and with time the player is introduced to new mechanics one at a time. Each new mechanic comes with a challenge that is uniquely crafted such that it is directly countered by the new mechanic. This teaches the player that when you encounter this challenge (or a variety of it) you can solve it with this mechanic. This is the same way we learn in school, new topics are introduced, and we are tested on them. In video games the tests aren’t on paper and you must instead apply the mechanic to succeed. If you acknowledge that you know what you should do, but don’t execute it properly, you don’t succeed.
Example
In a first-person shooter, the player is introduced to a trip-mine. You plant this on the ground where a group of enemies will be and it detonates when they are in range. This is better than shooting each one individually, as it is faster and defeats many enemies without exposing yourself to them (you don’t need to leave cover for the mine to go off.)
The player is shown where a mine should be placed, and told what button to press (but it is not pressed for them.) Then they are swarmed with enemies.
If they understood what they must do, but don’t carry out the action well enough they are punished. Either the mine doesn’t take out enough enemies of the group due to poor or late placement, or they didn’t do it quickly enough and couldn’t make it back to cover in time to escape their fire. Once they are presented with the puzzle of “many deadly enemies at the same time, coming from a known direction” and they solve it with that mechanic (the trip-mine) they are rewarded with progression and perhaps a ranking on performance (you defeated the enemies without taking damage, great job, 5 gold stars!)
Nurture
The nature that I mentioned before brought up the idea of a general game sense that applies to all games. I think the flip side to this is game sense for only one specific game.
If that natural game sense isn’t developed, that doesn’t stop someone from spending a lot of time playing one specific game. I know someone who has played a great deal of Ark Survival Evolved. They know probably every aspect to that game, the skill tree, the progression from basic tools to laser weapons, the names and deadliness of each dinosaur, and more.
I watched them play the game once, and before I knew anything about the game all I could do is sit and watch and learn. After a little bit of watching and learning I started asking questions, “why are you going here?” or “why are you attacking that specific enemy?” with responses ranging from helpful to just “because it was there.” When someone spends a lot of time playing a game without having that game sense they learn how to solve puzzles their way. This is not always the best way.
The same game
Eventually I could show the person playing Ark Survival Evolved some better tactics. Even though they have hundreds of hours in the game I still taught them something. This is because the puzzles that players face in all games are often the same puzzles put in different ways. Something taught in game design is how to make a small variety of the same style of video game puzzles interesting. How do you spin the same problem in a slightly new way to make it interesting to people who have encountered it a dozen times before? I don’t know how to answer that question, but I do know how to solve that problem, because I’ve done it before in a dozen other games with a dozen different spins.
If you have played Legend of Zelda games and also played the Darksiders series did you get a feeling that they were two sides of the same coin? Did they feel similar? Did War’s Crossblade feel like Link’s boomerang in the way that it was used to solve puzzles at a distance? Are they the same game? Clearly not, especially thematically they differ greatly. However, their series of giving you tools and showing you environment-based puzzles is very very similar.
Did you think it was a coincidence that just before some game’s boss with multiple hitboxes you were given a weapon that sends out many projectiles instead of one? If these seemed obvious to you that’s probably because of that gaming sense. If you haven’t played the games I’ve mentioned you’ve might’ve played another game that solves puzzles in a similar way. Eventually it will feel similar (and the most difficult puzzles actually prey on this sense by doing the opposite of what you expect, though that is very hard to make as it can feel really unfair if done poorly.)
The game within the game
When you play two different first person shooters you’re really playing the same game. Imagine if all first-person shooters were combined into one big hybrid game that had a perfect blend of all of the games it comprised. If you’ve played many first-person shooters before this amalgamation would feel so familiar to you, despite being “new.”
Games of the same genre can be boiled down to the same skills, and refining those skills will make you better at a new game of that genre that you have never played. In shooters it’s developing aim, managing cover and ammunition. In RPGs it’s managing threat, your resource pool, and matching character strengths to enemy weaknesses. In racing games it’s getting the best cars and matching the racing type to the track type (off road cars for dirt tracks, cars with good handling/breaking for lots of turns, cars with high top speed for big oval tracks.) Turn-based strategy games you need to make the most use out of the terrain, group (or ungroup) your units most efficiently for that game’s particular set of bonuses. For action RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile there’s getting good gear, crafting your skills (active or passive) so that their effects build off of eachother. I could go on but I think you get the idea.
Each game of the same type will have their own tutorial, because they must assume that you’ve never played a game of that genre before. However, if you have then you’re re-learning what you already know. Maybe you’re re-learning the same concepts for the twentieth time. Each new game is the same lesson in a different skin, taught by a different teacher. After enough times you’re going to really know what they’re teaching.
So how do I know so much about video games? It didn’t come overnight. Like so many other gamers I played one game at a time, and each game is a new learning experience. How did I show that person new things about Ark Survival Evolved? I’ve already played the genre for a hundred hours. Each individual component that makes up that game has been taught to me in other games time and time again. I may not know this game as well as you, but I know its puzzles.
