Invisible complexity

"Hey mom, wanna play Pico Park?"

The game seemed approachable enough, with its pixel graphics and cute little characters. The perfect game for some relaxing family time.

Or so we thought. Very quickly we realized that WASD is hard.

(Not for me, I'm flying across the map without much thought.)

My mom, on the other hand, couldn't find the keys without looking down at the keyboard. When she finally found them, she'd press too long, walking straight off a cliff. Restart.

Then came jumping onto another player's head.

It's so second-nature to me that I don't think, my fingers just do it. But not to my mom. She'd jump, then forget to move right. Jump and move right, then forget to stop.

The intended movement

What my mom kept doing

As I observed, I realized that she was actually running into legitimate challenges – ones I hadn't even thought about. She didn't know you could move left and right in mid air. Why should she? Platformer physics is different from real-life physics.

Everything had to be broken down into conscious steps: Find W. Press W. Press D. Crap, pressed D too late. With all of these strenuous thoughts, anything that required timing was impossible.

"I'm pretty pathetic, huh." My mom was visibly tired. Piling onto her already-mountainous mental overhead was the fear of letting me down.

An idea popped into my head: "Just press W and D together."" Now she didn't need to worry about keystroke sequences, only timing. Press, release, and there she was, standing on top of my head. We high fived, enjoying our small but needed victory. Our algorithm worked! Yet there was a twinge of dissatisfaction. A cute little shortcut wasn't a substitute for actually learning the fundamentals.

We decided to ignore the puzzles in favor of the basics. We wiggled back and forth on flat ground, jumped up and down, left and right, anything to strengthen the neural connections between her eyes, her brain, and her fingers. Slowly but surely, she learned where the keys were and how long to press them. Each improvement stacked toward the next, and over time, she went from getting stuck on a staircase to confidently nailing gap jumps.

We went back to campaign mode and made impressive progress:

We couldn't finish World 5 because time trials are hard and stressful.

My mom's movement was still shaky, but this time it added to the fun instead of detracting from it. Each level was a dual challenge: solve the puzzle, but also avoid delegating to her more than she can handle.

But the best part of it all was watching my mom learn Pico Park from scratch – slowly abstracting away the complexities until they become invisible, then moving onto greater and greater challenges.

Until she too forgets what it feels like to be a beginner.