If you're writing paragraph long instructions (as seen in the picture of your machine), you've probably designed your game wrong. In fact these days if you have instructions at all, you're probably doing it wrong.

Its not about how obvious you think it is, its about how hard it seems to the user. And the harder you make it the fewer users you'll have.

Secondarily, you put your instructions in printed form next to the screen -- when all the user cares about is the screen itself.

This is funny and interesting. SO stands for significant other in this case, right? This is happening because the game-player wants to play the game, but the SO is, in a leisurely way, taking it all in?

I actually read a post today that had a similar story about IKEA-like furniture.

http://dirtsimple.org/2009/05/how-we-get-stuck.html

TL;DR: The author's SO got stuck trying to assemble a kitchen cabinet, and couldn't figure it out. The author looked at the problem, checked with the manual, discovered the solution immediately, and got called smart. The SO didn't even bother. And the author realizes that if their positions were swapped, he wouldn't bother either.

There's something wrong with the whole class of people - that mostly seems to coincide with the "non-tech" group, though maybe it's more about problem-solvers/not problem-solvers. What's wrong is that they get stuck on the first obstacle and give up. Instead of assuming that there must be a simple solution and searching for it, they assume it's broken and quit.

Also, related, the famous XKCD chart: https://xkcd.com/627/.

People always look at me like I'm some kind of code wizard when they are stuck on an intractable problem and I figure out it by just reading the compiler's message.

To be fair, compiler messages can be needlessly cryptic, but if you copy and paste the error into Google you'll almost always find someone who did the exact same thing and had it answered quickly.

First rule of game design: players don't read things. Not on the screen, and certainly not on a cabinet - it's not the user's fault you put instructions in text format in a place that wasn't even the screen!

Not only of game design. People never read things that they don't expect or want to read. Message boxes are wonderful in this regard. Users trained themselves to dismiss those without ever reading them. Usually Cancel or No will close the message box and destroy nothing. Heck, I frequently even see people getting annoyed at message boxes that have a little □ Don't show this message again checkbox without ever noticing that they could get rid of them forever. Simply because they won't read.

This is bullshit. Somehow, the games made 20 years ago didn't know this rule and were totally fine. We're training people to be stupid. You can't reasonably expect that a complex program will be perfectly usable for the newbie from the get-go, and trying to assume that only makes the problem worse for the future.

I’d like to agree with you that games 20-30 years ago were unashamedly complex and were the better for it, but maybe they were made for a different audience, i.e. the small percentage of people who had invested in a home computer in the first place.

Also: “In fact, users don't read anything.”

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....

My first thought on reading this is that the cabinet decorations are almost always subconsiously ignored as noise. The fact that SOs spotted the directions while the players didn't seems to confirm it as well. I say subconcious because most people wouldn't realize the heuristic they were following until it's pointed out to them and probably wouldn't see their mistake even then.

How you instruct, Why you instruct, Where you instruct, and When you instruct are all equally as important as What you instruct the user to do.

I also think people don't always try to write clear instructions.

Did you fix the controls to be intuitive afterwards?