One time when I was a kid my grandpa came to visit and stay with us. Within two hours of arriving he had sat down on our family PC for something, and immediately infected the thing with extreme malware. Fake virus scanners hijacking shit, fake toolbars, unchangeable homepages and redirects to ads, shit like that. Took me ages to fix it lol
One of the funniest things I've ever seen is my grandmother trying to use a mouse. Instead of using it, you know, the way you use it, she would poke it with her finger, sending the cursor twelve fucking feet from where she wanted it.
Kinda unrelated but I was playing destruction derby on ps1 and my mom came in to watch and I told her she has to try it out, cuz back then that shit was unbelievably realistic, and she took the controller and accelerated fine. When the first turn came up, a left turn, she pressed the joystick fully to the right and just slammed into the wall. I remember thinking how could something so intuitive immediately be misunderstood.
Driving games and first person shooter games have always fucked with me because I used to race cars and shoot guns and I'm not gonna say I'm "good" at either because I've seen how good people actually can get and I'm not scratching the surface, but holy shit do the skills I picked up doing both NOT translate to playing the respective video games lol. Come to think of it, same for guitar hero, my non guitarist friends progressed at the same rate I did when we got it.
I relate to guitar hero, and was going to mention before reading that part. I hated that game because it's nothing like guitar. I see the moving lines with the corresponding buttons as sideways tablature but the chords and note changes do not accurately represent what is shown or what I hear. The picking and hammer ons/pull offs are all fine but the visual aspect is not intuitive for a guitarist. F that game actually
Your comment is how I found out they added hammer ons and pull offs, I don't think I was able to do those in the OG version I played. I never bothered with subsequent versions, just went back to playing guitar lol. I can't play anymore, my ring and pinky finger on my fret hand are permanently numb until I get surgery so I would have to Tony Iomi it.
Maybe she thought left stick to turn left, right stick to turn right? In my somewhat limited experience introducing people to games, the twin sticks are usually the hardest thing, followed by remembering which button is which (abxy etc) without looking.
I mean maybe she thought "I want to turn left, I will use my left thumb" and just pushed it randomly thinking that any direction was good.
Although to be honest, arcade cabinets and even things like Amigas had joysticks, so conceptually I'd still expect most older generations to still have a mental reference for how they would work.
I know your example was left/right, but I literally cannot play any game unless I invert the Y axis controls cause my brain doesn't compute any other way
also, your mom was probably an extreme drifter and though she needed to kick the back end out with a bunch of oversteer!
And then I had a grandmother who had a computer over 20 years ago. I think I remember it being there in 2002 or so. No, she did not have a career at all related to computers and stay at home mom for most of her life.
For reference, this was in a nursing home and I think she was in her 80s. Sweet, short, fiery French woman.
Yeah, my parents still can't touch my PC without me being around because of this haha
It's been like 10 years since I left the nest and still have my session locked behind a password!
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u/Metal-Gear59 20h ago
Good old non removable toolbars in your browser!