TIFU by introducing my girlfriend to PC gaming using Portal as her first game.

Some background, my girlfriend has never played videogames in her entire life on PC or console. The most exposure she has to gaming is probably to plants vs zombies or angry birds.

She started playing using the WASD keys and kept forgetting that she could also use the mouse to turn her character's head in the direction she wanted to go. I had to remind her of this quite often.

Then there was the whole idea of using portals, I briefly explained the idea to her and she nodded that it all made sense. At first I thought she understood, because she would shoot one portal near herself and another toward the objective she wanted to go to.

As the game progressed she would have a lot of those moments where you forget if you shot a blue or orange portal and you replace an important one because you didn't keep track of which color was there. And we've all been there, I didn't really think too much of it, I just kinda helped her through those sections with verbal guidance. I told her to have a system of which portal she uses first (blue or orange) and to stick to that for the majority of the situations.

She was doing well, not by most peoples standards, but by her standards she was spending like 30-45 minutes per level, familiarizing herself with the mechanics.

But then when she got like five hours into the game, like level 4 or 5, she kept shooting portals back toward the entrance of the level. Not just once or twice, but like 10 times in a row. I would usually stop and help if she spent more than 5 attempts at a problem part and help, but this "problem part" was so different that I wanted to just watch and observe why she was shooting portals in the direction that she came from.

Although I was frustrated because it was obviously in the wrong direction, more than anything I was curious as to why she kept thinking that shooting an exit portal near the entrance of the level was the right thing to do. When I asked her why she kept doing that, she just replied "I don't know, it's not working in this level like it did in all the others."

I was incredibly confused. When I asked her to clarify, she said "I usually shoot portals where I feel that the next room is and go through them and eventually I find the room with the elevator with the shiny door."

It was at this moment when I asked her to explain to me how the portals worked, she said that "it was basically just putting a hole in the wall so you could go into the other side and see what's in the room next to it."

And to make sure I didn't misunderstand, she meant like literally a gun that makes holes in walls to get to the other side.

After a good laugh, I explained how the portals worked and the look on her face was of pure amazement about how clever of an idea that is, and confusion about how she actually got this far.

**TL;DR:** I didn't do a great job of explaining the idea behind portals to my girlfriend and she got about one third of the way through the game without actually understanding the idea behind a portal gun.

If anything I think this speaks more about my ability to explain new concepts without anchoring to my previous experiences in gaming. As someone who one day hopes to teach medical students, I definitely learned from my fuck up and will be more aware of things I explain.

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