[javajosh]

Yeah, I totally agree with this. Too often we forget the wide-eyed innocence with which people approach technology, their half-knowledge which secretly terrifies them. They understand, somehow, the intricate pattern they control, and fear messing it up. (Which is actually a very good place to start learning to be a good sysadmin, but I digress...)

One way to empathize with users is to recognize that, to them, your software is a combination of an IRS form and the game Myst. It's filled with inscrutable, unknowable, questions, each of which, in any combination, produce arbitrary state changes in the rest of your program - and perhaps even the rest of the machine (or the internet). What's incredible to me is that this is not an unreasonable state. Real-world software has been forged in the fire of market forces, and contributed by remarkable individuals. Many of them have known computer science theory, but more than a few did not. Indeed, many computer science PhD has gone to his grave without writing a single useful program for other people to use! This, to me, is quite sad.

But I digress.

[reificator]

Compared to the average adventure game that came before it, Myst was actually fairly straightforward in how all of its pieces interacted. Especially because players had basically no inventory.

King's Quest seems a more fair comparison IMO.