I know some of you play The Sims too. I spend a lot of time on that message board (there I’m theevilwriter) and I’ve always been shocked by the huge number of messages regarding downloads. Most of them can’t get as far as unzipping objects and putting them in their proper subfolders…In the course of 24 hours on that BBS, there is generally 25-100+ messages from people either asking for help with winzip, or asking for non-zip sites (all 12 of them) which I find really strange. Winzip is a simple point and click program, why are so many people having trouble with it? The sims is the third game I’ve had to use winzip for in order to download user-created stuff, and I’ve visited message boards for those other game as well. On the creatures boards I could only find 1 message about win-zip out of several thousand. Is the average Sims player dumber, or am I wrong in thinking it’s a simple program?
WinZip is not simple. The concept of compression alone is beyond many people who only have very vague ideas of what exactly is happening behind a computer screen. Furthermore, they don’t care.
I did tech support, and believe me, a lot of otherwise intelligent people just cannot deal with any instructions for computer programs that have more than one or two steps. They don’t have the background.
Much like video games, computer interfaces have a kind of grammar to them. Use them long enough and you forget about it because it becomes second nature, but it’s there and it isn’t intuitive. It must be learned.
I would walk somebody through unzipping a file, and frustrated, they would ask me why it needed to be “zipped” at all. I said to make the file smaller. This meant nothing to them. It was just more hoops to jump through.
-fh
If you are talking about the BBS at the official Maxis/EA website, then yes, most if not all of the people there are incurably stupid. They can’t spell correctly and they respond to every help question with yet another cheat code. I don’t even read it anymore, the thickness of the ignorance there gives me hives.
I should tell you that I now have a bruise on my chin, since my jaw hit the floor so fast.
Well, my friend, this is when you respond “It just is.” If they continue the point, ask them why they need to play The Sims.
(They shouldn’t be asking WHY, they should be asking HOW)
Hey, I personally think WinZip isn’t hard at all. But people who haven’t used computers for years and years, specifically Windows-based computers, are quickly confused by it. I know because I talked to hundreds of them while I did tech support. Unzipping files was always one of the most annoying parts of any support call. There’s a lot that can go wrong.
If you’re a computer expert, this will be hard for you to visualize. Go download an OS you’ve never used before and try to download an archive and extract the files from it. Take the frustration of not automatically knowing what to do based on prior experience with the OS, and subtract your personal interest in computing from the process, and you’ve got the mindset of the people who amaze you.
-fh
That’s not what I meant, Hazel… I meant that, compared to most other tools that are floating around, Winzip is about as difficult as peeing.
wiping the urine off his shoes
Seriously though, a friend of mine was doing tech support for a while and I never got bored of the stories.
A lot of people just don’t seem to have a capacity for computers, weird stuff.
To me winzip is actually a lot easier than pissing most of the time, seeing how winzip is never erect in the morning and the files don’t suddenly change direction and fly over your shoulder while you’re using it.
— G. Raven
You also have to take into account the TYPE of person playing “the SIMS”. They are USSUALLY not your typical gamer geek 12 to 35 year old nerdy male. They are often your wives,sisters and mothers. The game was probably given to them to show them how addicting video games can be so they will stop making fun of you for spending HOURS killing perfect strangers online. I’m not bitter. All I’m saying here is that a lot of these people are NOT savvy at all with computers.
dead0man
the answer is “no”
there are very, verry many more Sims players than Creatures, so of course you are gonna get more questions. Also, Creatures is more of a sleeper, or underground hit. People that play that, usually have a pretty good understanding of computers before they get into it.
As for myself, however, I have been using WinZip effectively since I was about 10, maybe 11.
???
How do Windows browsers set up decompression? Don’t they install with presets for what to do with a “.zip” file, and wouldn’t it most likely be preset to send them to WinZip? (I know there are other programs, Aladdin Expander and PKZip for instance, but WinZip seems by far the most popular)…
On the Mac, you point everything (.sit, .zip, .hqx, .uu, .tar, .cpt, etc) at Stuffit Expander and it decompresses the file in the background as soon as it is finished downloading.
Don’t even get me started. I have downloadable pdf’s on my web site and nobody uses them because none of our visitors can figure out how to get acrobat installed…
I haven’t been to your site and I can’t speak about your users, but I personally avoid PDF’s whenever possible because I find acrobat bloated and unwieldy. That’s not to say I’m not computer literate, I just have a dislike for that specific application. I would prefer a straight text document or HTML/XML any day.
The problem with using html to handle the docs is that we need to make downloadable forms available and html’s general surliness with anything dealing with strict x,y coordinates makes it impossible to really do it any other way.
The problem is that we generally focus on people who, as a demographic, don’t really give a flop about computers. Installing software is NOT second nature to them.
-
-
- I found some Idle ChitChat on a UT board about people talking of doing a Simms Unreal Tournament mod. Lifting skins and models from the Simms game. I have to admit I did chuckle (I probably play UT a bit too often). - MC
-