Ahh, I see!

I found "and then a long thing happens and I can't do anything and just have to wait while my character does something totally unlike anything I would have intended or tried" to be a significant deterrent. Effectively, a really long delay during which I could do nothing but wait for things to happen, triggered by my character doing something totally unlike what I intended, acted like "punishment" -- it was an unpleasant experience in response to an action that I could not predict would produce that unpleasant experience.

Even just something as simple as, say, a cursor showing what verb would be applied if I clicked on a thing would probably have saved it for me.

I think the distinction here is one of how important agency is to you. It's important to me that I am making decisions for my avatars in games. I don't like it when a game makes a decision for me, especially if it's not a decision I want, or there's no way for me to guess what the decision will be in advance. So, basically, what you experienced as "Myst rewarded you for doing so...", I experienced sometimes as a reward, and sometimes as a punishment.

So it came with, for me, the largest downside of such confusion, which is "it is flatly and totally impossible for me to decide what my next action will be".

I think you're responding to a criticism other than the one I made. And radically so, given that I am pretty much on the opposite end of the game-playing spectrum from the straw man you're arguing with.

My complaint has nothing to do with the logic of the puzzles. The puzzles aren't even remotely, in any way, a factor in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the interface.

Your mouse pointer is over an object -- say, a box, or a book. If you click on it, will you:
1. Open it.
2. Pick it up.
3. Throw it.

You don't know. You can't tell. There is only one action for each object, but there are many different actions, so when you click on a particular object, you have no idea what instruction you are giving the game.

Imagine that you were to take something like Zork, and replace all the verbs with "click".

> CLICK TROLL
You attack the troll, dealing it a lethal blow. It dissipates into greasy smoke, leaving behind a dagger, a book, and a coin.
> CLICK COIN
You take the coin and stuff it in your pocket.
> CLICK BOOK
You open the book, find a magical spell which appears to summon a hostile demon, and incant the spell. A hostile demon appears.
> CLICK DAGGER
Realizing that you have no control over what your avatar does, you lunge for the dagger, then plunge it into your own chest.

And then someone on the Internet tells you it's your fault for not paying enough attention; you should have known what the dagger would do.

No. The problem is that you have no way of guessing what your interactions will be. If I click on a thing, am I taking it, pushing it, pulling it, or doing something else with it? I have no way of knowing. There's nothing I can look at, or study, or do, that will let me answer the question "what action will my implied avatar attempt to take if I click on this object". Sure, once I know that my avatar is going to try to pick a thing up, or try to turn it, or push it, or whatever, then we have puzzles which are by and large decent puzzles. But that's much later in the gameplay process than my criticism.

My complaint isn't about the process of figuring out how something works once you know what clicking on it does. It's that for each object, there is exactly one verb, and the player can't know what it is in advance. If Myst had been an RPG, the only indication of whether another player were a hostile monster or a friendly ally would be that, when you clicked on them, either you attacked them or you talked to them. But there would be no indication whatsoever, before you attack or talk, of which was going to happen...

I gotta say: I have seen people deny both evolution and climate change, and state that the Bible is why. Now, I happen to think those people aren't much better at understanding the traditions of their religion than they are at understanding science, but people really do say this stuff.

No, that's just not so. Silencing new ideas might be a bad idea. Silencing ideas which have already been adequately explored, and are total nonsense is just an essential component of preserving a usable signal/noise ratio.

Well, sorta, yeah. Because they know that many of the people trying to use their site to affect the world are trying to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with science or the promotion of a scientifically-sustainable worldview.

There's a world of difference between "if there were a serious, credible, alternative people would take it seriously" and "it is up for grabs".

"Up for grabs" means that if any random kid who's never even taken a science class says it's wrong because his dad says so and his dad's super religious and therefore right, that's just as important as if the entirety of modern biology and medicine relies on it. And that's... stupid.

Which is odd, because about 70% of the adults I know and hang out with regularly think the first couple of seasons of the recent MLP reboot were really good TV, me among them. So obviously it wouldn't drive just any adult insane; only some of them.

This may require us to confront the horrifying possibility that personal taste in entertainment might be somehow subjective

I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.

Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.

Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.

Booting an embedded PPC system directly to Zork.

Which is pretty much why I avoid Python -- because since I happen not to have the exact same intuitions as the Python community, everything written in the "Pythonic" way is awkward and backwards to me. And there's no way for me to use the language without having to be a person who has a different set of intuitions.

I can fake it, but it's a lot of work and I find it unpleasant.

Interesting data point: I hated it, and it was actually the reason I didn't try Ruby the first couple of times I heard about it, because everyone was SO enthusiastic about this, and I couldn't extract information from it.

But I actually love Ruby. It's probably my favorite language to work in.

So this is more subtle than just a do/don't like Ruby thing. And I don't know what the deal is. I do note, I'm autistic and sometimes get bogged down on poetry, and I think a lot of that writing is functionally poetry. I am not in general humorless or anything, and I certainly can use metaphorical language, but I need a certain amount of bare literal information to start with.

I'd guess that if someone had said "Ruby is a scripting language in which objects have types, but variables are usually just references to objects and do not have declared types, with an emphasis on flexible syntax", and then I'd read why's guide, I might have liked it better.

I think you are using the word "fun" too narrowly, perhaps. Interesting might be considered a kind of fun.

"Play" is the word we usually use to refer to the things that small humans, and members of every other species that learns, do to learn how to do things. The discovery that play is an effective way to learn should be totally unsurprising.

And willpower can make up for that, some, but it's a limited resource, and when you use it up making yourself pay attention, you have less cognitive capacity available for the actual learning.

So... learn to play, noob.

Milage seems to vary. I have a variety Android hardware, and it still feels sluggish to me. On every Android phone I've yet had, I've occasionally had it do a thing where I am asked to push touchpad buttons, and I push buttons, and nothing happens for a second or two, and then suddenly the last three or four UI events process all at once. It's less common now, but it still happens occasionally on... I'm not sure what the work phone is, I think a Galaxy Nexus or something. (It's not nearly as awful as my older G2 was, though.)

The one part of Blackberry's business that might be attractive to an outside buyer is its secure email hosting. If they can't even get that right with iOS & Android apps, what's left? Truly this is a zombie company with both of its arms falling off. The demise of BB hardware could be blamed in part to 'market forces,' but BB has no one to blame for the failure of its software developers and managers.

This is a well-researched topic with hard data available. And it's pretty unambiguously and consistently the case that the hard data show that working extra hours results, not just in lower productivity per hour, but lower productivity overall. Which is why people who start pushing for extra hours can't seem to catch up -- they're making it worse rather than better.

Your managers are trying to find out just how much gasoline they have to pour on this fire to put it out, and I don't think you can reasonably expect them to get smarter.