Intuition in gaming documentary script

Introduction
Video games are a massive part of today’s society and with them
being able to appeal to pretty much every audience you can think of,
it’s very clear that video games are a great source of entertainment
for many people. However, that entertainment can be easily lost
when you’re losing badly to someone who seems to always be one
step ahead of you, or when you really just can’t solve a puzzle no
matter how hard you try and think of the solution, leaving you very
frustrated. Both of these situations and many more can be solved
with just a little bit of intuition, and intuition is what I am planning to
talk about today, more specifically, intuition in gaming.

What is intuition and gamer intuition

But before we talk about intuition in gaming and gamer intuition, we
should establish what intuition is in the first place. The definition of
intuition is “the ability to understand something instinctively,
without the need for conscious reasoning.” However, whilst this may
be true there is more to intuition than that as the more experienced
someone is at something the more adept their intuition will get with
it and the same goes for video games. For example let’s say you were
playing call of duty and you’re running down a hallway that has a
corner turn at the end of it and your intuition tells you that there is
most likely a person round that corner ready to shoot you which
there is, if you’re a noob at the game then your intuition is telling
you that because it just makes sense whereas if you’re a pro at the
game your intuition will tell you that because you have seen so many
people go to that corner to get kills. As you can tell the noob’s
intuition was just pure intuition however the pro’s intuition was
brought about because of their experience with the map they are
playing on. And this experience allows players to make more intuitive
decisions rather than if they had just started the game because they
know so much about it, This intuition which is brought through
experience with the game you play is what people call gamer
intuition and what’s great about gamer intuition is that it can carry
over to different games you play so you’ll have a head start when
you play other games for the first time because of your gamer
intuition.

How we use intuition and gamer intuition to help us in video games

There are many ways one might use their intuition when it comes to
video games whether that be as a player like the example shown
before or a game developer trying to make their game the best they
can, so let’s look at a couple of examples to get a better idea of how
intuition is used in video games. And for our first example we’ll look
at one of the most commonly used examples of intuition being used
in videogames and that is when a game will show an item to you that
you can’t pick up, and then you’ll find an obstacle that requires
something to get past it and you use your intuition to put the pieces
together and you go back for the item and this time you’re able to
pick it up to be used to get past the obstacle. This example is used a
lot in games since it’s a simple and effective way to make the game
more interesting and it rewards players for paying attention which
will make them feel good and want to keep playing. This concept is
called back tracking and one game series that uses it a lot is Shantae.
As it makes you go back to an area you’ve already been to, to get an
item that you are very subtly hinted at getting to continue in the
current area and it does this multiple times throughout all the
Shantae games. Another one of the most commonly used examples
would be using intuition in a puzzle to help you figure it out, One
game that does this a lot is the tomb raider series and one puzzle I
want to go over is the White Queen puzzle in the Shadow of the
Tomb Raider which has you explore a manor in a flashback as young
Lara croft to unlock a secret door in the manor, now when you get
dropped into this puzzle the only clue you get is a piece of paper with
a drawing that presents a scene of a Queen dressed in white with
two red knights either side of her and a big bat behind looming over
them this is accompanied by two numbers followed by a letter on
the right being 30N and 90E and that’s all you get. With this you get
to exploring the manor and eventually you’ll find a globe that will
have a bunch of numbers and letters on it that you can interact with
of course with just a bit of common sense and intuition you figure
out that you have to match the globes numbers and letters with the
ones on the paper, doing so brings down a ladder giving you access
to a new area as such you climb the ladder and explore the area until
you get to a wheel which you can interact with and doing so opens
up the wings of big model of a bat. Opening the bats wings causes it
to shine two red lights on a chess board at which point you’ll use
your intuition to figure out that of course a chess board has knights
on it and there were knights on the paper that were red as such you
have to move the knights into the red lights that have appeared once
done the white queen of the chess board will be revealed behind the
ladder you had let down before as such you figure out pretty quickly
that you need to turn the globe again to deactivate the ladder at
which point you drag out the Queen and the puzzle is complete
unlocking the secret door. Now whilst all puzzles require a bit of
intuition there are puzzles where intuition is the main driving factor
rather than being given a bunch of clues as to how to figure
everything out and the White Queen puzzle does this pretty well
essentially making you figure out the whole puzzle from one piece of
paper and whilst this puzzle is pretty easy it doesn’t take away from
the fact that the developers made good use of players intuition to
solve it. My final example is when say you’re playing a platformer
and you see a wall with a crack in it, any gamer would instantly go
over to it and hit the wall, and doing so will usually result in finding a
secret path to a hidden area or secret power etc. This is a reward
mostly found through gamer intuition since without the prior
knowledge of how secrets are commonly hidden in video games the
player would’ve most likely thought nothing of it and continued on.

