The joys of baby steps in gaming
Learning to love the early end of the power curve.
Most games are a journey in empowerment. One of the great joys of this hobby is hitting that point at the end of the game where you are all-powerful. Mowing through enemies, gliding past obstacles; what was once challenging is now trivial, thanks to the growth of your character’s abilities and your own skill as a player.
Everyone likes this, and why not? It’s fun being a god. But as we race to feel that rush of empowerment at the end, we forget that the start of the journey is fun too. There is joy in being powerless.
On the face of it, this might not make sense. Typically, you’re at your weakest point at the start of a game: your character’s moves and abilities are limited, and as a player you’re not sure when to use them. Often, you don’t even know what the rules of the game’s world are. You’re helpless, clueless… and I love it.
That mix of mystery, peril and discovery is extremely compelling. It’s a pattern I’ve repeated in open-world games for over twenty years: unsure exactly of what works and what doesn’t, each expedition away from the safety of your hideout or camp is full of discovery and danger. You take baby steps forward, hit an obstacle… and then scurry back to safety, licking your wounds and healing up before trying to go that little bit further.
As a result, the opening areas of those games are burned into your memory in a way the rest of the game just isn’t.
I hadn’t quite grasped the rules of GTA 3’s carjacking and police chases yet, so I spent a lot of the early time on foot, learning all of the nooks and crannies of GTA3’s Portland. Pokémon Legends Arceus is the first in the series where the Pokémon can directly attack the player; unsure of exactly how close you need to be for them to spot you and how much damage you can take, I know every rock and climbable slope in the opening area of the Obsidian Fieldlands.
But I don’t have that same intimate knowledge of the rest of the game’s spaces, because by that point, I’m too powerful and too knowledgable to care.
At the start of Pokémon Legends Arceus, I had to go everywhere by foot, tip-toeing around every Pokémon because they represented a mortal threat. By the end? I just hit a button and jump on the back of a giant bird to soar past Pokémon that aren’t worth the time to swat aside with my powerful team. By the time I reached the last island in GTA 3, I knew the best way to evade the police was by car — so I didn’t bother looking for hiding places on foot anymore.
Don’t get me wrong: reaching that point is fun too! It’s fun to wield powerful weapons or attacks. It’s fun to use your knowledge of a game world’s rules: like Neo in The Matrix, you can bend the game to your will, sending GTA 3’s police on a fruitless chase that you can end in an instant. And it’s not just power for power’s sake, because you’ve earned it.
When you have power, when you understand how to handle the threats, you don’t need to look so closely anymore. And that makes me a little sad. I love that I’ve walked all the sidewalks and back alleys of GTA 3’s Portland; I wish I had the same detailed knowledge of Pokémon’s Coronet Highlands as I do with the opening areas of Obsidian Fieldlands.
Gaming’s journey of empowerment is extremely rewarding. There are few feelings like hitting the heights of your powers and abilities. But from those heights, you can’t see what made you love the game in the first place.
