Each day–assuming no other plans interfere–the nephews are given a 45 minute block, each, in which to be their Links. Their dad takes a turn when he’s home, sometimes. He’s 57 and says he’s never played a video game before.
Niece is just shy of three so she just watches and climbs on me and chews on my shirt(s) until I ask her why she’s chewing on my shirt(s) and she insists “that’s not a shirt!” and I asked her “what is it then?” and she says “it’s a sweater!” and I say “a sweater is a kind of shirt” and she remains dubious.
12 year found a stable? Got verbal directions then got on a wild horse and rode it to Waypoint Town where he bought as many dressups as possible from the appropriate store and I helped him discover he could in fact sell some of this older clothes. Learned the Secret Ancient History of This Variation On The Same Story Again Oh No Ten Thousand Years Ago Everyone Was A Tribal Tattoo!
He went around town blasting through dialogue until time was up then I was up.
They wanted me to Actually Play instead of run around setting grassland on fire in boxers so I made a beeline for my waypoint and smashed some gerblins and collected some weapons/items and made the Giant Ubisoft Phallus erupt from the ground then I did my first Temple then I dropped various metal objects on the oofbox of the dude who is demanding too many Orbs in exchange for a Gilder, imho. Discovered I could magnet hanging lamps loose and shortcut Skull Cave of Gerblins to unlock the Murder Chest and then it was nine year old’s turn.
He was frustrated by the temple he had saved in, though it looked like he had figured out how to progress in it. He just needed to space out the Thrilling Puzzle Blocks they gave him a bit more and what he was trying to work would work, geometrically. I tried to encourage him in this direction but he’s nine and impatient so he pulled the ripcord and teleported out. Oh well.
He had the Hot New Threads big brother just bought on his mind, and spent the rest of his time trying to exploit the environment as aggressively as possible to generate fat stacks of rupee against the day he arrived at Waypoint Village, Home of Infodump Grandma. Broke most of his weapons generating cheap stacks of wood before figuring out an arrow----> fish ----> rupees -----> arrow ----> etc. loop?
They told me I figured things out a lot faster than they had, and I told them I just had a lot of practice with the Conventions of the Medium so not a lot of it was that new to me.
Then brother-in-law decided to go for it. He:
-obviously has a lot of trouble moving both Body and Camera at the same time and tended to keep his thumb off the right stick when he was locomoting, lending (from a bystander’s pov) a lot of the temple he did a slower Mario 64 When The Preset Camera Path Glitches Out Or Lags quality
-multiple shoulder buttons extremely up-fucking
-has to look at the controls a lot to visually check for a prompted button
-probably not helped by impatient children with more plastic brains and more time in the game trying to give him unasked for advice every 5 seconds?
I told him he picked a hell of a game to start with.
Anyway sitting there I realized how much of the vocabulary I use to talk about Game is dependent on a context that no one else in the room had. I also didn’t want to exhaust anyone, or myself, so I didn’t try to provide The Elements of AAA Open Blast 101 and just chilled.