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I know some folks see the yellow paint discourse as repeating old discussions. But do you have any idea how much of a repeat it actually is? Here is a video from Egoraptor explaining why players feel terrible about being handheld in less than a minute. Can you guess when this video was released?

But wait, there's more! It's all the same arguments everyone is still having all these years, again explained within one minute, and this was made by a non-gamedev at the time!

So when I see folks say 'If you're not a game dev, stay out of this conversation!' or 'You try and sit behind playtesters and see how they get stuck!' I am flabbergasted. He wasn't a gamedev, and he explained the problem in 1 minute. And he did this... 13 YEARS AGO www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fpi...

And for the arguments of "Well, 20% of players will always get stuck, so we just have to have incredibly ham-fisted and immersion breaking UX in our games.", alright, but if: 1. You do not mind the other 80% are now annoyed as hell. 2. You are crunching to get it done. bsky.app/profile/ryst...

Its bleakly funny how TV discourse is having a moment around Netflix exec's going "what if someone is cooking pasta while watching this show, maybe the characters should announce what they are doing" and people mock it, meanwhile games discourse is often doing a weird defence of the same thing.

hardly the same. you can't get lost in a tv show or a movie. it's not a spatial reasoning thing. you're either paying attention or you're not in games it can be very easy to get stuck even if you *are* paying attention, this is why signposting exists, and why it's mostly done in 3D games

And that for example in the fight scene with the larger spiral staircase, it is visually 'set up' in an earlier frame, much as how videogames 'set up' a mechanic, like we saw with the megaman platforms that drop down. So, I would say the design langauge is very similar, if not the same.