For fun, I recently rebuilt a little text adventure some friends and I had built in the early 2000s. Originally written in QBasic, I translated it line by line in Go, and set it up as a little SSH server.

For posterity, I didn't want to change anything about the actual game itself but knew beforehand that the commands were difficult to figure out organically. To try and help modern players, I added an introductory heading when you start playing informing the player that this was a text adventure game and that "help" would give them a basic list of commands.

Watching people attempt to play it in the logs, it became painfully obvious no one read the heading, at all. Almost no one ever typed "help". They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.

I wonder how different the outcome would be if the idiom used was not help but "instructions", as in, what portion of users did not want to admit they needed assistance?

I'm not refuting the fact that people seldom read, but this seems like an interesting additional vector to explore.

> They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.

Is that like the "players" who send HTTP requests to my mail server?