What makes a game intuitive

So, with those examples in mind, what makes a game intuitive? Well,
a game can be intuitive in many different ways and one way that can
be done is through intuitive tutorials and when I say tutorials I don’t
mean the type of tutorials you get at the beginning of a game to help
you understand the basic mechanics of it I mean a tutorial that
doesn’t present itself as tutorial instead teaching you about a certain
mechanic or enemy in an organic way. A great example of this would
be Half-Life 2’s Barnacle enemy, so let’s look at how the game
teaches the player to deal with them. The first encounter the player
has with the Barnacle is a scripted event in which when the player
comes close to the Barnacle a bird will fly past the Barnacle resulting
in it snatching the bird out the air and eating it. After seeing this play
out the player now knows without any sort of tutorial that going
under the Barnacle will result in death. Later on after the player has
become accustomed with the Barnacle, the game will then give the
player a situation where there are multiple Barnacles blocking the
path and there is no way to shoot them down however there are a
few explosive barrels in the corner and pretty quickly the player
should have the idea to throw the explosive barrel at the Barnacle
and doing so will have the Barnacle catch the barrel and try to eat it
resulting in it and all the other Barnacles around it dying, this gives
the player important information letting them know that using
explosive barrels can get rid of multiple of them at once. All of this
info that the player now knows has been taught to them in a way
which doesn’t involve any sort of tutorial instead expecting the
player to be able to figure it out in intuitively based on the events
that happen in the game. Another way a game can be intuitive is by
letting the player explore the world around them rather than telling
them where to go, this kind of intuitive game design is best used in
open world games, and now you might think that all open world
games by default do this, since they are open world after all but that
isn’t the case to get an idea of what I mean let’s look at some
comparisons of open world games, so let’s look at Skyrim vs Hollow
Knight when you first enter the game of Skyrim you are thrown into
a scripted event in which you linearly follow a path up until you get
to the open world and once you are finally in the open world the
game will give you a main quest marker and tell you where to go and
until finishing the game although you can go and explore the world
without going to the quest marker the player will always have it
there to tell them where to go also you can’t really do any proper
exploring after you’ve gotten through the first area of the game after
the intro sequence whereas when you enter the Hollow Knight world
for the first time you are quite literally dropped into the first area of
the game and… that’s it you can already start exploring to your
hearts content and you have no quest markers anywhere and
nothing to tell you where you should be going of course the first area
you playthrough is still pretty linear being the tutorial area for the
game however there are still secrets that you can and will miss on a
first playthrough of the game in the tutorial area and once you start
getting to the main areas of the game there is so much to explore
that you could easily spend 50+ hours just exploring all the beautiful
landscapes you enter and throughout the entire game there is not a
single quest marker on where to go, not to mention that once you’re
a decent way into the game you have options on where you want to
go rather than having to go through a linear path to complete the
game. As you can see there is a clear difference in the intuition used
in both of these games. Where Skyrim allows you to go explore the
world around you it still encourages you to go to the next main area
that you are supposed to go and forces the game down a linear path
in order for the player to complete it, but with Hollow Knight the
path the player takes in the game to get to the end goal is
completely dependent on the player themselves since they have the
freedom to take their own path to the end of the game rather than
having to go down a pre-determined one. So, we know a couple of
ways a game can be intuitive now and we also know what it is and
how it’s used in video games but intuition isn’t just a skill to use it’s
an experience as well so what are the feelings and emotions that a
player gets from intuition in gaming? Let’s find out.

