It’s been a while since I spent some quality gaming time with my mother, which is probably more than most people can say about their parents. She has always loved sharing my hobbies, but gaming sometimes seemed like a step too far. Yet for the first time, I felt these barriers fall away thanks to the PS5 and its revolutionary Activities feature.

RELATED: Astro's Playroom Review — Invigorating the DualSensesWe booted Astro’s Playroom - a platforming adventure that happens inside a fictional replica of your own gaming console. We used Activity Cards for the game, a side feature that comes included with select PS5 games. Not only do these Cards let you track the progress of your objectives, but you also pick up various clues and hints about completing any secrets or collectibles this game has to offer. Before long, it felt like all the obstacles to someone inexperienced with games had vanished.

Astro's Playroom Activities

The Activities are hard-wired into every possible trophy in a given game. Whether these trophies are unlocked by completing stages, finishing certain tasks, or gathering collectibles, there will be a small demonstration video to tell you exactly where to jump, what hidden walls to break, and what innocuous-looking boxes are hiding secret devices under them. You can also pin this video to the edge of your screen to accompany your playthrough without any nuisance to your immersion.

It was as if we had our very own personal assistant guiding us every step of the way. If I see something that’s high in the sky, or some walls that look suspicious in a level, I don’t have to think about whether they are just there for aesthetic purposes or not. With one click I can go to the Activities screen, and learn everything that has to do with that level. I can also skip that level and go back to it anytime by clicking on the activity card, so backtracking is not an issue anymore.

It might be hard to imagine this different perspective for younger gamers, but for complete novices like my mother, who’s not used to handling two analog sticks at once, or multitasking in general, it was a gateway into gaming. She’s the kind of player who has to move first, then jump, and is incapable of moving and adjusting the camera at the same time. For her, the act of gaming itself can be as exhausting as it is fun.

As experienced gamers, we make a lot of micro-decisions intuitively all the time - like moving forward or making a number of calculated jumps at some points - but these things don’t come so easily to everyone. Sometimes, gamers need to have clear and well-defined short-term goals, and the Activities feature whittles gaming down to the simplest of tasks while making them feel rewarding.

Astro's Playroom Springy Spa

Activities provide one pivotal concept to accessibility in modern games: a framework. Sometimes your brain can get overloaded with vast amounts of tasks and quests, which in some cases take too long to accomplish. Activity cards break this experience into small chunks or tasks, and even state the time estimated to complete each of these tasks. They hold your hand with video demonstrations and notifications until you succeed in doing them.

Of course, plenty of games include a similar form of task management and a detailed record of all the available quests along with their requirements and rewards. The difference is that in-game quests like those in Astro’s Playroom give you orders but not solutions, and available hints many not always be clear or tell you what you need to know. Activity cards will show the most optimal way of interacting with the game pieces (Quests. Collectibles, Puzzles, Etc..), and ensure you are always keeping up with these tasks from start to end.

There was a certain icy section where the frozen platforms were so fragile that they would break as soon as you stepped on them. Normally, you would have gone through them a bunch of times until you memorized the route patterns, but for my mother who wasn’t able to multitask between traversal and creating these patterns, this kind of challenge was pretty much impossible. She would end up flustered and confused no matter how many times she challenged this level.

PS5 Activities screenshot

With Activities, that all changed. She learned the pattern of this specific route at her own leisure, and drilled it into her muscle memory. Then she would go about it easily and stress-free.

The gratification I witnessed on my mother’s face when she finished a stage on the first try along with discovering all its hidden secrets resonated with me. With each passing stage, she was getting more and more from her experience with the game. In-game quests tell you the rules but not always the solutions, and hints may or may not give you the full know-how, but Activities give you the pure applied knowledge and only ask you to have fun.

A lot of bad experiences in gaming are borne from blunders and miscommunication between developer and player. Activity cards are an open invite for the player to stop obsessing about the things they find hard or inapplicable, and enjoy the game with much more manageable goals.

There's a nice Chinese expression that feels apt here: "Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul" (借屍還魂, Jiè shī huán hún). It means that even if an idea is deemed inappropriate, it can be repurposed in a new way that changes the perception around it. In the same vein, Activities can change the perception of players who have avoided certain games before simply because they were too complex, or because of their own lack of experience.

If activities get integrated into more games, fledgling gamers will spend less time getting confused about the parts they don’t like in a game. Instead, they can focus on the parts they enjoy, opening up to them at their own pace, and most importantly, creating fond memories of the game and the time they spent with it.

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