come make video games, we've got:
- players don't look up
- players don't look down
- players don't look
- players don't read
- players don't listen
- players don't look
- players don't look
- players don't look
- PLAYERS DON'T LOOK
the cool thing about designing video games is that for every single piece of information you try to convey to the player there will be a player who either misses it or misinterprets it
and the thing about this is that players will always discover new ways to misunderstand things, ways you hadn't even considered. you can deal with the idea that they'll miss some information, you can build in redundancies or try to work through a process of teaching and reinforcing and testing so that you can re-expose the player to the critical information they need. but they'll always find the one assumption you made where you thought something could only ever be interpreted one way, and they'll devise some absolutely diabolical misapprehension of what you're trying to convey. every time.
In all sincerity: an important part of my learning process as a level designer over the last few years was letting go of the idea that it's possible to have everyone experience things the way you intended them. You can lock them in a room, point lights at something, have it jump up and down and make sounds, and unless the camera is physically wrenched out of their hands, they might still miss it. Chasing perfection is a road to madness.
This isn't to say that there's no reason to try—god knows I try. But you get diminishing returns for your efforts, and past a point, you have to examine how they negatively impact the experience in other ways.
It's really natural to look at somebody fumbling around in your carefully constructed Experience Zone and tripping over your deliberately arranged guard rails, and think: oh damn, they aren't getting this at all- but you have to remember as a player that's a normal and even maybe fun (?) aspect of the medium! Let players bump around in a room for longer than intended before getting it! Normalize not getting it as a player too! I feel like this was my experience with every formative game I played when I didn't even understand where games came from and I think one of the more enriching bits of playing games is poking around until you learn HOW the designer is going to try and tell you things.
If you've internalized mainstream industry thinking deeply enough then you probably do believe that it is possible to spackle up every last possible gap in player comprehension to have a perfectly frictionless experience. I don't think this is true even for the kinds of experiences the old AAA status quo prefers to put out (linear, narrative and action setpiece driven, maximum production cost + fidelity) but it's especially untrue for things like puzzle and adventure games, where a majority of the player's experience lives in those stretches of Not Knowing Exactly What To Do Next and puttering around, and you're far better off building around that negative space and making it enjoyable/interesting to inhabit than trying to fill it in, because all you'd be left with is a solid house-shaped block of spackle with zero habitable space left inside.

Wondering how much effort went into forcing the player to look at the plane crashing into the underwater tunnel at the start of Bioshock...