I visited my parents last weekend, because they've spent about half their life worrying about me and it's a hard habit to break. Mum's been vaguely curious about DROD, and I figured she might like it, as the little computer game experience she's had has been games like Boulderdash and Chip's Challenge, but she's had some issues with downloading the game (in case you're curious, our sudden shunting of people off to Sourceforge on DROD.net is what does it. If you're not familiar with mirrors, it can be somewhat daunting.)
I installed the JtRH demo on Mum's computer, and watched as she played through the first and most of the second level. Let me tell you, it was fascinating. My mother's a clever woman - she has a successful business, with three retail operations, in a market that doesn't normally see success. She just doesn't play computer games, and so I got the rare experience of seeing someone with no pre-conceived ideas about computer games play a game that I knew the design of intimately. Gives me great food for thought.
My mother suffers from Meniere's Disease, which is a catch-all term for 'there's something wrong with your ears, man, I dunno'. It's, needless to say, not exactly a research priority, despite it being a real problem. It's consistantly misdiagnosed and the causes and cures are completely unknown, but we do know that it interferes with the balance centres in our ears. Mum's learnt to deal with it, but things like moving backgrounds can trigger vertigo. Like our title screen, for instance.
I've always thought there should be a standardish option in computer games called something like 'Epileptic Trigger FX' that controls things like flickering lights, fast moving backgrounds and the like, things that might set off sufferes of epilepsy and related diseases. We've gotten a lot better at avoiding these effects, but I think there needs to be more awareness of these sorts of issues in the industry.
Anyway, I grabbed the mouse and dropped Mum into the tutorial, where I learnt that Mum knows my sense of humour really well. It took her a couple of seconds to read the opening text on the tutorial before she turned to me and said, 'You wrote that, didn't you?'
The interface and how to play was explained pretty well, I thought. It was curious how Mum kept using the arrow keys - I figure this is because when using her more usual programs like Word, Excel and HandiTax you use the arrow keys to move around and enter things with the number pad. She started to remember quickly, though. It took a while for Mum to work out what the scrolls were - with scripting, there isn't as much correlation between words on the screen and where you're standing, so it didn't come to her right away. I think this might also be because having scrolls you can read on the floor is a standard game cliche and one people new to computer games wouldn't know.
Note that the tutorial says nothing about monsters.
One of the weaknesses of our storytelling approach is that we weren't really given an opportunity to express in-game the relationship between Beethro and Halph, which Mum asked me about. She wasn't sure about the rocks in the first junction - I explained to Mum that they're just rocks, and they won't attack you. Not sure where that came from, to be honest - maybe from Boulderdash, where the standard assumption is that if you don't know what it is, it'll kill you. The simple logic puzzle threw Mum for a second, but I kept quiet and she figured it out.
And then we got the first roach. I had to encourage Mum that it was all right to kill it, but she took a very cautious approach to it, hiding behind the wall, stepping out and stabbing it. This continued into the next room, where Mum used the same approach on the three roaches.
The next room is where we introduce tunnels, which Mum charged at, and crumbly walls, which Mum also charged at accidentally and died. Mum was very cavalier about death - at the end of the level, where you see the first pit, Mum strode right up to it and bumped it a few times to see what it'd do. (This I put down to not knowing the computer game cliches - in computer games, usually a pit means death.) Several times Mum would die suddenly, including the apparantly horrid scream3, and there'd be no reaction out of Mum apart from the occasional 'Why did I die then?', while room transitions made her jump for about half of the first level.
She ended up getting the three roaches, after a good deal of fear and a bit of thought, and moved on to the force arrow introduction. I must admit I interfered here, as I explained to Mum what the force arrows did. In my defense, she was terrified at all those roaches, and looking at it now it isn't exactly necessary. She completely missed the zigzag speech, and I explained that Halph was showing you how to get past the line of force arrows, so she rewound, expressed disappointment at the lack of a checkpoint, and got past it. She had a bit of trouble at what I thought would be the easiest part, with the wall of force arrows with diagonal gaps in it.
The next room, the tunnel/roach battle, rattled Mum considerably, but she perservered and got to the tunnel pretty quick after a few false starts. It was here that I learnt Mum's origins with computer games, as I first saw her deal with roaches by quickly moving then turning, which in DROD often ends badly. After a few tries, I interfered again and explained that monsters can move diagonally too, so you need to watch out for holes in walls. After Mum sorted out the strategy, she was off.
The next big puzzle room was the tunnel ambush room, where Mum belatedly used the checkpoint. She got the idea that you needed to have your sword the right way before you used the tunnel right off the bat, but I helped her a bit with the strategy in the ambush part of the room. In the next room, Mum inadvertantly (maybe on purpose, I don't know) mastered the art of swiping around corners. She'll work out backswiping before you know it.
In the tenth level exit room, I began to suspect that Mum might not be listening to dialogue when there's a puzzle in the room. I had this confirmed when I watched her during the Halph introduction on level 2, and I found it interesting. I figure that there's lots of dialogue, such as the pit thing introduction, that's poorly placed as it plays during a puzzle while people are focused on the puzzle. I tink I'm responsible for most of it, come to think of it.
On level 2, Mum started to have lots of problems with the roaches. She had some difficulty with the first room, nothing too major, and she soon realised that it wasn't as bad as she thought. The first part of the second room gave her considerable trouble, and I eventually had to suggest that she try moving instead of rotating. It was here she first mentioned she was getting exhausted. The final part, the orb surrounded by crumbly walls, provided Mum with lots of fun, and I saw Mum use approahes I would never have considered to get roaches - I think you might be able to tell a smitemaster by the way they solve rooms, almost like a game fingerprint.
Mum took a while on the roach queen intro room, but by this point she was getting a handle on the game. She described it as being 'kind of like Boulderdash', which is a weird comparison but I can kind of see it.
I'll see if I can remember anything else, but I think that's everything I noticed.
Matt
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