Mudlet:February 2021 Userstudy

Subject

• 25-30 age bracket
• female
• Masters education
• no concept of MUDs or text gaming prior to this
• does not game much at all, except for Pokemon Go on a mobile

Study notes

• welcome screen:
  • understandable overall
  • did not know what a server address or port is in the welcome message
    • -> this is targetted at advanced players, so mention that explicitly. “Already know what to do? …”
  • game ‘Midnight Sun 2’ was chosen due to the name’s appeal
  • upon clicking on the game label, subject thought they were in the game already and started filling in the character info into Mudlet’s login box
    • -> hide login info by default, this again is a convenience feature for advanced players
  • then they hit ‘new profile’ following the logic that ‘profile’ meant their on personal profile… not the game one
  • connected to the game in the end with the Connect button, experience was confusing but relatively OK and did not take too long
• game:
  • actually started typing right away into the command line upon connection
  • character creation was worked out as intended
  • chose white background colour in the game when the game offered, not into dark themes in general
  • text seems to appear all at once, didn’t realize it goes from bottom to top
    • because of this, you need to remember where you were, then read from there until latest, while text keeps coming
    • couldn’t stop text from coming
  • sensitive mac scrolling (fixed since) was a real big issue - increased frustration
    • -> check with subject again that PTBs are fixed
  • ‘map loaded successfully’, ‘searching for prompt’ messages went over the subject’s head
  • (game, not mudlet) started out in ‘vegetable’ and could not work out how to change it.
    • This combined with fast scrolling started to induce annoyance
  • subject thought given the generic mapper’s prompts, that mapping was something they needed to do
    • in reality the prompts came up as a response to the map being opened
    • but the map was auto-opened by the script in this game
    • eventually subject went back to the game story
  • at some point the subject lost track of the input line, scrolling, and progress in the game. To try to get back on track, they spent a while looking everywhere in the Mudlet’s interface, mappers, and settings
  • they eventually looked at https://midnightsun2.org/start.html, found the “look” command and were able to resume playing from there
  • but were still lost as to what to do, since the game did not prompt for anything and they kept facing unknown emotes like “emotes”
  • decided that they have to read the whole start.html page before being able to play or even understand anything. While the page is very helpful, it should not be mandatory
• mapper:
  • scrolled out of the mapper view and had no way to bring it back
    • -> don’t allow to fully scroll map completely out of the view
• game content:
  • periodic ‘reminders’ for players as implemented by some games are essential
  • subject was frustrated in the end by the overall experience. Took about 45min all in all.