End of week ranting and babbling

It's Friday, and it's a chance for Jared to put up his feet and get some sort of gaming issue off his chest. YAYSORS!

So it's my first english extension class, and my teacher first tells us that this is a class where we 'must think for ourselves'. Which is actually pretty good for all the free thinkers, and bad for all those who like maths (damn straight thinkers). Anyway, he said something along the lines of 'shedding too much light can something something' and basically it meant that it's ultimately more rewarding to develop our own ideas rather than find a fixed meaning. Or something like that.

Now I may be babbling, but I'd like to take that half quote and find a new meaning that can relate to gaming. Shedding too much light can be unrewarding. Yeah, like 'hand holding'. Shed too much light on a game and it can be unrewarding

'Hand holding' is known to us gamers as the act of providing copious amounts of help that it eventually feels like the developers would've been better off cramming a walkthrough into the game. It feels patronising and ultimately unrewarding.

We as gamers like to feel a sense of accomplishment. Whether it be finding a method to defeat the boss, reading through cryptic clues that the Silent Hill games are notorious for, or just finding the right piece of evidence to present in Phoenix Wright, there's this feeling of mightiness when we eventually figure it out. And it's a damn good feeling.

But alas, some games are more than happy to grab your hand and pull you the whole way through without giving you a chance to object. Now a game like Super Mario Bros Wii. which was heavily advertised as a family experience, is excused for having a function which allows the computer to take over and show it's 1337 skills, but a game like A Boy and His Blob, which was well known for it's extreme difficulty has no excuse to give you a clear cut sign on what to transform your blob into.

I know there's a cliff that the boy can't jump to, I know that I must feed my blob a bean to transform into a trampoline. Don't doubt my intelligence and assume that I don't know what to do. It's patronising, and the sense of accomplishment is lost.

And yeah, you might say that A Boy and His Blob is a kiddish kinda looking game, but even some more adult (or hardcore, meh) titles are quite content with dragging you throughout the whole game without a say. Batman Arkham Asylum, for all it's awesomeness and super cool Scarecrow, automatically assumes that once you're dead, you're in dire need of help. Like I didn't know that I had to keep quiet while killer croc is lurking beneath.

A tutorial or two is fine, but developers oughta know that we can think for ourselves too. Maybe a little more subtle, such as the excellent Uncharted 2, which ended up telling you what to do when you were stuck in a certain section for a looong time, or like how Nate leans towards where he needs to jump to. It's still help, but not as blatant, and there's still that sense of reward.

So the equation should be less handholding = more rewarding. Developers, take note, we have a brain too!