I’m trying to get my SO into gaming and have met with very limited success and so I was wondering what you guys have done to get friends or SO’s who are not into gaming to start fragging mobs on Halo or Left 4 Dead?
My SO refuses to even give some games a shot. Over the holiday I dragged her kicking and screaming on the computer for a round of peggle. Now, she’s a peggle “master” and proud of it. But I can’t get her to even give Left 4 Dead a try. A while back I also got her briefly into Zoo Tycoon, ahhh good memories
What other games would you suggest I try? How do I get her to give Left 4 Dead a shot, short of faking a zombie apocalypse and telling her she needs the practice for the inevitable onslaught?
If shes not into shooting games, shes not into shooting games. Im a gamer girl, and I hate shooting games. I play RTS. I play citybuilders. I collect old handhelds. I paint warhammer figures. I play tabletop and computer RPG untill my eyes bleed.
Shooting games are booooring. You walk around, you shoot stuff, you die, you read annoying shit in the chat panel. The end. There is no (for me) discernible difference between Counter Strike and Wolfenstein 3D (exept the latter is actually playable).
If she likes some games, but not games from a particular genre, why harp on it? You have a gamer girl. Let it go. Get yourself matching DS lites and play pokémon or something. My SO loves Counter Strike, and I gave him the courtesy of trying, once. I predictably hated it. He has let me be since. We play other games together, just not shooters. If he had kept going on and on about trying CS again, Id be out of there in a heartbeat. There is nothing more undateable then obsessive gamer-boys.
FWIW, I liked F.E.A.R enough to play for a few hours. Maybe try that. Or something with humour, like Serious Sam. Or, you know, games like the ones she likes already.
An extremely daunting task. If you want to convert someone, you have to do it incrementally. Left 4 Dead and other FPS’s generally require a lot of previous game experience to enjoy. Health bars, ammo, first person controls, lots of buttons, matchmaking software, it’s a lot to take in if you aren’t already familiar with those conventions. You might have slightly better luck with Team Fortress 2, which I would say has much greater mass appeal, but even then it is unlikely. For a very casual game, I have had great success with getting non-gamers to enjoy Boom Blox on the Wii. Fun, great for groups, and the learning curve is only about 2 minutes. Long ago, I remember that the Monkey Target mode in Super Monkey Ball for the Gamecube was good at drawing in non-gamers, but that’s a bit dated now.
Your best bet is to find games that your SO enjoys watching and play those. Somewhat cinematic RPG’s are the most obvious. Over time she may ask to join in. If not, oh well. Some people just don’t like videogames.
Here’sa pertinent guide. Hold old are you (and her)? That website (25 and up. We keep the kids out) also has a rather large community built around it, so if she’s interested in the community aspect of it, she can go that route.
Peggle is a great start, but enjoying Peggle makes one a ‘gamer’ about as much as enjoying Solitaire makes one a ‘gamer.’ Casual games are awesome and an explosive industry; they just don’t involve the same love of story and skill that gaming culture creates.
Shooters are a lost cause on someone who doesn’t want to devote the time to learning the controls. Sim-games like Spore, Black & White, or (hey) The Sims are a great way to get someone familiar with core ideas like resource management, death as a penalty, dialog options, etc.
There’s not a lot of games my partner can get in to, but turn-based RPGs tend to sit well, since they involve a lot of strategy and methodical improvement, with plenty of character development and not much twitch-based action.
I would comment on LOUNE’s suggestions, but I don’t meet the very strict requirements for visiting the site.
Your best bet is to ease her into gaming with the Wii–it worked for my parents. My dad hadn’t played a game in years, but then I got him started with Wii Sports, a low-pressure, but very fun social multiplayer game. Now he’s playing Resident Evil 4 (he’s beat it like 20 times!) and Mario Kart Wii.
I’d actually echo this. Be warned: if they’re scared of “complicated controls”, the Wii will only enforce that. Then again, my mother played Mario Kart Wii and excelled in driving into a wall. That was it.
