We disagree - not on whether this kind of content is good, but how we choose to respond to it, and not just how we respond internally, but how we respond in the public sphere, the aspect of our response that makes everyone who writes anything in a public place a miniature critic.
I salute your public spirit and long-term vision
and improving the medium is certainly a good reason to play games and critically explore everything they have to offer. At some point though, one should play games for the experience itself, as an audience member and not a critic. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing? "I caught 10000 fish and was bored the whole time." #informative, but also #sad. Don't be #sad your whole life.
If people didn't communicate that something is displeasuarable then developers could make anything and claim ignorance, we're back at the old debate of "hate or constructive criticism?".
There's nothing wrong and everything right about giving feedback. But again, as consumers and not paid critics, it is perfectly OK for us to post a glib Steam review that says something like, "There was too much lore, and what little I read was very dry so I skipped the rest. The NPCs were boring so I avoided talking to them whenever I could. There was a quest to murder a kitten but my character didn't want to do that so I bailed and went back to hunting the dragon."
So, Zombra, what's your position on games in which arbitrarily talking to people and listening to them drone on and on for no apparent reason will give you experience, permanent stat improvements, unique items, new followers, extra side areas, more ending options and access to crucial parts of the story of the game?
The same as I described above. I'll try to play a game in a way that is fun, and will deliberately skip stuff if it doesn't look interesting and/or I don't want my character(s) to behave that way. Unless the game is punishingly difficult, those extra stat points aren't going to make or break my ability to finish the story in a perfectly satisfactory way. As for maps and NPCs, I've already explained that I am perfectly OK missing out on content if the game is designed to be played that way - and if it gives you options
1. Talk to Joe for hours on end
2. Thank Joe and be on your way
then it
is designed to be played that way.
Note again that I don't advocate trying to skip a game entirely - in what world is that fun? If I'm not going to participate in
anything then I shouldn't be playing in the first place. But neither am I obligated to participate in
everything, unless the game is constructed to force me to.
Did I miss out on getting a sweet sword or talking to a wonderful NPC? I can absolutely live with that as long as it's not required (and if the Sword of Boss Killing
is mandatory for completion, then there won't be an option to skip the quest to get it). It's the price I pay for not having to dig through a thousand piles of garbage and talk to each and every
boring NPC. And if every character in a particular game is a delight to interact with, then I'll naturally want to talk to them all anyway and won't skip anything. It's a self-correcting system.
The same is not true of all RPGs, though. If I play Planescape: Torment with the goal of figuring out who the Nameless One is and what his deal is - which, y'know, is a pretty reasonable way to be playing the game, since that's pretty much the default goal of the game and all - there's no better way to do this than to systematically talk to everyone until they have nothing more to say. I don't feel that the game offers meaningful ways to exercise choice, because there's no meaningful way to determine which parts of the game are important (in terms of strategy, or even in character) and which are not. I don't think that people are completionists simply by nature; maybe some are, but I think that (some) games also teach them to play that way, and correspondingly the problem can be alleviated by making better games with more meaningful forms of interaction.
RPGs - particularly older ones - have definitely conditioned players to scrape the bottom of every barrel, leave no dialogue option unclicked and no trash can unsearched. In more recent games this is not always the case though. RPGs are getting big enough, broad enough, deep enough that seeing everything just isn't necessary any more. In fact many of them are being deliberately designed to decondition these impulses by excluding content based on player decisions. Wasteland 2 changes whole areas and permanently destroys factions. Witcher 2 and 3 cut off access to entire maps. Age of Decadence goes whole hog with everything - almost every dialogue decision excludes others and many choices have catastrophic consequences.
For some people, this means "Well then I guess I have to play through the game 12 times." To me this is the wrong lesson to take away. I embrace the consequences of decisions big and small, even if they aren't hard-coded, signposted HIGHPOOL OR AG CENTER choices. "No, I don't have time for your side quest, stranger" can be a fun, meaningful decision too.