While, for obvious reasons, we cannot interview one to confirm this, I have to imagine that being a baby is terrible. You try to take a step. You fall over. You attempt to explore, only to be met by playpen walls or a parent’s “loving” arms. After months with little in the way of clear instruction, you think you’ve finally got basic bowel control down, but then you shit yourself. Again! Everyone’s always trying to explain things to you, but not the right things. Frustration suffuses your entire existence. You scream about it—regularly, at the top of your feeble little lungs—to no avail. This is what starting a new video game is like.
Every (traditional, non-live service) video game has two worst parts: the start and the end. Vanishingly few games nail either, and I can count on one hand the number that manage to pull off both with any modicum of grace. But where conclusions often fall apart catastrophically or fizzle wimpily, beginnings drag. To be fair, I appreciate the dilemma here: Some tutorials have to operate under the assumption that they’re not just teaching the player the specific game’s mechanics, but how to play a video game. This is not an easy medium in which to craft a dazzling, propulsive takeoff; I don’t envy game designers at all.
Still, even the best intros often serve as snags for me. Everybody praised the hell out of 007 First Light’s boot camp tutorial as an exemplar of the form, and while I did appreciate the way it used movie-like montage cuts to depict Bond’s progress and—mercifully—hurry things along, I still wanted it to end asap. Moreover, it was sandwiched between a hyper on-rails, also tutorial-y opening mission and a bunch of slow-as-molasses character intros. I want to sneak around and do cool spy shit! You can show me Bond being a seductively roguish scoundrel later.
That’s how I feel starting an action game, a genre designed to launch you into the thick of things as expeditiously as possible. JRPGs, meanwhile, are torture in this regard; I really, really hope that Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter assumes I put over 50 hours into the first game when it comes out next month, because I did, and I just want to hop right back into a story that ended on a huge cliffhanger. I don’t want to be taught to play the game I already played again. All this in mind, you may be wondering how I, an avowed Warframe fan, ever began a journey whose first 70 or so hours are considered by the community to be a tutorial. I’m not sure myself. I was a different person back then.
You might, upon hearing this, believe me to be the kind of person who loves it when a game just sets you loose in a gigantic open world and allows you to run free. You’d be correct! And I love the early-game sense of discovery—or in the case of more difficult games like Elden Ring, menace—that accompanies it. I'm willing to concede that that part of starting games rules. But even some of the standard bearers of the genre—The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild—first hem you into constrained kiddie pools while tantalizing you with what lies beyond. Sure, they’re building to that moment when you’re finally able to survey the landscape and awe-strickenly think “I can go anywhere,” but my (tears of the) kingdom for a game that just gives me that moment right at the start.
Again, though, I’m not trying to debate the merits of any specific game’s opening; I’m demonstrating the stumbling block that prevents me from starting new games. I flip through my Steam library on my Lenovo Legion Go after a long day of work, and I think “I should play that game. Oh, and that game. That one too!” But then I realize how blah the first 30 minutes to an hour will be—and moreover, that they will feel like more work—and the idea of frictionlessly scrolling on my phone begins to whisper to me like the One Ring Of Power. Before I know it, my evening is gone.
I do think the allure of The Infinite Scroll plays a role here; I remember myself having a more functional attention span as recently as 2020, and now I don’t. And so, I’m going to argue against myself by encouraging you to start more things. Succeed where I’ve failed! Pick up a new game, or a new book, or a new TV show—or skill or hobby or whatever else! Life does not have to be a rut or a dead end. You can just do a new thing any time you want to. I’m definitely trying, even if so far I’ve yet to entirely break out of my comforting but also limiting old habits. All you can do is keep trying to muster the energy and the will. Eventually, you’ll start to start—to actually start, and perhaps even continue. After that, the rest is easy.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. We're getting everything off our chests; we're writing about the things we hate, the things we're annoyed by, the things that are making our lives worse. And yet...there can be no hate without love, so we're finding time to write about that too.
