Playing Rain

I started a new video game yesterday.  It's the middle of the semester and I needed a mental vacation, so I bought Rain for my Playstation 3.  It's a puzzle game with a visual style reminiscent of French noir films.  A young boy pursues a shadowy girl though the rain-swept streets of a deserted urban landscape, while both are hunted by ghostly monsters.  The game play revolves around the fact that every being in the world is invisible unless bathed in rain. Hiding is as simple as ducking under an awning.  To progress, you have to figure out how to climb, crawl or run through the urban maze, while using your invisibility and cunning to avoid frightening skeleton animals and the primary antagonist, called the Unknown.  The game received largely positive reviews, mostly for the artistry and storytelling.  The only real criticism has been that the game is really pretty easy.  And it's kicking my butt.

You have to understand, I don't play many video games.  I don't like them.  I don't want to play war or be a criminal or a cop. I'm turned off by the misogyny and violence that is packed into just about every game available.  The fact that the pinnacle of video game achievement is expressed in Grand Theft Auto V infuriates me.  I want striking graphics, complex storylines and, most of all, a positive and engaging emotional arc. So games I'll spend my time on are few and far between.  In fact, I've only found four so far I've liked enough to buy: Flower, Journey, The Unfinished Swan and, now, Rain.

So, I'm far from an expert gamer, something that I'm reminded of every time I play. While game reviewers (master gamers all) dismissed Rain as not challenging enough, I'm sometimes brought to the point of apoplexy by my confusion.  Because I don't know the rules.  Not the rules of the game system (push this button to jump, this one to run.) Those are presented clearly at the beginning of the game. And not the rules of the world in which the game exists (monsters will be attracted by footsteps splashing in water, you can track your progress while invisible by watching the litter stirring on the ground.) The game is designed to teach you those things as you play. What I don't know are the underlying rules of how video games are structured and presented to the players.  I just haven't played enough games, racked up enough experience, to know the way the (virtual) world works.

This means I don't see the only possible exit from an alleyway because every possibility looks plausible to me.  Oh sure, it's clear after I've found it (or looked up the cheat to find it.) But I haven't evaluated enough game situations yet to recognize the signs that indicate "important" details from "background."  It took me a couple of hours of play to realize that a shift in camera angle was signaling a significant element in the environment.  Or that the cutscene that introduces each new chapter contains foreshadowing of events to come. How many other clues am I missing as I play, leaving me blundering about hoping to run into the thing I need by sheer chance? How many times have I died in the game so far (dozens!) because I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing?  

Many of our students arrive at college in the same state of bewilderment.  The vast majority aren't master students, and many are first generation college students, venturing into a world as strange and alien to them as the sodden streets in Rain are to me.  They don't know the unspoken rules that underlie our world.  They haven't read enough to know how to distinguish the important ideas in their readings from the supporting text, so they highlight everything...or nothing. They pack up their books as the clock winds down, already looking ahead to what's next, and don't heed those reminders at the end of class that are critical for keeping up-to-date with the work.  They don't see a quick visit to a professor's office hours as the quickest way to dispel confusion.  Of course it is obvious, when you know the way college works.  It seems ridiculous to even have to explain it. But if you don't know how to filter the significant information from the clutter?  Well, at least you don't die, as I have so many times on a dark and dirty virtual street.  But on the other hand, death in a video game is never final.  I can always try again, and again, and again, until I figure it out and move on to the next challenge.  The consequences of a student missing the unspoken rules of college life can be far more permanent.

This is why I'm so interested in how learning takes place in video games.  Because you DO learn the rules of the game as you play, or else you'd never be able to move up to more challenging levels.  And unless you are a hyper-analytical college professor, you're not even aware that you are learning.  You just get better, bit by bit, until the tasks that stymied you when you started to play are now effortless.  Those skills are now so much a part of you that you don't even have to access them consciously.  Nearly every time I encounter a new challenge in Rain, I fail it.  I die.  And it is SO frustrating! But the game doesn't stop there.  I do it again.  And again and again, until I've got it.  I'd like to see our students "play college" in the same way, to absorb the rules as they go, trying and failing and trying again without fear and without penalty until they can't even remember what it was like not to know how to play the game.