"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.
My mom couldn't find the WASD keys without looking down at the keyboard. When she finally found them, she'd press too long, walking right off a cliff. Restart.
Then came jumping onto another player's head.
It's so natural that I don't think, my fingers just do it. My mom, on the other hand, would jump, then forget to move right. Jump and move right, then forget to stop.
Normal gameplay
My momShe was getting stuck on concepts that I hadn't even considered. One example was game physics. It took her time to realize that you could move left and right in mid-air, and that inertia was not a thing.
Everything had to be broken down into conscious steps: Find W. Press W. Press D. Crap, pressed D too late. This slowed her movements to the point where anything that required precise timing was impossible.
"I'm pretty pathetic, huh." My mom was visibly tired. Piling onto her already-enormous 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 land. There she was, standing on top of my head. Our algorithm worked! We high fived, enjoying our small but needed victory. Yet there was a twinge of dissatisfaction. A cute little shortcut for one specific action wouldn't transfer over to the multitude of challenges ahead.
We decided to take a step aside and ignore the puzzles in favor of learning 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 staircases to confidently nailing gap jumps.
We couldn't finish World 5 because time trials are hard and stressful.
We went back to campaign mode and in the end, we completed 5 worlds (20 levels) in total. More importantly, the game became noticeably easier for my mom. She no longer looked exhausted, nor needed a break every 5-10 minutes. We played for 3 hours straight, which was exponential progress by that metric.
The best part of it all was seeing my mom's process of learning Pico Park from scratch, slowly abstracting away the complexities until they become invisible. Until she, like me, forgets what it feels like to be a beginner.