...oh, and I just realized that the puzzle with the big items isn't one that you get out of the way early, it's one that isn't in the game anymore. Moral: Players won't read even when they're reading an article about how they won't read.

"Don't expect the players to remember" is good advice too. The other time I had to look at the source code (besides the "look under a lot of things" puzzle, which was just laziness on my part) was when I got the VIP pass and said to myself, "I know someone said something about a VIP pass fifty turns ago, now what was it?"

Sarah: The purpose was not to chastise players for being unobservant but to make the exact same observation you're making: If the player expects an action to work some way and it actually does something else, the author should make the difference clear and not expect that the player notices it if the information is shown in places like notifications of implicit actions where the player does not expect to find this kind of information.

(Also, I'm not sure if it came out clear enough in the article: every example I used was about bad design choices, not examples of players playing wrong.)

I was absent for the "Yo Momma" session of ClubFloyd, but I think I would've missed that item too. I'd assume it was just scenery. I remember being stumped for the longest time in "The Isle of the Cult" because I overlooked a stool embedded in the room description.

I'm not sure how you can force players to re-read descriptions, though. If the game detects that the player is floundering, one might try inserting a new paragraph that hints, something like: "Your eye wanders idly around the room, finally landing at the neglected refrigerator." But that's a lot of extra work for the programmer; it's probably better to make the refrigerator stand out more in the first place.

A better take-away, I think, would be "don't automatically mess with someone's possessions without a lot of warning."