Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need by Max Kreminski.
From the post:
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I was first introduced to the idea of problem-solution ordering issues by Richard Lemarchand, one of my game design professors. The idea stuck with me, mostly because it provided a satisfying explanation for a certain confusing pattern of player behavior that I’d witnessed many times in the past.Here’s the pattern. A new player jumps into your game and starts bouncing around your carefully crafted tutorial level. The level funnels them to the key, which they collect, and then on to the corresponding locked door, which they successfully open. Then, somewhere down the road, they encounter a second locked door… and are completely stumped. They’ve solved this problem once before – why are they having such a hard time solving it again?
What we have here is a problem-solution ordering issue. Because the player got the key in the first level before encountering the locked door, they never really formed an understanding of the causal link between “get key” and “open door”. They got the key, and then some other stuff happened, and then they reached the door, and were able to open it; but “acquiring the key” and “opening the door” were stored as two separate, disconnected events in the player’s mind.
If the player had encountered the locked door first, tried to open it, been unable to, and then found the key and used it to open the door, the causal link would be unmistakable. You use the key to open the locked door, because you can’t open the locked door without the key.
This problem becomes a lot more obvious when you don’t call the key a key, or when the door doesn’t look like a locked door. The “key/door” metaphor is widely understood and frequently used in video games, so many players will assume that you use a key to open a locked door even if your own game doesn’t do a great job of teaching them this fact. But if the “key” is really a thermal detonator and the “door” is really a power generator, a lot of players are going to wind up trying to destroy the second generator they encounter by whacking it ineffectually with a sword.
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Max goes on to apply problem-solution ordering to teaching both math and monads.
I don’t recall seeing or writing any topic map materials that started with concrete problems that would be of interest to the average user.
Make no mistake, there were always lots of references to where semantic confusion was problematic but that isn’t the same as starting with problems a user is likely to encounter.
The examples and literature Max points to makes me interested in started with concrete problems topic maps are good at solving and then introducing topic map concepts as necessary.
Suggestions?