How it feels to use intuition in video games

So, let’s look at this in three stages. The first stage will be when a
gamer starts to develop gamer intuition, the second stage will be
when a gamer has fully developed their gamer intuition and are now
able to use it consistently and the third stage will be when a gamer
starts to also use their pure intuition in tandem with their gamer
intuition to make them truly skilled at the games they play. Right
starting with stage one, when you start developing gamer intuition
you will be able to do things like know a few of the basic buttons that
is universally used across most games such as A/X or Spacebar
depending on what device you are playing on being the jump button
in most games and you may know that a sniper will be in a certain
high up place in a shooter because you’ve seen multiple other
snipers there before. Stage one will motivate the player a lot since
their gamer intuition is helping them improve at games by a big
margin at a fast pace therefore making the player want to play more
games as they see a clear improvement in their skills as a gamer.
Stage two is the stage most gamers will stop at. With the players
gamer intuition fully realised because of the sheer amount of
experience they have as a gamer there will not be much if any room
to improve their skills in this way with the gamer being able to easily
understand most button layouts and maybe having a preferred
button layout on their controller, being able to easily figure out
where and when someone might pop round a corner or where a
camper might be, being able to know when a boss is coming up
before they even get to the boss arena etc. therefore the majority of
gamers will be at their best once they get to stage two. Gamers at
this point will have their favourite games that they play the most and
they’ll be pretty good at those games however the worst part of
stage 2 is the fact that the player will feel like they aren’t making any
progress at this point as they have already mastered their gamer
intuition and their skills are as good as they think they can get as
such a lot of frustration and toxicity will happen in stage 2 and out of
the three stages this is the one where most gamers drop gaming for
the most part and go on with their lives. Now stage 3 is the stage
that takes the most effort as you’re using your pure intuition rather
than your gamer intuition which improves naturally as you play
games whereas you have to make an active effort to improve in
stage 3 this is why stage 3 is a stage that all pro gamers master
however you don’t have to be a pro at the game you play to be on
stage 3 also I should mention that whether your in stage 3 or not
depends from game to game for example if someones favourite
game was Overwatch and they had over 500 hours in it then it is
likely that that person is in stage 3 on Overwatch, what I’m
essentially trying to say is that those who go into stage 3 only go into
stage 3 because of how invested they are in a game, in my own
experience I’ve been able to get to stage 3 with games like
Overwatch, Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Plants vs Zombies
Garden Warfare all of those games are games I’ve put hundreds of
hours into with me usually playing them nonstop for about 2 years of
my life each. So why is stage 3 so special? well as I have said before
it’s because you’re using your pure intuition rather than your gamer
intuition but then what do I even mean by that? As explained before
gamer intuition is intuition you get through your experience in games
so the more you play the better it gets whereas pure intuition is a
sort of common sense brought around by instinct so to compare
stage 3 with stage 2 let’s your playing a fighting game and your
opponent is on the ground after you just finished a combo on them
now for most fighting games the opponent will have at least 4
options those being rolling left, rolling right, a normal getup or a
getup attack a stage 2 player will know that the opponent will roll left
behind them because they know it’s the most common getup option
whereas a stage 3 player will be able to predict the opponent using a
getup attack because to them it just makes sense that the opponent
would use a getup attack even though they know that rolling left is
the most common getup option their intuition told them that it was
going to be a getup attack both of these instances are what’s known
in fighting games as reads since your predicting what your opponent
is going to do next like you read it in a book before they did the
action now the stage 2 players read was successful because of their
knowledge of the game whereas the stage 3 players read was
successful because not only do they know the game inside out but
they also had the instinct that the person they were playing against
was going to do an unconventional move, that’s the difference
between those stages. So in conclusion stage 3 is a stage that only
the most dedicated of gamers get to, it’s hard to achieve and when
you master this stage it puts you on a completely different level to
the other 2 stages putting you at a pro level of the game you play.
Okay so we finally understand what stage 3 is so how does it make a
gamer feel then? Well stage 3 is the stage where all of your emotions
come out after all you have to put in so much effort to get this far,
the player will feel an immense pride when they pull off a clutch play,
they’ll feel amazing after completely dominating in a match, they’ll
get really frustrated when they lose for simple and obvious reasons
and may get toxic, they’ll be cocky at times, they’ll inspire some, and
deter others. Stage 3 is a roller coaster to go through especially since
stage 3 is such a big part in a gamers journey as whilst not many
gamers will master stage 3 the majority of gamers will be able to get
to stage 3 but if that’s the case then why did I say that stage 2 is
where most gamers will stay? Well that’s because the term gamer is
a very broad term it can technically mean any person who has played
a game before and going on that definition it makes sense that most
people would stay at stage 2 because a lot of people aren’t super
invested in video games but still enjoy them whereas a true gamer
are the people who get to stage 3 the ones who want to put in the
effort to achieve greatness in the games that they play. Anyway, I
don’t want to start rambling so let’s look at how intuition in gaming
can help us in real life as well.

How intuition in gaming helps in real life

Whilst I was researching for this documentary, I had found an article
which had talked about a game called Miegakure which is a 4
dimensional puzzle game that uses the 4th dimension to shift through
the world of the game and to explain how the game works in simple
terms essentially when you are met with a roadblock in the game
you have to shift into the 4th dimension to quite literally give you a
new perspective on the puzzle which will let you figure out the
solution. Now the article writer says that they remember getting
taught about the 4th dimension in their math class, but they did not
get a basic understanding of it until months later when they read a
book on it, whereas the person who played Miegakure was able to
get a basic intuitive understanding of the 4th dimension after having
spent 10-15 minutes playing a video game. What this shows is that
the virtual world of video games can be used to teach complex topics
in an intuitive and easy to understand way which will in turn help
them in real life but not only can video games be used to teach
concepts and complex topics in intuitive ways, they can also be used
to adapt the players learning style into a more intuitive one
therefore making it easier for them to learn things whether complex
or not. The fact that video games can be used like this shows how
useful and important having an intuitive game can be, I think it goes
a long way when your video game is able to teach your players real
life concepts and topics, it gives the player an insight in the real
world that they normally wouldn’t have and that is a special thing for
a video game to be able to do.

Conclusion
So anyway, what are my final thoughts? Well, I think that intuition
and intuitiveness is a very important part of video games as it makes
games more exciting and engaging to go through. It can make the
player better at the game they play to a major degree, it can also
even teach players real life concepts and topics. There is so many
things intuition can do in video games however the majority of
people never even take notice of it, and I believe it’s something that
should be talked about much more with how big a role it plays in a
players journey and experience of the wondrous world of video
games. Thank you for listening to this documentary and I hope you
all have a great day.