This thread also demonstrates another difficulty in the issue in that much as we all seem to agree that game texts have a poor history of instructional design, we also have few universal standards to baseline.

Like, we started with Polaris, and maybe half the thread agrees it’s hard. The other half found it usable and beautiful. Similarly Nobilis. Ditto Tribe 8.

Some of the examples are translation issues (the French games) and some are expectation and subculture issues (World of Darkness), and many are just different preferences.

Which means that to make a better text you might have to actually contextualize, research, and test the text as text in addition to game as game.

And few folks seem to have time or focus to do that. It’s hard, considering how low the return on game design most often is already, to invest that much effort into the really unfun part, especially when it doesn’t seem to have a direct impact on sales or popularity.

(Though I’m sure it has one, don’t get me wrong. It just isn’t as obvious as other impacts. For an example see Immortal 1st ed.)