Intuitiveness is Easy to Conflate with Prior Knowledge

There's not really a snappy way to say what I'm getting at with this post, but there is something that permeates video game discourse and especially becomes a problem as a game gets analyzed and overanalyzed. The more you examine a game's construction and the more you replay it, the harder it is to understand the new player experience and what knowledge you're taking for granted. The experienced player will expect new players to intuit information that's only obvious in hindsight. That itself sounds really obvious when I put it that way, but let me get at this with some examples.

Metroid Dread came out not long ago as I write this, in the macro the game mostly relies on knowledge common to people who play a lot of video games, sometimes things so fundamental you don't even think about doing them, but which can be unintuitive. One player went slightly viral for getting heated that they couldn't get past an early obstacle because they couldn't jump high enough—it turned out they hadn't held the jump button when jumping and so Samus didn't jump as high as she possibly could. This is something I guess I would term... retrospectively intuitive? When you know already that Samus has a variable jump height and that holding jump gets you a higher one even from a standstill, it makes sense retroactively that that's how it works. Being retrospectively intuitive isn't useful for a new player though. Many things that are retrospectively intuitive are things that rely on the accretion of knowledge that comes from having played a lot of video games and coming to understand the ways they are typically designed to work. It can make even a game designed to be friendly to new players curiously difficult in unintentional ways.

This is often brought up in discussions of tutorial design, that a game should simply show the player how to do things or put them in situations where they must do something to advance, that subtle environmental hints or aspects of animation will work to "naturally" teach, avoiding the irritation of a forced tutorial on experienced players. Aside from the fact that it's nearly impossible to teach certain kinds of advanced techniques this way in most genres, there's also the fact that it relies on the capacity of the most inexperienced players to intuit correct information about mechanics without a base of knowledge to intuit from. Combine this with the tendency of experienced players to make assumptions about a game's mechanical underpinnings and get very upset when they don't work as expected, and the tendency of the same players to skip these tutorials entirely, and I can sympathize with the desire to force players to demonstrate some knowledge of the mechanics being taught before moving onward. In retrospect you can point to all sorts of aspects of how a game's design is meant to push players toward some sort of conclusion about its flow or mechanics, but to a new player that's just a morass of unfamiliar information and what parts of it are useful or correlate to the mechanics are unclear.

The way to introduce new concepts to players is very dependent on the goals of the game, obviously, but it also deserves a more specific essay. For now I mostly want to talk about how retrospective intuitive design intermixes with how games are analyzed and how their successors are often criticized. While I have seen this discourse float around, this isn't a callout—I can't speak to the experiences these people have had, I just want to offer a perspective. Now for what will get me roasted. I think Super Metroid's (the immediate comparison point the aforementioned Metroid Dread was put against) design's capacity to be intuitive, it's capacity to guide the player through, is tremendously overstated by many retrospective analyses. Much hay was often made of how well it guided the player, and on some level this is true, but I wouldn't say appreciably more than anything else in that late SNES era. It's not a frictionless experience and was not designed to be so. The developers knew they had put in cruel tricks that would prove frustrating; the map documents relating to the game refer to the one chamber that forces Samus to wall jump as "Hell." Plenty of areas are designed to trick you if you don't know the map, unmarked fake walls are built into the series’ DNA such that it has retained them long after most other genres discarded them. Super Metroid is very good at trapping new players into small loops for long periods of time relative to its (8-10 hour for a first playthrough) length. Super Metroid becomes "intuitive" when you already understand it and you can see the hints as to how it's laid out materially and mechanically, but for that first time player they're watching Etecoons jump off walls and wondering why they were allowed to save here.

This isn't an indictment of Super Metroid either, the game is doing this on purpose—a frictionless metroidvania wouldn’t evoke a feeling of an unfriendly atmosphere, of being lost and ultimately conquering the area. Places like this are designed into the experience to make sure the player faces obstacles on the way to feeling the satisfaction of overcoming them. Overanalysis from a position of complete knowledge can heavily dilute perspective on these design goals though, a path so well trodden you forget you had to trample down the grass the first time through. These games teach but the process is far from smooth, both by dint of the complexities of what's being taught and because the experience was never meant to be a smooth one.

So why talk about this, what's to be gained? I won't lie and pretend it isn't largely just a bit of contrarianism since there was a period, especially prevalent in the mid to late ‘00s, where Super Metroid was held up as essentially the perfect game. Its core design was held up as an example that there was nothing that mechanical minimalism couldn't communicate, because if Super Metroid could be so intuitive everything could be. That said, there are less spite based reasons for this essay, which is why it didn't start with me ripping into that whole discourse. Intuitive game design is a choice and not always the right one, but it's worth acknowledging that what counts as intuitive is built on assumptions that are fundamentally artificial. That doesn't mean that those assumptions should be broken without cause—it's better to be intuitive to some people than no one—but that the perspective on these bits of "repeated" information is skewed.

More importantly, I'd argue it's important for people looking at a game retrospectively to carefully consider the disentangling of what they have known for long enough to have forgotten acquiring the knowledge and what is instantly understandable. I know I've been guilty of assuming that sometimes highly contextual explanations would make sense to people when asked about what to do in a game. The assumption that something is intuitive can poison attempts to find alternatives in design. This assumption can rob us of understanding about intentional choices of pacing and design. Flattening the design of a well-studied game makes it less interesting to examine. It's something I have to watch out for, but maybe it's a reminder other people can use too.