To me, any game that requires the player to have mastered certain skills before they start playing the game suffers from massive design flaws. Just because many, many games suffer from this flaw, it does not mean that games must have that weakness. Take your own example of the FPS genre; the early 3D shooters like Wolfenstein and Doom were deliberately designed to accomodate people who hadn't played such titles before (i.e. everyone) in the easier difficulty settings: you started out with just one weapon, the beginning area had wide spaces with zero enemies (so you could adjust to moving in 3D at your own pace), the first few levels had several powerups and only a few, weak enemies, etc. It gave you plenty of chances to develop the necessary skills as time went on, with tougher enemies/specialized weapons/hazards/narrower corridors being introduced gradually, until by the end of the third chapter you were pretty darn good at the whole thing.

BUT at the same time the games let experienced players test themselves from the get-go: they could hunt out the secret areas that were scattered even in the first levels (and required a good grasp on the game mechanics to discover), they could pick a higher difficulty level and thus encounter tough enemies from the start (including ones that always respawned...*shudder*). In fact, if you go back and replay those games at the higher difficulties today, you'll find that despite mastering more advanced FPS skills, those games are still incredibly tough to beat.

I strongly disagree that the organic difficulty approach is in any way impossible to achieve: I think it's sloppy for designers if they can't accomodate the full range of skill levels (note: I didn't say it was "easy" to do). My perfect example of this is Super Metroid, which introduced players to several new skills that they needed to master just to beat the game (speed burst, wall jumps, bomb jumps, etc. etc.), but which always did so in a controlled manner: the wall jump, for instance, was the only way to get out of the pit where you find those alien monkeys, but those monkeys show you what to do, and that entire area is designed to be a safe and easy place to practice that maneuver. It even accomodates different skill levels: novices need only do two in a row to escape (the most you'll ever need in the game), while experts can do up to seven in a row to reach the Power Bomb at the top of the shaft. Either way, the game took a few minutes to show you a new move, and gave you the time and place to learn how to use it (thus letting the developers re-use that skill later in the game, adding extra challenge). That's the type of process I want to see from more games.

I understand what you're getting at in your third paragraph, and I agree that that's a problem that needs to be solved. I just don't think this is the way to go about it. "Show me how and let me practice" seems to me to be the better route: think of World 1 in Super Mario Bros., with its weak enemies and easy jumps, and how its four levels each build on what came earlier, but also introduce new elements. And then think of how experienced players can skip to the later, tougher parts (via the Warp Pipes) because they no longer need to practice those skills; they're good enough for World 8, so off to World 8 they go! By contrast, a player who keeps auto-playing out of World 1 is probably never going to be prepared for World 2, let alone 8, so what are they going to do when they get to the next tough part? I'd imagine they're going to have to resort to this feature more and more, so by the end they're just watching instead of playing. That's not fun for anyone, so why would you keep playing? THAT'S what I'm afraid of.

Ok for you people upset about this I have a serious question. How is this feature any different than youtube videos of the levels? This functionality already exists. It has existed for years. Now there is no need for the middle man though.

Actually, speaking personally that's not true at all: what I enjoy from gaming isn't the challenge per se, it's getting the chance to see what comes next that I enjoy the most. The problem is that seeing the next part involves beating the current portion, and I know from long experience that beating the next next challenge is going to involve utilizing skills that I picked up earlier. And I don't see how things can be any other way: gameplay is what separates gaming from passive forms of digital entertainment, but if you don't mix the gameplay up (usually via harder challenges) it'll be too much of a chore to see what comes next, so I won't bother.

Your anecdote about your friend is a good one, and it does a perfect job of illustrating that the status quo isn't going to cut it for many people. But I don't think that this feature would have led your friend to a different result (if I thought it did, I'd be all for it). Sticking with Galaxy, imagine how he would have used this feature; after dying the first time, your friend would naturally activate this feature to get past that part. That's good so far as it goes: an obstacle to having fun has been removed. But what happens when he gets to the next star? Chances are he can't beat that part either, so he activates this feature again. Another obstacle to fun is gone, which is still good.

But the game's not going to get any easier as he moves along, so save for a star here and there your friend is now stuck in a cycle of die (likely earlier than before due to underdeveloped skills and harder challenges) and watch, die and watch, die and watch. I know for a fact that after a very short while I would not have be having much (any?) fun at all with this, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb by guessing that the majority of people wouldn't either (if you're just passively watching, why not stick to a movie, which does that type of entertainment much better?). So in the end your friend will find that gaming still wasn't much fun, and he's still leaving our hobby. The difference is that this cycle has also absorbed lots of people who are similar to your friend, but who would have been willing to retry some challenges a few times to learn the necessary skills, but who instead opted to use this feature to die and watch, die and watch, die and...

I know there's a problem here. I know my proposed solution is not only difficult to implement in practice, but that it won't work for everyone either. And I know that I definitely don't have all the answers, and that Nintendo's track record is much more impressive than my own. Nonetheless, I'm looking at what little we know about this feature and applying it to the hypothetical New/Lapsed Gamer, and I'm not liking the results. I think this is a great feature for people like ourselves who are already interested in/dedicated to gaming, don't get me wrong. But I think it will drive more new people away from gaming than it will draw in.

