This has a pretty sound basis in both neuroscience (I understand from people who know more than me) and genre theory.

Really. No for serious. One of the main ways we learn, communicate, and engage in joint work together is by building mental models, especially repeatable, modular, reusable models that we use some background heuristics to apply to the situation at hand in like 90% of the things we do in life.

When you learn a new game with radically different expectations, especially in games when many expectations are assumed and/or unspoken, it is either going to break your brain (‘s mental model) or break the game. Often both.

Because RPGs leave so much unspoken, they’re pretty high learning curve on this. But when you take Tabletop board games into cultures where that type of game or play is relatively unknown, you’ll see it happen too.