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.
