Okay, so I’m navigating my way through a wonderful piece by Steve Ersinghaus called Stoning Field, and I get lost in the loop, traversing a Mobius Strip it would seem. But all the while, the reader is learning navigation (unless like me, you were shorted on patience in birth and your monthly supply has been used and you know the author well enough to cry for help). Going through it again, I recall the placement of buttons and what they are coded to do. When a button is not where you’d expect it to be, you wave the ol’ cursor around in despair, and voila!
Immediately following, I played a few quick games of Solitaire, as I often do to keep my hands busy while my mind is pondering something a bit more weighty. Something strikes me, gels into this: whoever the gods be that create hypertext, games, etc., must know something about their prospective audience. What attracts them? What leads them onward? What is their tolerance level of frustration? This last is likely one of the most important.
In navigating Solitaire, I have established a pattern: move from the right columns first, avoid tagging on until necessary, i.e., a king comes up, move a card down from the deck first if it’s going onto the finished pile, etc. But there’s something else I notice: there’s a stupidity handicap built it. I’ve always suspected this, but I believe it now to be true. If you play the game dumb–missing the obvious plays, after a game or two the setup is geared so you can’t possibly lose unless you continue on a downward spiral in alertness and gameplay.
So, who and on what do the creators base their patterns to avoid losing their players?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology