Game Play Reflection #6

Having given up on America's Army, I have returned to Toon Talk. But this, too, proved to be frustrating. My task was to create the complete alphabet by repeatedly add 1 to a letter and appending that letter to the already existing string of letters.



But I couldn't remember how to train the robot, and there is no help. In desperation I went to the internet. Supposedly I could press F1 while holding an item (robot?) and get help, but that didn't work: the computer just made some sound indicating I had done something invalid. F10 shows a function key table, but it turned out to be useless as well. Finally I discovered I had to drop a box ON the robot (but NOT on his "thought bubble") to get it to run. But then it would do one iteration only. Finally, I went back to Marty (the Martian) and he said to use Dusty (the vacuum) to "suck up only the stuff that will change in the 2nd and 3rd holes." So I did so, and it worked. But it was painfully slow because I forgot the technique whereby I could skip the animation and go straight to the result.



What I find so annoying is that I could have saved a lot of time -- well over an hour -- if I could have asked someone a question -- not on the programming but on the usage of the robot. It was extremely frustrating! And sometimes you do the right thing accidentally, and you aren't sure what you've done so you can't do it again. What kind of learning is that?