Dandori Time!
Lessons from a video game
It’s been awhile since my wife and I have played a video game. Sometimes we have a game we’re playing, sometimes a show we’re watching, sometimes an activity (Legos) or an after-dinner walk if the weather permits. Lately, though, we’ve been playing Pikmin 4 on the Switch.
A couple of years ago, we picked up Pikmin 3, also on the Switch, but we ended up putting it down after a couple of hours. Why? Pikmin is an adaptation of the real-time strategy genre, combined with 3D exploration like a typical adventure game. The Pikmin are little plantlike creatures that you command—analogous to your expendable soldiers or infantry in a simulation or strategy game about Rome or World War II or whatever it might be.
Except the Pikmin are cute and have personality, and while the game doesn’t punish you for getting them killed, it does try to make you feel bad. The game centers around daytime exploration missions on an alien planet (your ship crashed and you’re looking for the parts, or for energy to fuel the ship, or for other crew members who survived, etc.) and at the end of the day, if you haven’t gathered all your Pikmin back to your base, there’s a cutscene of the alien creatures coming out of the shadows to eat your stranded Pikmin.
I looked up on Reddit whether this game made people anxious (there’s a time limit too, because of the “daytime” mechanic) or if they didn’t like the Pikmin dying. One person returned the game when he realized the Pikmin would die. One guy even said he developed a real-life phobia of caterpillars, because towards the end of one of the games, an ugly caterpillar boss falls from the ceiling and if you’re not careful, will crush almost your entire Pikmin army. A few other people chimed in that the Pikmin games are really low-key horror-survival games, and that if they were marketed that way (instead of “look at the cute plant creatures!”) the series might be even more commercially successful.
When I saw that cutscene of the Pikmin getting eaten, I restarted the whole mission two or three times before the game could record the day in my save file, and it got tiresome, and that was it. The new game, 4, has a “rewind” mechanic—basically, autosaves to which you can return—so that if you mess something up, you can go back a couple minutes and try it again. I like that much better, and my Pikmin losses are minimal and we can still play the game!
It’s funny how video games actually teach you things. They teach you about yourself. There were a few moments in this game, and in any game, really, that presents some challenge, where a task seemed impossible. If you replay it a few times, though, you can start to develop a strategy, and suddenly this impossible thing becomes trivially easy, even though nothing changed.
It always surprises me, and mildly frustrates me, that I couldn’t figure out whatever the puzzle or trick was initially, even with lots of video game experience. But that’s the whole point. A good game is designed to feel impossible and then become easy, while also introducing new abilities and enemies. The difficulty and the ease of play are supposed to both rise throughout the game.
This experience should also teach you that often, frustration is just an initial, impulsive reaction, and isn’t really telling you anything about the reality of the task at hand. Frustration is a kind of bitter, misdirected curiosity. A video game—where, after all, the real-world stakes are ultimately zero—can help you cultivate wonder and curiosity that perhaps you can bring into the real world. Nintendo is extremely good at getting this all just right.