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263 points foxtacles | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.44s | source | bottom
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tempaway43563 ◴[] No.44353729[source]
I remember watching my young nephew play Lego Island and the introductory video where the camera flies around the island is amazing. But then he was totally baffled by the 'main menu' when some excited lego guy babbles instructions at you in flowery hard-to-follow language, and you had to do abtract things like write in a book or drag icons onto the map before you got to do anything fun like racing cars. I think he could have clicked around that screen for hours and never realised he had to drag the people onto the map.

Great game but they wouldn't make it like that now. Its like a grown ups idea of an interface that a young child would like, rather than something actually tested.

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prophesi ◴[] No.44355964[source]
To be fair, after you enter your name in the book, the Infomaniac tells you that you have to drag a portrait on to the map to begin the game.
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1. tempaway43563 ◴[] No.44356182[source]
Yes but that only works if the child is listening. Children dont listen to wiggly mad dudes waving around on the screen. They just randomly click around and giggle at things.
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2. prmoustache ◴[] No.44357073[source]
Gross generalization. Some are smarter than that.
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3. prophesi ◴[] No.44357178[source]
They'd do well to play more games like this then! All of the Humongous Entertainment games in particular have a special place in my heart. There's nothing much intuitive about these 90's/00's point-and-click games, but that's mostly the point; to let kids click around and see what works in an entertaining fashion.
4. jkrems ◴[] No.44357286[source]
Nothing to do with "smart", or at least that's mostly irrelevant to this observation. But it's definitely age-dependent. No matter how "smart", it's not fair to expect young children to immediately and fully pay attention to some "random" voice when other interesting things are going on at the same time.
5. deadbabe ◴[] No.44358025[source]
Is the child like 3? He needs to learn to listen. Valuable life skill.
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6. alexjplant ◴[] No.44359840[source]
I'm notoriously bad at figuring out video games but was able to grok this at the age of 7. It probably had more to do with the fact that education in the 90s placed a decent emphasis on computer literacy (e.g. "Mouse Practice" for Mac Classic) so I was hip to the drag-and-drop paradigm. I don't have kids but I've read that most grow up on touch interfaces these days due to the ubiquity of tablets so I'd imagine that the mouse context is foreign to them.
7. tempaway43563 ◴[] No.44367604[source]
this was 25 years ago, he's a project manager now