Indie developer Petter Malmehed released his unconventional alternate reality puzzle game After Hours in 2018, and according to Malmehed himself, it did alright, even if it wasn’t a big commercial success. However, in recent months and years, he’s seen its user reviews on Steam gradually decline at the same time as its completion rate is steadily dropping, and he thinks he knows why.
It turns out, an NPC named Sarah, who is able to receive real-life emails from players crucial to advancement of the story, held all the answers.
Malmehed looked in Sarah’s email inbox and found thousands of emails from 2025 alone. Concerningly, he also saw that “about a third of them” didn’t have anything in the main body - everything was crammed into the subject line, which was preventing the in-game system from identifying the keywords necessary to respond.
“That’s something I’ve noticed a lot of young people are doing these days,” he told Polygon. “So I believe the users are in general pretty young.”
“No form of modern communication requires a subject and a body — it’s easy to see how people [who are] not familiar with email aren’t filling out both fields.”
Lol this is just tragic. How would these people write a letter, even just to out in their neighbour’s letterbox regarding a burglary or something? Do people not think that they need to write a brief title?
I mean, I personally was never taught to put a subject while writing a letter, only for emails. I figure if it’s important enough to be put in a letter you should just read the whole thing, and the first couple lines should Include the reason for sending a letter anyways. Aside from that I haven’t written a letter in over a decade, and have only written about 5 emails. Any communication I do in person, over text, or over call, with an emphasis on in person. On top of the notion that I wouldn’t ever write a letter to one of my neighbors, let alone interact with them in general. If I saw one of them getting burgled, I’d call the police and then mind my own business. So to answer your question, “these people” wouldn’t write a letter to their neighbor, most people don’t really do that anymore.
I think most business and official correspondence has a bold subject line, and in the past perhaps they used full caps on type writers (what would I know, I was born in 1990). I like the idea of just putting the subject in the first couple of lines to make the point, sometimes having a dedicated subject line takes up precious space. I usually re-write several times over until it’s cropped enough to fit the subject line :)
when i write letters i dont include any “dear X” or whatever, the recipient knows who it’s for/from because it’s addressed to them and has a sender address
For physical letters I only put a subject on business correspondence, but that’s not something I expect kids to be familiar with
