Words: 1995 Approximate Reading Time: 15- 20 minutes
I’ve mentioned multiple times that one thing I do with my free time besides just playing games is observing others play games. There are a lot of interesting insights that can be gleaned from seeing how one person responds to a challenge that you’ve encountered before, or how someone else processes information that you might not have noticed.
One thing you learn from observing others is what people have a certain amount of patience for. Or lack of patience for.
I’ve bounced off of puzzle games that other people went on to complete 100%. Those same people have rage quit games that I’ve beat multiple times. Why do we have these different reactions? Why does this game or mechanic frustrate me, but not others, and vice versa?
And this kind of question leads us to the topic of tolerance. Often the things that cause people to bounce off are problems. They need not always be problems: sometimes the tropes of a genre or the underlying mechanics are just unappealing to us, even if we can acknowledge why they might be enjoyable to others. Just as an example of that distinction, I dislike player vs. player competition. Fighting games and arena shooters are things that I have no inclination to play…but those mechanics and systems are still fun. It’s just a type of fun that I don’t like. Those systems aren’t “problems.”
So when I say that tolerance is about “problems,” I mean that these are things that genuinely would cause any person to become frustrated. Is the opening of a game dragging out for too long? Does leveling up and progressing seem to take forever? Do you keep dying? Do the controls feel weird? Is the writing bad? These and plenty of other questions are the kinds of stuff that you might well hear other people talk about when they say that they don’t like a game. And there’s a fair chance that if you heard one of these criticisms about a game you really enjoyed, you might say “I don’t really understand what they’re talking about.”
So I wanted to take some time to examine all of those reactions and how we can understand tolerance. Namely, how we do understand how tolerance works, and from there what lessons we can derive about our own tolerance. Is it going to be worth continuing with this game? Is there such a thing as a tolerance that is “unreasonably high” or “unreasonably low”? How much of a problem is this issue that I have with this game? The degree to which these questions can be adequately answered is…debatable…but my aim is to introduce the topic and some tools so that we can begin to engage in some self-examination.
Building Tolerance
Just about every genre of every medium has a set of tropes associated with it. Mystery novels, horror films, action games, and so on. Those tropes are built up over time through a complex set of history and experimentation. Sometimes a trope exists because it works, and sometimes it exists because that’s what others have done before. It’s tough to tell exactly where the line between the former ends and the latter begins.
And in many cases, tackling any work within these genres for the first time can feelstrange, precisely because we are unfamiliar with these tropes. Someone used to reading mystery novels may be perplexed about the straightforward story in an action movie, wondering why little details get no significant attention and don’t pay off in stunning reveals. Conversely, an action movie fan may wonder why this mystery novel is so slow-paced and keeps calling out all sorts of information that don’t seem to move the story forward. Understanding a genre or medium involves understanding why elements are constructed as they are: what is their fundamental purpose?
We generally gain knowledge of all this through experience. And often that experience requires guidance at early stages. We are taught how to read, and from there we may still need help understanding characters and storylines and themes. We can observe films or TV shows, but we may need help in properly watching them so we can fully understand what is going on. We need to be told how the buttons on a controller work so we understand how to manipulate a character in a game. Learning is more than just the literal mechanism of interaction (reading, watching, playing), but also the process for reading information that exists at a deeper level. Noticing details of direction and design that convey information that is not explicitly called attention to.
But even when that learning is done, jumping into a new genre within a given medium requires experience. Sure, you may be able to get through Dark Souls without getting hit, but that doesn’t mean you can just hop into Overwatch and dominate the competition. The rules are different, and thus we need to go back to the educational phase.
So imagine, for example, that you’re used to playing incredibly linear games. You follow one story beat to the next, walking down what is effectively a tunnel from beginning to end. And then you’re plopped into an open world game like Breath of the Wild. You’re given a set of tasks with a choice about which one to tackle first…but which one do you tackle? How do you know where to begin? Even if you try to tackle them one after the other, eventually you find yourself struggling because you’re far too weak: you’ve only got a handful of hearts and weak weapons to take on the most powerful foes.
And the problem in this scenario would be that you’re not acquainted with how open world games work. You are meant to explore, to take your time and do other things besides just go to the next main quest. And yet, the game doesn’t really tell you to do that. It technically does explain the basic mechanics to you – it introduces shrines and tells you what reward they supply. But the basic infrastructure of the game is still left as something that the player is supposed to “figure out.” A process the player may not be familiar with.