Girls are the hardest to get into gaming from what I’ve seen. However, I know a handful of chicks that are absolutely nutso about Guitar Hero. Also, many girls will give the simple Wii games a try, such as bowling or tennis.
Little Big Planet for PS3 has been noted to be a good game for non-gamers as well. I’ve never played it, but from watching YouTube vids, it looks simple and fun.
Agreed with the others who say that shooters are a really tough entry point into games - you love them or you don’t, pretty much.
I’m a woman who’s been playing video games since Pong came out as a home game and I ran down the street to my friend’s house when her family got it, and we thought it was So Cool. In my lifetime I’ve owned an Atari 2600, Commodore Vic-20 and C-64, a still-continuing series of gaming computers, Playstations 1/2/3, and a Wii, plus played a ton of games on my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s Sega Genesis and had a serious arcade addiction in my high school and college years.
I still hate shooters. Oh, I don’t mind the light gun versions sometimes, but prefer teaming up with a partner.
If you’re into buying a whole new system, Wiis are very newb-friendly. Non-shooter games that I’ve tried for the Wii and would recommend include Rayman’s Raving Rabbids* (1 or 2, haven’t seen the others), Sam & Max Episode 1, the sorta-game Wii Fit**, and the aforementioned Wii Sports “demo” disc. Our other Wii games are more shoot-y. Other games that I want and aren’t shooters include the Trauma Center games (like Operation, or the old ER computer game).
Cross-platform games: Overlord, which IIRC is more of a RTS game with an evil overlord and his minions. Rock Band or Guitar Hero? Mass Effect is a good fighting-not-shooty pausable game with a good storyline and even some romance (a similar game is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). Bully, which is like a cool “sim” game of a kid who isn’t the most rule-following, perhaps, at a school, and can choose to fight back if bullied, shoot a slingshot, attend or skip classes, kiss girls (or boys!), and so on. (Look up a review, I’m really not doing it justice.)
OK, there’s some shooting but it’s pretty minor.
** Danger Will Robinson: Don’t buy the Fit unless she asks for it. :smack:
True to some degree, it mostly depends on the person. My mom wouldn’t be able to handle a non-Wii controller for sure, but I was able to get my dad to try the Resident Evil 5 demo on 360 and he actually managed to do okay (after a lot of practice and guidance, of course =P
But of course. Playing into some of the fears by offering something that’s (for lack of a better term) “good enough” isn’t very fun either. Hell, if they’re scared of the controller, start them off with Civilization: Revolution.
I got my mom into video games by just giving her games that involve things she already likes. She likes decorating and item collecting and she loves animals, so I suggested Animal Crossing. Turns out she likes it. She always liked Tetris (everyone likes Tetris), so we got her that, too. I have a game that’s sort of like Hidden Pictures from Highlights for Children, and I know she’ll like that, so I’m giving it to her when I’m done.
I don’t have this problem with Unsquare Dude. I play more video games than he does, but we both like them, and we both like the same kinds. I dunno… that was just fate for us, I guess.
As others have said, most games seem to depend a lot on a lot of familiarity with other games.
It’s true of card games too (I assume you folks refer to COMPUTER games / electronic games, yes?) My GF could not learn the rules for any of the card games my family plays because the concepts of “tricks”, “suits”, “hands”, “pile”, “take”, “trump”, “discard”, “draw”, “deal”, and so on are totally foreign to her. So it’s too much to take in all at once. Me, I can’t remember a time when all of that was foreign to me.
Most computer games are simultaneously boring and damn difficult. Not to you, perhaps, but to newbie nongamers for certain. It’s hard to get any pleasure out of a “game” wherein you can’t get out of the first little bit. The “boring” part is harder to explain. I’ve seen games that were potentially not boring, but the difficulty level kept me from getting anywhere in them. But games that revolve around a recurrent skill test with ever-more distractions and/or increasing difficulty, most of it having to do with speed and accuracy… after awhile they all kinda blur into each other. Seen that <yawn>, got anything else?
