@mhoye@mastodon.social
i think jenn schiffer's 2014 talk about how "your grandparents probably didn't have node" helps put a lot of things into perspective for the farthest-flung version of this problem -- developers assuming their audience is only developers. but in a world where the UX designers at the tech megacorps are constantly pushing quarter-baked overhauls and paradigm changes out into the world... unlike the old world where Windows and Mac were teaching the user some of the fundamentals, the platform is often more of an adversary nowadays. we can't assume that even developers aren't having their 'struggling to use windows 8' moment, let alone people who can't devote so much time to staying familiar with the ever-changing interfaces on their featureless squircle-screen. but as long as participation in society demands these dangfangled machines, it's our responsibility to make learning them worth the investment.
i think a lot about unobtrusively tutorializing the human-computer-interactions we take for granted, from the perspective of game development. it can feel unlikely, perhaps even embarrassing, to consider that your own app could ever be the first thing of its nature that a person has ever seen -- but you can't assume that it's not!
take for example the three-week free-time project my friends and i submitted to a game jam last year, a 2D platformer for the gameboy advance ("getting around it with pheasant birdy"). as soon as i felt it growing in scope from 'tech demo' to 'playable game', designing and implementing a tutorial subsystem immediately became a non-negotiable feature to me, and was one of the first things i worked on once i had the basics of the engine in place. naively, one might think that the demographic of "people who own GBA flashcarts/emulators and download homebrew game jam entries" wouldn't need to be taught "press ➡️ to walk", "press 🅰️ to jump", "press ⬆️ to climb", since those would be obvious fundamentals to anyone who's played any game in the tradition of super mario bros within the past four decades, and surely cutting that scope on such a time-limited project would let us make the rest of it more substantial... and that may be true, but what about the parents/coworkers/etc. of my dev team and me, some of whom never touched anything video-game with their own hands after playing a few rounds of pac-man/tetris/galaxian in the 80s and deciding games weren't their cup of tea, or younger relatives whose experience of gaming are primarily mobile gachas? (we even embedded a javascript-based GBA emulator on the game's page with a special build of the ROM that replaces the button icons with keyboard keys -- many people we'd want to share it with don't need to know how to download and use an emulator.)
we sorely need to instill a patient, empathetic, noone-left-behind mindset in our development cultures. this probably means we have to re-educate a lot of arrogant technocrats who think "patience? teaching? isn't that what the chatbot we added is for?"
old and unimproved!
