I began playing video games at the age of two, on a state-of-the-art HP desktop, which set my father back by $1000 in the year 2000. Twenty-five years later, there’s a certain language of video games that I consider myself well-versed in. Red or green means health, “M” for map, “I” for inventory, and I can almost always slide by pressing the crouch button while running. These, among a thousand others, are certain “rules” of video gaming that I consider universal.

However, when I built a desktop using old PC parts that wasn’t just my girlfriend’s first-ever gaming PC, but also her very introduction to gaming itself at the age of 25, I realized that gamers take a lot for granted. There are tons of implicit phenomena in every game we play that we just assume are obvious, but the lay of the land is far different to someone who hasn’t been chronically in a chair, holding a controller, for a third of their life.

5 Your character can always go faster

Shift to sprint was never her first thought

Stray was one of the first games my girlfriend played. One of the cutest and coziest games I could introduce her to, Stray put her in the shoes, or rather, paws, of a cat. Now, the cat might be nimble and lithe in her movements, but after seeing my partner move around slowly, not being able to make some jumps, and dying because she was unable to outrun the danger, I asked her why she wasn’t trying to run or sprint. The answer? “Isn’t the cat running already?”

That is when I realized that while I instinctively reach for the Left Shift button, or R2, L2, or L3 to sprint in absolutely every game I ever play, that isn’t the case for a completely new gamer who isn’t explicitly told to do so. We faced a similar situation in Super Meat Boy, where one of the first few levels required her to jump a longer distance than the levels before. As such, she kept wondering why she couldn’t make the jump, before I explained to her that some jumps can only be made while sprinting, or even holding the jump button to go higher!

4 Climbing is usually restricted to selective ledges

Yellow and white paint aren’t just for the aesthetic

I replayed Ghost of Tsushima very recently to show her just how beautiful games can get. Watching from the back, when my partner praised the skill it must require to climb the face of a hill, I handed her the controller to show her that it didn’t. Surprisingly, it wasn’t enough to just tell her to hold the left stick up, as she expected Jin Sakai to simply keep going up the way it did for me, not knowing that I was actively aiming in the direction of the handholds carved into the face of the mountain. “How do you know where to go?” she asked, which was when I showed her the dabs of white paint and dirt that Ghost of Tsushima uses to show you where you can climb and where you can’t.

I then introduced her to the concept (and the meme) of yellow paint, where games heavy-handedly explain to you where to go and where to climb through the use of yellow (or sometimes white) paint. FFVII Rebirth is one of the biggest offenders here, and Tomb Raider (2013) is particularly so. In Tomb Raider, however, it did work to our benefit, as I realized that new players need obvious hand-holding that makes gamers roll their eyes. Eventually, she began recognizing said yellow paint markers, pointing excitedly at them and yelling at me to climb them, even when I didn’t need to.

3 Soundtrack changes and save points are never random

Why do I hear boss music?

Speaking of 2013’s Tomb Raider, another learning moment for both my partner and me happened early on in the game, as Lara enters the mountain village. Everything seemed serene until the winds picked up, and the soundtrack went from ambient woodwind to angry orchestra. I knew immediately that something was coming, but my partner? She just thought the soundtrack was getting spicy. No, babe, that angry orchestral music means run. Ten seconds later, a group of Solarii cultists ambushed her.

See, after over 20 years of boss fights, ambushes, and quick-time events that start the second you let your guard down, I’ve developed a sixth sense for danger. A save point followed by a sudden music shift? That’s the game’s way of screaming, “Brace yourself!”. After all, there's a reason the "why do I hear boss music?" meme is known to every single gamer today. To her credit, she’s now learned to recognize these audio cues, always cautious and running to save the moment the music shifts.

Of course, as she watched me play the 2023 Dead Space remake, she questioned why I wasn’t half as excited as I should be when I came across a room with plenty of ammo and health packs. I guess she’ll learn that lesson eventually, too.

2 The universal L3 + R3 experience

The rite of passage for every gamer

I was probably about eight years old when I got my first-ever controller — a cheap, knock-off X360 controller you could see through. Grand Theft Auto III was the first game I played on it, and I really wanted to honk the horn in that game while driving. This was my first introduction to the L3 phenomenon — a rite of passage every gamer must go through. For my partner, it was The Last of Us Part I, where the game asks you to press L3 to look at an explosion. We only heard it, however, since the prompt confused my girlfriend, and she frantically began analyzing the controller to see a button marked L3.

It’s not her fault. There is nothing intuitive about the fact that L3 and R3 are the act of pressing in your thumbsticks, especially when the buttons are never visually labeled on the controller. Even while trying to sprint in Assassin's Creed Shadows, she never got the hang of it, often coming to a halt while trying to press in the left stick to sprint. It’s one of those things you either learn once and carry forever… or miss completely until someone else comes along to mock you for not knowing it.

1 Your map is always talking to you

But you have to know to look

I booted up Driveclub one lazy Sunday to show her just how drop-dead gorgeous racing games can be. Honestly, I still think it’s one of the best racing games ever. It’s a shame that the studio shut down, regardless, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole. Anyway, I handed her the controller and let her drive — and then watched her crash into walls like it was an insurance fraud simulator. At the end of two brutal races, I asked her if she was braking too late or misjudging corners, and she just sighed and complained that she didn’t know where the road was going at those speeds.

That’s when it hit me — she wasn’t even glancing at the mini-map. The tiny track in the corner of the screen — a sacred tool every racing game veteran uses to prep for every upcoming turn — was invisible to her. It wasn’t just Driveclub, either. Even in Need for Speed II SE, Forza Horizon 5, or in SlowRoads, an online in-browser game that is just relaxed driving, she had no idea what lay ahead. And even after I pointed it out, she’s still not used to darting her eyes to the map and back to the road. A reflex for me — a total blind spot for her.

It’s okay if you don’t speak the language of games yet

Gamers have been speaking the language of video games for decades, while newcomers, like my partner, are just learning how to spell. I carry a wealth of implicit knowledge into every game I play — where to go, what to press, how to move — and none of it is innate. I learned it all in one crash, one death, and one wrong turn at a time.

Something that is purposely frustrating and hard wants you to get better, because it wants you to do that again. Games want you to retry that jump, nail that corner, or finally notice the ledge doused in yellow. Watching someone you love begin to see those patterns for the first time? It hasn’t just been wholesome — it’s been downright magical.