It’s one of those things I have seen so many times in game designs, my own, those of students, or anybody else: In the middle of the screen, right in the players’ field of vision, you have placed a giant GUI element communicating something really important such as time left. And players don’t see it.
They don’t understand how much time is left, they are confused when time runs out. You ask them afterwards and they don’t quite believe that there even was a timer there.
This is a good example of that effect:
(Via Free Williamsburg.)
Illustrative and hilarious! This has the depressing Danish bicycle infomercials beat by a long shot.
I used to have a business card, on which the single largest element, in a very noticeable display font (Crackhouse) was my email address.
You wouldn’t believe how many people looked at it and asked “What’s your email address?” — because it wasn’t in tiny type under my name, where they expected it to be.
It’s why humans are relatively efficient at parsing information, isn’t it? Saves a lot of processing as long thing are where you expect them to be.
I guess it’s also one of the reasons why you can make puzzles at all: We tend to look for certain types of answers depending on the clues we get, so you just trick the player into looking for answers in the wrong place – as in the case of Greg’s email address.
I just wish moonwalking bears would have the decency to stop at stop signs once in a while.
A little late to the party, but thanks; that was hilarious.
Reminds me of watching a friend play through the end sequence in Portal (I had already played it), and I wanted to know how much time he had left, and he hadn’t realized that there were big screens all around showing a countdown.