The flaw in your FPS example is that a few levels is no where near enough time to develop the proper familiarity with the controls.  They'd still find the later levels near impossible (I'm speaking from personal experience, here) were they to be an actual challenge for anyone else.  If you doubt me, just watch someone who's completed a single FPS, and someone who's been playing them for years play some multiplayer together (aka watch novices play veterans in some online shooter).  The novice will be utterly destroyed.  As I said before, certain games will lack challenge entirely for an experienced player if they were to have a learning curve that accomodated new players.  Case in point: SMG.  It develops at a pace that a beginner can start with it and finish it.  However, I was never really challenged in the required stars.  My favorite parts of the game (aside from the awesomeness of the ideas) were the optional stars.  Your example in Metroid only proves my point.  The main game is not very challenging for an experienced gamer, and most of the challenge they get is from optional things.

That's obviously one way to do it, as I said, making everything optional, but it can leave experienced gamers feeling cheated.  The only way the game really challenged them was if they went out of their way to do it.  It's the same as the three hearts, broken knife, no shield challenge in OoT in a sense.  It's like creating new rules for yourself because the game isn't enough fun on its own.  That's not how it should be.  This new way Nintendo's going for, I think, addresses that issue.  I think you assume they'd entirely ignore organic growth, but I don't think that's going to be the case.  What this allows is for challenges that go beyond that organic growth to be inserted as well.  Think about Twilight Princess.  The game requires you to get used to a new tool each dungeon, and be able to use it decently by the boss.  However, for someone like you or me, we've got the hang of it after a few seconds, and all the game will ever require us to do is use it that simply.  Now, what if the room before the boss key required us to use it in a way that was, for once, not blatantly obvious and apparent, a real challenge for a Zelda veteran?  For me, that'd be more fun.  Or maybe, the last form of a boss could require something a bit more complex than "use tool to attack." Now, there were challenging things in Zelda already; they just weren't required.  This way, though, we get to experience them while playing the real game.  Those little option side things are, because of their nature as optional side things, usually limited in scope(i.e. special galaxies in SMG only have one level), too and problem's addressed as well.

Thus, the play for you system both addresses the inherent imperfections in an organic growth system (it can not address all players needs at the same time; it simply won't work in certain parts for certain people) and allows the injection of parts that challenge experienced players into the main game without creating road blocks for new ones.  As you said, a good system will allow ample time and space for a new player to learn.  Thus, having the game complete an individual section for them will not cripple them as you claim it will.  It hasn't crippled kids asking their older siblings to do it for years, and it won't now either.  People who would abuse this system completely misunderstand the point of games, and wouldn't enjoy them no matter what system was in place.

I have a question though...did the information given to us said that we could "skip" the level or we could see how the level should be tackled and then trying it out? (it's very confusing >.

If I were them, Id add the cheat menu on the game but no auto playing. Thats just dumb.

That's a poor analogy though: I'm speaking of being able to learn the skills necessary to play through the single-player mode, while you're speaking of the skills you need for multi-player. You know as well as I that those are two fairly different things, and that MP demands that the player's skill be much higher (as high as their human opponents, in fact). To use a real-world analogy, I'm calling for them to do a good enough job at teaching that the person would be comfortable going out on the dance floor and having a good time, while you're saying that they must be good enough to seriously compete in a dance competition.

And note that the feature we're discussing will do nothing for your hypothetical: using auto-play isn't going to teach the new player the skills he needs to succeed in multiplayer, and using auto-play in multiplayer would replace the player with a bot, which the more experienced player could have done without needing to call a friend over (and the new player could have just stayed home, or just watched from the beginning). You're illustrating my point perfectly; novices who use this feature will never be able to enjoy the complete game.

Your example of SMG tells me that we're actually closer in opinion than it would initially seem: Galaxy does a pretty good (but not great) job of bringing new players in peicemeal, teaching them the skills they need to enjoy the game as they go along. You're trying to argue (successfully, might I add) that Galaxy's early stuff isn't hard enough to engage more experienced players, but again this feature would do nothing to help the novice: were the game hard enough to engage you from the start, the novice player would never have the chance to learn the skills you use and need to perform as you do. Instead, they'll keep activating auto-play until they realize that they're not having fun watching a game play itself, at which point they'll just walk away. It seems to me that a better solution would be a new Warp Pipe, which lets experienced players skip the chaff and get to the goodies immediately, while letting the novices learn the game at their own pace.

You may be right that the people who abuse this feature the most probably wouldn't enjoy the game either way: I don't have anything but my imagination to "prove" things one way or the other (just like in the rest of my argument). I'm not as convinced by your analogy to asking your elder sibling to beat something for you: my own personal experience tells me that you can only beat the later parts when you do the earlier stuff yourself. I know I never got good enough to beat games until I was forced to do so myself. BUT I also know that if I'd had more options as a kid, the frustrating difficulty of the NES games would have driven me from gaming. As I said before, I know there's a problem, and that this feature is meant to fix it. And I'm not completely devoted to my own proposed solution either. But when I play things out in my head, I can't see how this feature will bring in more new gamers; if anything, I remain convinced that it will have the opposite effect in the long term.

Well here's our answer why New Super Mario Bros. Wii isn't online. I really hope Nintendo has enough sense to never allow this feature to integrate into online multiplayer.

Noname, in your scenario, a player who gets stuck and uses this feature is eventually going to get bored of the game playing itself and quit. If this feature did not exist, a player who gets stuck will get frustrated, give up, and quit. The end result is the same, so what is the harm in trying this new feature?

Not really. That would be a poor reason just because of what you said right at the end.