learning to play video games

from evy's notebook

When I downloaded Hades four months ago, I'd barely played any combat video game. These games intimidated me because I knew there were a lot of foundational skills involved to be good at them. I didn't play video games growing up, and wasn't sure if I had the patience or interest to suck at a game while developing these skills. But covid numbers were high, I was bored, and my friends said that Hades rewarded failure and that I might enjoy playing it. So I gave it a go.

As I expected, there were indeed a lot of foundational video game skills relevant for the game and missing from my skill set. To name a few:

moving my character to a new location accurately, to avoid standing over things that hurt me
remembering which button does what, and coordinating when to use each of the five (or more!) ways of attacking
aiming my attacks to hit enemies
knowing when an enemy is about to hit me, and avoiding this attack -- through playing Hades, I learned that most enemies have their own unique ways of damaging me, and that there are visual cues to warn before each attack

These were a lot of things to focus on at once, and I found myself frequently overwhelmed and flailing around, unable to really improve much on any of them. What I think really helped me was spending time focusing on particular skills. Instead of trying to win or get further in the game, I'd play with the goal of improving a particular aspect of my game play. Here are some experiments my friends suggested:

only use "attack" and "dash", and none of the other buttons
don't try to hit enemies, only try to not get hit by them, and explicitly say out loud when I think something is about to attack me
for bosses with many attacks, focus for a while on only avoiding one of them without worrying about the other ones

Hades was an especially great game for practice because every time the player dies, the plot advances and more power-ups become available. I've written before about how it's easier to learn when it's less scary to fail, and I saw how my being less intimidated by dying helped me feel more willing to spend time focusing on particular skills. After over 100 hours of play time, I think I've gotten a lot better at playing Hades, and it's exciting to think about how the skills I've learned might help me play many other fun games!