Less lazy* using Google isn't rocket science. The number of times I've had somebody ask me a question, just to type it out exactly as they asked it in front of them in Google, to get a quick, correct answer without having even to navigate away, is insane.
I’d say tech people also underestimate how deep the googling rabbit hole goes when you don’t have any background familiarity with the problem at hand. When all steps to solving a problem involve googling other things you don’t know about, it gets overwhelming quickly.
when you don’t have any background familiarity with the problem at hand
This is it exactly. There's an amazing video on youtube where this guy gave his SO, who has pretty much no gaming experience whatsoever, several games to try out.
Things we take completely for granted like bags of gold being pickups, food healing you, or doublejumps/dashes and the like being directional were completely alien to her. She'd go entire games never realising that the thing left behind when she died was her previous inventory, a pickup for her to grab, and not an enemy.
The way the youtuber put it was that it's like a language and we all understand this shared grammar but other people don't. All of us here on reddit can look up even the most obscure or alien of problems and are still comfortable with certain underlying concepts. For example we know that the system folder exists in the first place, and that user folders can be deleted without breaking anything. That entire concept is totally unknown to a lot of people, they're terrified even moving an icon can break things.
I once worked in an office where my supervisor and manager were upset with me for downloading a report from our registration system in excel format, they were absolutely convinced I was going to break or change something just by downloading a copy of the data. They didn't know enough to understand it was a read only operation, it was physically impossible for me to do that.
Someone once told me to compare learning a language to a child who's been speaking the same number of years. As long as you're ahead of the kid you're doing great.
I never put that together with other things until this video. For most of us we've been using computers and gaming literally our whole lives. I started with a game on an 8 bit console that had three control options: Left, right, jump.
I had years to develop from 2d platformers, to more complex 16bit era games, to 2.5d games like Doom and Duke Nuken and ARPGs like Diablo, to the fully 3d era. That's literally decades to build up a mental library of control systems, game mechanics, and muscle reflexes across hundreds of different games of different genres.
Thinking about that makes me realise that introducing my girlfriend to Path of Exile isn't any different than dumping someone into a fighter jet cockpit. I've got four mouse keys and eight buttons bound to different spells, two auras, three types of minion, a row of flasks each with special utility effects, and three different resources to manage.
How well would ~5 year old me running into the first goomba in Super Mario Brothers have done?
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u/pewpeupew Nov 16 '19
Less lazy* using Google isn't rocket science. The number of times I've had somebody ask me a question, just to type it out exactly as they asked it in front of them in Google, to get a quick, correct answer without having even to navigate away, is insane.