This example is useful because players feeling lost is a problem. And the fact that the game may give insufficient indication of what they are supposed to do (because there isn’t really a “supposed to do”) is a problem. It may not make the game bad, but it does mean that there’s a valid reason for people to get frustrated and stop playing.
For a person who is familiar with these systems, that degree of player freedom may not merely be fine, but desirable. It may be what you crave. But that desire comes from a variety of sources, including familiarity with the genre itself. Knowledge of the genre helps us to navigate the genre more effectively, which reduces potential barriers to play.
And this is true of a medium more generally. The more we read, the more comfortable we are with reading. The more we play, the more comfortable we are with playing. The easier it is to overcome problems and devise solutions for overcoming problems.
Assessing Tolerance
Of course, the problem with all of this is that we can build tolerances for things that perhaps we shouldn’t tolerate.
As an example, repetition. Certain games – particularly “games as a service” games – are framed around continually performing repetitive tasks. And that repetition may be drawn out in such a way to manipulate players into continually playing, and thus spending money. The more time spent, the more inured we get to that repetition, and the more we are willing to tolerate. If you’ve already spent 500 hours in a game, what’s another 50?
And that raises the question of whether our tolerances can become skewed such that they are “unreasonable.”
And of course, that idea works in the opposite direction. A player could conceivably have so little tolerance for any degree of frustration that they drop games at the slightest notice. As a hypothetical, death is a fairly common facet of playing games – sometimes you fail at a sequence and the character dies. Now imagine that a player absolutely refused to keep playing upon their first death – their tolerance level is based around “does the game allow me to continually succeed without any significant issues.”
Actually finding that line is, admittedly, tough. Maybe even impossible. And that’s assuming that such a line exists in the first place. Because to a very real extent we have to contend with the fact that these players are and aren’t (respectively) having fun. Should that fun be had? Could they be having more fun? These are the questions we must be able to answer to successfully build a framework for understanding whether someone can be too tolerant of a game’s systems…or not tolerant enough.
Just as relevant, though, is our own ability to think about our tolerance levels. Because if we can identify some sort of “ideal” tolerance level, we can work to address our own tolerance levels in light of that ideal. Are we too inclined to give up on something we shouldn’t? Are we too likely to give the benefit of the doubt to something that doesn’t deserve it?
Our own tolerance levels are relevant for our ability to effectively critique games. We can run into problems that cause us to bounce off, but what we’re willing and unwilling to tolerate skews our understanding of what problems are. Examining and re-examining our ideas in light of what we’re willing to put up with helps us to disentangle mere “like” from assessments of “quality.” If we want to say we like or dislike a game based on what we’re willing to tolerate, we need not worry. But if our tolerance levels are set too high or too low, our normal inclination to designate systems as “good” and “bad” loses power – to what extent is this system “good” because I like and am willing to put up with it, even though I probably shouldn’t; to what extent is this system “bad” because I dislike it and don’t want to put up with it, even though I probably should?
Since any ideal – assuming it exists – is vague, our goal wouldn’t be to hold ourselves or others to some impossible standard of perfection. Rather, it would simply be to assess and re-assess what we accept, and don’t accept, from our games. And of course, ask why we accept (or don’t accept) those things. To reflect upon the standards we have and how reasonable those standards are.
Concluding Remarks
It’s easy for us to get stuck in our own heads. This is true in almost all areas of human life, not just when it comes to opinions about video games and game design. Which is why learning about games from a wide variety of angles is incredibly valuable. Observing others, listening to what others like and don’t like, seeing what frustrates others and understanding their frustration, learning about design and why elements of design are present. These all help us escape the narrow confines of our brains and stretch our reasoning muscles.
Tolerance is one of those weird aspects of our play precisely because it is so variable. We can often acknowledge and accept taste, but when it comes to the idea of what someone is willing to put up with – or not put up with – we can have a harder time understanding those concepts. In some sense, what we call “taste” includes our ability to tolerate issues. But toleration is also a factor on its own, something that is a product of our background and time and experience and plenty of other elements that can be both internally and externally affected. Thinking about what we do and don’t tolerate and why can help put some of our feelings into better terms and give us more tools for criticism and analysis.
Abstracting Games 