But the buttons are hidden! Someone else had to show me how to click on a posters name to bring up a menu of four things to do with them. Even putting your mouse over something doesn't work, because you have to actually click. Since there's no way of knowing what will activate when you click on it and what will just sit there laughing you, there's not a lot of incentive to to move your mouse, pixel-by-pixel over every screen, wondering what, if anything, is going to happen.

Apparently, that's just the way the world works these days; people are expected to be born knowing things. When I got my computer, there was no manual for it (and the help system is a joke). When my parents bought a CD player, it didn't come with a manual, so they had to wait until their three year old granddaughter came to visit to show them how to work it (I wasn't any help -- I wouldn't know how to work one, either).

I'm not stupid; I program my VCR, and I roll my eyes at people who's clock is flashing, but I couldn't've programmed it if it hadn't come with a manual. When I had to replace the radio in my car, the new one didn't come with a manual, so I'm stuck with the stations that were programmed into it at the factory. Pushing buttons at random doesn't help a darned thing, though I did figure out how to use the scanup/scandown (and at least the radio has identifiable buttons, which this system often doesn't). I can't even imagine the demented sort of brain that came up with the idea "let's disguise our features so no one knows where to look for them".

It's a lot similar to the situation I was in at FF's RPG site. There was no rule book. I can't play a game with no rule book. "You'll pick it up as you go along" is a non-starter, because I don't know how to go along.