Watching Thimbleweed Park "let's play"s is painful

Keep in mind that in a great many cases, the problem LowLevel is describing happens AFTER the player has found a roadblock. They know there’s a problem to be solved, but they’re so intent on ruling things out as quickly as possible that they’re not taking time to analyze any of the clues available to them. A related problem is that in their rush, the player is actually failing to find the real roadblock, which in turn creates a whole new roadblock (I can’t figure out what to do next). This feeds right back into the first scenario, where the player has a roadblock (I can’t figure out what to do next), but they’re so intent on ruling out possibilities as fast as possible that they fail so see the clues that would help them progress.

But even taking your response at face value, the player is playing a game that requires observation and deduction from the beginning of the game all the way to the end. By the time the player needs to find out which room a particular hotel guest occupies, they’ve had to solve a large number of puzzles. If the player still thinks they have to try to find the roadblocks as fast as possible instead of carefully observing their environment, the player has failed to learn one of the most fundamental rules of puzzle solving, particularly as applied to point-and-click adventures.

You’re right. Doing things quickly is not strange behavior. And that’s a major problem because it tends to bleed over into real life–or maybe more accurately, that real life inattentiveness bleeds over into games. To give an example, I have a particular talent I’m really skilled at: I’m an expert at finding things in plain sight. I’m sure it sounds like I’m making a joke, but I’m not. For a long time, I didn’t think it was a skill at all. I need to find something, so I look for it, find it, and problem solved. But as time went on, I started noticing more and more that other people did not have this particular skill. Instead, other people would realize they need to find something, and skip straight to asking someone else where the item was. On many occasions, I would almost immediately pick up the item in question and silently hold it up in the air in an exaggerated fashion. Every single time I did that, I found that people were so intent on not finding things, that they’d always fail to notice the item until I either drew attention to it somehow, or they happened to notice me holding the item when they turned to leave the room they left largely un-searched.

In quite possibly my favorite example of lack of observation, someone once came downstairs to ask me where a black wallet was. I knew exactly where the wallet was, because I had gone downstairs earlier and noticed the black wallet sitting on top of a waist-high dividing wall at the base of the stairs. In the process of going down the stairs, you pretty much have to look at that dividing wall, and a black object on a white background is pretty easy to spot–or so I thought. In the process of coming to me to ask about the wallet, the person in question had to walk down the same set of stairs, see the same dividing wall with their wallet sitting on top of it, get within 1 meter of their wallet as they walked past it, and find me. Now there was one crucial difference in that scenario: They were looking for their wallet, but I was not. Yet I’m the one who found the wallet in a quite obvious place, while the person with the actual puzzle to solve walked right past (quite literally) a clue that was right in front of their face (also quite literally).

I find the prevalence of such inattentiveness quite discouraging, and the fact that it’s common doesn’t make it a desirable trait. My “illogical” tendency to observe the environment around me and take note of what I see has served me well in real life, since I’ve effectively already found items before I ever need them. Another “illogical” behavior that has served me well is looking for things in places that don’t make sense. Of course I’ll first search in sensible places, but especially when searching for things for other people, I’ll look in illogical places as well because their clues are unreliable. Someone will adamantly tell me that an item has to be in the living room, and then I’ll go outside and find the item in the car. Where other people gave up after searching the obvious places where an item “should” be, I find the object where it actually is.

Perhaps that’s why point-and-click adventure games are niche. They’re inherently unsuited to people who refuse to look past the obvious.

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Oh, I don’t think so…

immagine

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You need to take your time observing the scenario and -thinking-. This is not a punch-button game. It’s a puzzle. The pressure to have something -happen- in the video is probably too much.

I´ve actually seen Let´s Players looking at walkthroughs in between episodes because they don´t want to bore their viewerbase by aimlessly walking around.

Ugh, I can understand the motivation, but if I were doing a Let’s Play and was worried about that problem, I’d play the game fairly offline and try to work my offline experiences into the Let’s Play somehow.

If I was to do a LP I’d simply play the game and the speed-up the parts where I’m just thinking.

Some people just don´t have the time to play games off camera. I can´t speak for all them, but for some it´s only part of what they do and they have tight schedules, so getting hints off camera is often the best they can do.

Which is extra work and not much fun to watch. But similar things happen with people who do RPG LPs. Some boring repetative grinding gets edited out, and most people understand that. So that would be a similar solution.

