Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots/vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the field of view. He asked of the radar screen, "What's that clock thing in the top?" ("It's a radar screen." -- blank look. "It's a minimap." -- Comprehension!)

I have a MMO Asteroids style game up online. At one point, I hired a high school aged kid to do testing. His first reaction: It doesn't go where I point it! It's impossible to strafe! For the younger kids reading this comment 1) is the point of the mechanic and 2) It's not, if you grok basic physics.

I've noted that the "Asteroids" movement mechanic is generally hugely bastardized and dumbed down for modern audiences in today's games, to the point that it breaks the expectations of anyone who has skill with the mechanic in Asteroids. "Heat Signature," and "SPAZ" are two examples of this.

Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games.

Maybe the interest is limited to pseudo old-school interfaces based on blocky graphics, like Minecraft or Nintendo-ish platformers?

I think that mostly has to do with subculture and what one's peers are interested in. I never had that much interest in platforming mechanics. (Honestly, I'm about as bad as that game journalist who got called out for his clumsiness with the Cuphead tutorial.) To a lot of hardcore "gamers" that marks me as a non-gamer. However, my clumsiness with platform mechanics isn't any different than most other's illiteracy with the Asteroid movement mechanic. It's just that certain mechanics are subscribed to and practiced more than others.

Also, most successful games nowadays come with fairly extensive tutorials, and even if they don't but are still popular, then there are tons of YouTube videos which can be used as reference. In the 80's, you just had instructions printed on the arcade console and a few screens animating basic game mechanics. We figured things out because we had to, or we got advice from friends who figured things out. In 2018, there are so many games, no one really knows what to do with them all, so you skip over everything that doesn't grab you immediately or you go and do what all your friends are doing.

So yeah, they probably would be as quick, but in 2018, only a very few are going to bother.

Watch kids deal with screens now. They will walk up and put a finger on it and if nothing happens immediately lose interest. They simply don’t do any interface that isn’t exactly like a modern smartphone. Even typing on keyboards.

They would regularly go off-site and just brainstorm everything they could think of. It all went into a large binder. When someone needed a new idea or concept, the book was there.