Mudlet:February 2021 Userstudy

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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.