Raph pointed out this article regarding how hard it is for non-gamers to play games. I’d recommend any developer to read it. It rings true to me – for the life of me, I can’t play Halo. An FPS without mouselook eludes me.

One thing that gamers and developers often forget is that we’re trained by each of the game’s we’ve played previously. 3D Wolfenstein trained the first shooter players. Doom trained them to think about altitude. Duke 3D trained them to jump. Quake trained them to mouselook. Quake II trained them to go for the flag. If you’re playing Prey and Portal now, you’ve gotten more than a decade of training on how to play a first person shooter. If they’re your first game, though, you’re learning how to do ALL OF THAT on top of also trying to conquer the bizarro world physics unique to these games.

If you think about it that way, maybe it’s no wonder that Doom was the best-selling PC game on that list.

 It also suggests that the industry desperately needs the Serious Sams to provide entrance ramps into their genres.

Original comments thread is here.