I get bored with art really really quickly. I basically have no patience for it at all - it has to capture my interest within the first few minutes or I just move on to something else

for example when I’m reading some fiction I often quickly skim through it at first to see if my eyes catch something interesting, and if I’m playing a game with scrolling dialog boxes I’ll often just stop playing if there are too many dialog boxes in a row lol

and often if a game expects a lot of up-front effort from me (for example, a big AAA game with lots of cutscenes and tutorials at the start) I’ll put off playing it pretty much indefinitely

and I used to think that this was a problem, like my attention span was being shortened by spending my entire life on the computer (which is kinda accurate, lol. though of course it’s more nuanced than that). like maybe I need to stop and appreciate things more or learn to have more patience. or I would have FOMO about “what if it gets really good just after I stopped?”

but thinking about it now, I think it’s just that there are so few types of art that I end up enjoying, so the expected utility of me putting effort into something that I don’t immediately enjoy is very low. in fact the statistical distribution of my enjoyment of art, given that I’m not immediately hooked by it, probably looks like a long-tailed bell curve with the center firmly on the negative side of the X axis - so the mean of that bell curve is definitely negative lol

so yeah I’ve decided that there’s nothing wrong with me playing a game, seeing that it has a lot of scrolling dialog boxes, and immediately uninstalling it lol. or me saying “I’ve been meaning to play this demanding AAA game for like 2 months. that’s never going to happen so I’m just uninstalling it” or even just, skimming a piece of fiction for 3 seconds and deciding not to read it

also, of all the art that I love, I don’t think a single bit of it has the property {I felt bored engaging with it at first and I had to tough it out before I enjoyed it}. they all hooked me right away. that might be sampling bias but it’s also reassuring

huge shoutout to Vampire Therapist for being the only Scrolling Dialog Boxes game that I’ve enjoyed because of the text in the scrolling dialog boxes. that was a hell of an experience for me

genuinely I think that if a game has a lot of talking it either needs to use the Disco Elysium conversation UI or it needs to rethink how much talking it has

Dialog Boxes™ are nice for Zelda-like games where characters will generally say like 1-2 short things and those things are simple hints or little bits of flavor. but as soon as a character starts monologing they are a terrible UI choice (IMO) because:

• you’re forced to read at the pace that the text is appearing
• dialog text is very ephemeral and there’s no way to reread it. so if you forget to pay attention, accidentally skip past a single box worth of text, or misinterpret what someone is saying, you can sometimes get confused about what’s going on for the rest of the game

but Disco Elysium:

• gives the text tons of vertical room so you can see a lot of it at once
• appears immediately (no gradually appearing), so you can read at your own pace
• lets you scroll up as far as you want, to reread anything that you missed or didn’t process correctly

it’s amazing. it solves every complaint that I have about dialog boxes, while still providing a format for characters to communicate with text on the screen

@kasdeya do you have any thoughts about how this applies to visual novels? they tend to have history logs so you can re-read (and even replay any audio) earlier dialogue boxes, but they're also *heavy* users of traditional dialogue boxes to the point that the genre is practically defined by them 😶 which makes me think maybe they've evolved some adaptations or novel approaches to ease some of the problems with dialogue boxes

(seems like there might be overlap with Disco: Elysium?)

@kasdeya That at least proves that there's plenty of art and games out there that does capture your attention.

And since there's more art and games out there than any of us will get to in a lifetime the fact that you might miss something that got good after you stuck with it isn't such a big deal.

@liese so I haven’t played too many VNs at all but I’ve played a decent bit of Vampire Therapist! often their history features tend to confuse lol and if I miss something what I end up doing is reloading a save so that I can read it again. they definitely seem to have history features though but I just don’t know how to use them, and I’m glad that they have them!

I also played a VN that was set on a Discord server, so you could scroll up to read the conversations just like you could on Discord and that was really really nice IMO. and I think that has a lot of overlap with how Disco Elysium does it as well

@CIMB4 hmm I have a bad memory so I feel like I do repeat myself on Fedi a lot, although if I’ve posted this before it definitely wasn’t in the past week or I would remember it