Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Years ago a friend let me try his Zelda videogame to have a chance to poke unabashed fun at my clumsiness with console controls, but had a funnier time with my in-world cluelessness. At one moment, I was trapped in a cave whose exit was too high for walking, and I was armed only with a ranged weapon. Atop the exit was a ladder. I was lost. Exasperated, my friend showed me how to get out of there. Never in a million years would I have deduced that I was supposed to shoot the ladder so it would fall to the floor and let me climb to the exit. I was about 23 years old.

More recently, I helped my boss install some applications in Android tablets. I had (and have) never received formal training in the Android OS, and after testing several applications I found the problem of how to close them. I ended up developing the habit of going into the task manager to manually terminate any program I wanted to close. It would never have occurred to me that going into the open programs list and swiping them off the screen would close them, which I only learned two years later by accidentally watching someone else do it.

Programmers and I have clearly different ideas on what is intuitively obvious and what is not, but maybe it's just me being a clueless 1980s dinosaur. Opinions?

You would probably find http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/] either extremely frustrating or very rewarding side all of the solutions are very opaque and require you to get pretty creative with things to try.

I don't think that swiping is obvious either, but I just googled "how to close an app" and voila.

Also, portal 2 is another puzzle game with very cleverly hidden solutions.

4philh11y

Video games will often teach you as you go along. It doesn't sound like you played that game from the beginning, so you didn't see all the earlier rooms where shooting something above a door was the solution to a puzzle.

3Baughn11y

Swiping applications off the screen doesn't actually close them. It just removes them from the list. The Android OS transparently closes applications based on memory pressure. You're never supposed to have to do it yourself, and it'll transparently reopen them to their previous state based on persistence files. It usually works. Of course, sometimes apps get it wrong.