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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

> designers who believe their audience to be too stupid

How will they know to go up the ladder or break the crate if it doesn't have yellow paint on it...

You laugh, but my experience has been in a lot of games there will be ladders and/or crates you can't interact with alongside those you can. If they're going to do that, I'd rather have the markings than waste a bunch of time trying to use non-interactive things like a moron because there's no way to tell until you try it.

Most games are littered with a plethora of unexplainable obstacles like invisible walls, ledges that cannot be climbed, boxes that cannot be opened or broken, ladders and stairs you cannot climb, and doors you cannot go through.

I think the discussion point here is that game devs and artists create a visual language for communicating to the player on elements of the game and their importance, and from simplifying some elements to be the equivalent of a pointing flashing sign that it's a reflection of their opinion on the ability of the players to understand their mechanics vs their visual language/mechanic being flawed to begin with

if you were directed in the game to go towards paths that would have inaccessible content, then I don't think painting the ground yellow says anything other than "hey idiot, stop looking around, its over here!", which, to be fair, IS strictly better from a user experience perspective than to simply get stuck due to lacking indication or direction

The trick (albeit difficult) is to be very subtle about it, maybe a quick emote from the main character "I shouldn't be here" or some environmental design that guides the player.

Valve is doing an amazing job there usually, Super Giant Games as well). Other game devs slap you over the head with it, with markers, popups, and whatnot and don't even let the player do any discovery, an endless tutorial.

They get play testers who aren't gamers and need their hand held like that. Studios and publishers think making the game accessible to people who don't play games will expand their market, but those people don't already know standard gaming conventions because they were never interested in games in the first place.

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