Originally posted by wysewomon:
but I just don't understand how some people play games with the walkthroughs right at their elbows, following along and doing what the WT says to the exclusion of anything else.
There are some reasons for doing this.
Some people play adventure games for the story and if the puzzles take too long to solve, they just want to get past them so they can discover more of the story. For some people, the story is more important than the puzzles.
Some games are just so full of timed sequences that end with a "game over" that they get fed up and want to know where they are going to encounter a timed sequence, and to know exactly what to do when a timed sequence starts so they can get through it with a minimum of saved game reloads.
Some games may not have so many timed sequences, but have many other areas that you have to avoid or you'll get sudden death. Again, it's a matter of not having to do 99993878265 save reloads.
Some games have very inconvenient navigation systems and it's very onerous getting around to look at things and figure out the puzzles (Journey). And some games have a lot of disk swaps and the gamer wants to minimize the number of swaps (Dark Side of the Moon). The walkthrough shows them the shortest route.
Some games have dead ends. If you've played a game where you got almost to the end and then found you couldn't progress because of some item you didn't pick up way back in the beginning, you may not want to replay the game without knowing that there's not going to be some other thing that's going to prevent you from finishing.