I saw a Markiplier video where he died in Bendy and the Ink Machine, which doesn’t have save points or allow saving, and he had to start all over again. He skipped that.

I think that most people who have already played adventure games will assume that they are stuck because they are missing something, not because the game is broken or flawed. Being stuck is a normal condition in PnC adventure games and an adventure game with difficult puzzles is designed in a way that people will get stuck if they don’t observe carefully the environment.

Because overlooking things is one of the causes of a roadblock, so observing carefully the environment minimizes the chances that I’ll reach a roadblock at all.

It was a general behavior, not something observed only in specific circumstances, but a specific example is the one that I wrote above: the player was moving the mouse pointer so quickly that he didn’t notice the poster hotspot in Ransome’s trailer.

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Good point. By roadblock you probably mean “situations where you are stuck”. Of course they can increase if you don’t observe carefully. However, by “roadblock” I meant “obstacles/problems that the story puts in front of you, which you need to solve before the story can move on”. Finding a map, opening the factory gate, finding the murder weapon, and so on. These are not things that increase in number if you don’t observe carefully. I was trying to say that it might make sense to first try to quickly discover what these roadblocks/obstacles/problems are, and only then observe carefully. Goal-based reasoning, in other words.

With this example: it seems to me it makes total sense to quickly walk out of the trailer in order to discover what are the concrete obstacles or the problems that the game expects you to overcome, rather than focusing on the poster and trying to figure out what it can be useful for. I know that adventure games can be played like this, and probably they can be finished more quickly if you play them like this, but this does not seem to me an enjoyable or fulfilling way to play. It resembles too much “try everything with everything”. I want to arrive through logic to conclude that I need to do something with the poster. So, when I play, I intentionally ignore the poster until it makes sense for me to interact with it. But it would be a mistake if you looked at me and concluded I am being superficial because I am overlooking the poster.

I’ll quote my original paragraph so that it’s easy to show that the player had reached the circus trailer for a specific reason, following a sound line of thought. The only thing that prevented him for finding the object was a lack of observation:

For example, I saw a video in which the player knew that Ransome had to find an item and he correctly hypothesized that the more probable place where this item might have been was in Ransome’s circus trailer. He went there, moved the pointer around a lot of time and he completely missed the large hotspot of the poster on the wall, which would have helped him a lot.

I want to emphasize that the topic of my original post was not related to a lack of deductive skills nor related to a “try everything with everything” attitude but related only to the speed at which some players manually execute their actions.

Wow. Sorry for missing the original paragraph. I should have looked for it :slight_smile:

Clearly I can see no way to play the devil’s advocate of that.

My irony-meter just exploded.

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I hope I haven’t hijacked the topic too much ! :slight_smile:

(Then again, if I had read more carefully, the conversation would have ended with “yeah, people are stupid”)

I don’t think that this phenomenon has anything to do with a lack of intelligence. I think that it’s more related to the way they use the mouse (either generally or when playing games).

Fixed.

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I know I have lost the right to talk :slight_smile: , but… he had arrived through logic to conclude he needed to search the trailer, but then performed this search superficially, missing a big recognizable object. It’s hard to say it has something to do with how we use the mouse, because such a search is done with the eyes. (This object was clearly visible.) So it seems a case of “search performed poorly with the eyes”. The only explanation I can see apart from lack of intelligence is very high pressure due to recording a let’s play. Or very poor eyesight :slight_smile:

The common behavior that I have observed is that they move the mouse so quickly on the screen that the name of the item that they are pointing at is shown for a fraction of second so small that their brain doesn’t have enough time to realize that there was an interactive zone of the background.

Had they moved the pointer more slowly, the probability of noticing that text (and the corresponding hotspot) would have increased.

As far as I understand there are two ways to search: the first way is to search with your eyes: locate the most apparent objects with your eyes, then move the mouse pointer until it arrives over the object you are looking at. In this kind of search, it cannot happen that you don’t realize the object is highlightable.

Then there is the other way to search: you move your hand trying to span all the screen, and pay attention to see if a name appears. In this case, it can happen that you miss something.

You tipically do method 1 on the most apparent objects, and then method 2 just to make sure you haven’t missed anything. But here the question is why the user was only employing method 2 , without doing method 1 first. It seems unnatural. as if he couldn’t parse the background.