10% is not enough! Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!

[mshcherbatskaya]

Have you ever tried to teach a non-gamer to play a game? How did it go? Do you get frustrated and impatient? Did they? Was it console or PC? Was the non-gamer male or female? Do they game now?

I remember teaching my roommate how to play Halo in co-op on the Xbox, and we both had a blast. Sometimes literally:

"You threw a grenade at the back of my head!"
"I wanted to see what the button would do.."
"It throws grenades--"
"Yeah, I figured that out"
"--AT MY HEAD!"
"Sorry."
"Would you like me to show you what this button does?"
"No, I don't think so."
"It punches people in the head." *melee attack*
"Hey!"
"So don't do that at the back of my head either."

It should be noted that we were both laughing out asses off the time. I don't know that I would call her a gamer now, but when I moved out, she bought her own Xbox, mostly for racing games. Since I was teaching her, I wasn't focused on level objectives at all. If the fighting got a little busy, I'd run around and knock the enemy back a bit so she could get used to aiming, running, looking, bashing--no! not jump up and down! Bash! (Big controller, small hands, sometimes I hit the B-button, some times I didn't.) I let her just poke around looking at things in the level, too, which was kind of a thing with her, since her only other gaming experience was Myst, and lots of it, years ago. And we quit when she got tired of it, rather than pressing through to the end of the level. We did some pass-the-controller, over-the-shoulder "co-op" in single-player games like Fable, too, and I would come home and find her playing it on her own.

 

[Easykill]

Sorry, don't know too many girls... Which sucks.

 

[Singing Gremlin]

Me dad once tried to join in while my brother and I were co-opping halo. So my brother relinquished his controller and we set off. A few minutes later he was hopelessly lost, so to save time we decide he ought to just respawn next to me. So we gave him detailed directions resulting in him jumping off a cliff. He still hasn't forgiven us.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

Sorry, don't know too many girls... Which sucks.

So, did you ever teach a non-gamer guy to play?

 

[freetogoodhome]

I once tried to teach my girlfriend how to play. She hates violence and I had GOW in my 360. Big mistake.

 

[Easykill]

Well, I've made a couple more casual players get more into games. And my friends did it to me. I liked games, but not nearly as much as do now, and was still half under the assumption that games were for kids.

 

[AnGeL.SLayer]

I've taught my Aunt and Mother to play HL and scientist hunt. They both adore them. I've also gotten a few gamers to expand their horizons a bit. Going from pure FPS to RPG and vice versa. It was hard teaching them mainly because the mind set for a FPS isn't quite the same as a RPG. I had to basically reconstruct how they figured one plays games. With my Mother and Aunt it was even harder because they still type with two fingers let alone the combination of keys and mouse. It was interesting. I have to give it to my brother though when he was teaching me years back. I'm not an easy one to teach at times when aggravated.


^_^

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Adventure games are usually a good gateway drug. It's how I got hooked, anyhow.

 

[Easykill]

Someone, somewhere, will find that post above and use it to try and ban games...

 

[stompy]

I attempted to get my dad to play a rally-racer once. Unfortunately, he hated the rumble, and reckoned that my hands'll get shot if I don't turn it down. He's right though; I can't keep my hands still, 'cos they shake too much.

I also attempted to get my cousin to play Halo. I got frustrated when I got him to go through the tutorial, because he didn't get what they asked of him.

Edit: Um, what's the 10% about? Sorry, but just curious.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Someone, somewhere, will find that post above and use it to try and ban games...

They already have AA websites for gamers.

http://www.wowdetox.com/

Dunno about banning...judging by the cigar in my hand I'd say it's unlikely. Still, I wouldn't be shocked if Blizzard had an ungodly class action lawsuit filed against it in the near future. Not sure if they'd win, but someone is going to take a shot at that billion dollar income eventually.

 

[Smiles]

This is how my brother got me into gaming, i still suck though...

 

[Saskwach]

The closest I got was trying to teach an RPG nut friend how to play an FPS. Halo 2 was at hand. I went slow with just some basic aiming, shooting and moving but rather than get frustrated she just got bored. She plays in our Halo lans but not very well. A real trooper in that regard.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

Edit: Um, what's the 10% about? Sorry, but just curious.

It's the "what sex are you?" poll with the 10% female membership stat (though I was not just asking about teaching women to play) bumping up against one of the more colorful bits of my history and knocking a bit of it out into the open.

In 1992, the religious right in my state (and throughout the U.S.) was staging a massive anti-gay political and social push. You would probably not remember it and many of you were not even born yet, but this was also at a point in the AIDS crisis where it wasn't uncommon for a gay man to go to a friend's funeral every 2 or 3 weeks, and there wasn't much in the way of effective treatment. The combination of these factors lead to a large portion of the gay community feeling like they really had nothing to lose. Out of this came two in-your-face activist groups, ACT-UP [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power], which focused on AIDS issues, and Queer Nation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_Nation], which focused mostly on pissing off the religious right at every opportunity and making the rest of the gay rights movement look very calm and reasonable by comparison. I was a Queer National.

The pertinent statistic: 10% of the population is gay or some variant thereof. I think that's a Kinsey report statistic, but I'm not sure.

Aaaaaaanyway, one of the more absurd things that the religious right insisted was that gay people were constantly trying to convert straight people, especially children, to homosexuality. That we were "recruiting".

We all pointed out that almost all of us had grown up without knowing of a single other gay person, and thus we were obviously not recruited. However, giving that we were snotty, young, pissed-off youngsters who were just coming into the freedom of not receiving repeated beat-downs from our high school and college classmates, we decided to turn the recruiting accusation back on its source, with the protest cheer, "10% is not enough! Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!" As we were mostly single at the time, the idea of adding to our dating pool was also quite appealing.

 

[Nugoo]

I've gotten a (female) friend of mine into RPG's. She doesn't play very often, though, because of her school work.

 

[Akatsuki_slave]

I tried to teach my mom to play Mario Kart on the SNES in battle mode. She never really got the idea, but she beat me. I was only about 12 or 13 at the time. . . . Also, I tried to teach a couple of friends to play Golden Eye in vs. mode. They sucked so bad they forced me to handicap myself to die w/ one shot. I still won ^_^

I've given up on non-gamers since.

 

[eggdog14]

My sorta-girlfriend loves bioshock, though she's never played it. She found me playing the end of "Fort Frolic," when the opera music starts playing and then Cohen comes walking joyously down the stairs, and was immediately enthralled.

When i explained what was going on and what the game was about, she basically fell in love with the game and insisted i teach her how to play.

I suppose anyone can appreciate "Art"!

 

[Saskwach]

I suspect the reason for th 10% is less on the gaming end of things and more on the gaming forum side. While the girl:guy gamer ratio is surely higher than 10%, the hardcore girl:guy ratio is a bit more skewed.
Note: Let's not get into the semantics of hardcore; you know what I mean and unless you have facts to refute me move along. This isn't the fight you're looking for.