Are Amnesia players adults or teens?

[Jinix]

It has to do with basic deduction skills.

First off - The game tells you that WASD controls the character's movements. Here is the thought process anybody goes through.

Press W - notice that character moves forward. Submitted into short-term memory
Press A - notice that character strafes left. Submitted into short-term memory.
Press S - etc.

Not to mention the cartographic universal of up/forward = North, etc.

The game guides you through every other step. It teaches you how to check your notes and mementos, how to turn the lantern on, everything. And these are some of the simplest controls you can get for this type of game.

Now all you need, assuming you can actually produce short-term memories and eventually turn them into long-term ones, is the ability to manipulate the muscles to press the keys. Admittedly, these are fine motor skills that take time to perfect, but 15-20 minutes is enough to be able to actually do it on a basic level. Like how people with no knowledge of music can physically depress the keys of a piano and after mere minutes learn to play simple melodies. The game makes it easy enough for you, it's not like it's a complex RTS that maps every single key on the keyboard. It's essentially just WASD and the mouse.

You gotta come up with a bigger challenge than operating a 50s radio. It's not even analogous, because those radios often came with a visual representation of what frequency you are currently tuned into. The basic concept, ignoring everything else, is: one knob adjusts frequency and the other volume. Not difficult. In fact, even if the numbers were totally unintelligible and the frequency was adjusting by means of tapping the antenna, you can figure it out with relative ease.

As I said, it's a basic skillset that all mature human beings possessed, with the crucial discrepancy being that the keyboard/mouse is a totally foreign idiom to many. The concepts are the exact same however, just like I can listen to a conversation in Hebrew with visual aids (body language, setting, external stimuli) and come up with rough definitions of basic words. Even if they completely suck at the game, it's not like they are going to be thinking 15 minutes into the game: "Uh, which button was up again?" It's something that's constantly being practiced while playing the game, making it effectively impossible to forget, and it takes a surprisingly short amount of time for the body to develop habits out of muscle memory.

So there.

EDIT: And of course I do not mean "retarded" literally, to all of you who think I am taking potshots at your parents (btw, if your father who received two Masters degrees, cannot figure out the controls of Amnesia after a reasonable amount of time, that is surely the ultimate testament that public education promotes stock, generalized thinking patterns instead of encouraging creative solutions and deductive logic).

I have been using computers daily since the 1970s, I have taught over 10,000 people how to do various things with computers that includes programming on every type of computer that was available from Altair, zx80s Kaypro, IBM, Vic 20, Commodore64, Texas Instruments, Apple II , Umpteen types of RadioShack computers. MACs and an assortment of others including the building of them.
I've taught everything from binary and assortment of early languages including DOS and HTML. I've used computers daily since 1974.... oh, and before that I used typewriters occasionally...

BUT...even now I have to look at the keyboard to type.

My wife and children type like they have gone insane - words appear as fast as light - and this is while they look and talk to someone standing beside them. That blows me away.

Being able to type without looking at the keyboard is something I'll never achieve. In fact I bought a keyboard that has a blue glow on the keys (Saitek) for gaming in the dark.

It's not hard to use wasd but fingers sometimes need to scratch a nose then come back down to the keyboard and have to "refind" the wasd again. Losing moments and resulting in getting killed in the meantime.
This problem is multiplied when you have an assortment of other keys that need to be used instantly in game like weapons, spells, potions assorted actions etc.,.

I play like this - and consider it part of the fun really as I come into the game permanently handicapped and have more of a challenge.
Looking at it like that it's a plus.

What you play and how you do it should be enormous fun regardless of what handicap you start with.

I remember a brain surgeon who came to me to learn how to use a computer (back in the 80s when word processing and spreadsheets was all the buzz amongst professionals) he quit the class within a couple lessons because the key board was too confusing.
The lesson to learn here is that one man's skills are another man's spills.