Maklak said,

Apart from making the colour of the frames more obvious and sticking character portraits to the left of the text, instead of connecting it with traingles to character potraits, I don’t know how you could improve text in Frayed Knights.

But then, I don’t have a problem reading up to 5kb of text in a game. In something like Morrowind, I’d always stop to read a book.

Anon said,

Lousy writing is one problem for me but another would be if it isn’t connected well with the game world and is only there for atmosphere alone.
Many gamers like the latter, but I don’t have the affection or the time to collect ten volumes of the history of Tamriel, antics of gods one never actually sees in the game or stuff that happened eons ago.

When I read books I want to get hints like where some treasure could be hidden or the description of a ritual that I have to follow to advance in the plot.
What I also like in games are contemporary reports like newspapers and also diaries or letters of NPCs (as in “existing people”) – all of these can contain clues or other valuable information, surrounded by non-important bits. The “game” here is to find the interesting stuff, obviously.

The short(!) texts for special inventory items like with the Bioware RPGs (Neverwinter Nights was great here) were tolerable for the high fun factor (very good writing), especially when the weapons or magical items brought their owners down – so the player gets wary of these items.

But reading lots of books that I know (or assume) don’t contain interesting stuff is no option for me.
The last game I remember reading most books was Ultima 9 – I remember reading books alone for the fact that I enjoyed the page animation, LOL.

Edward Hamilton said,

All of the “rules” in this piece are basically rules for how to drive me crazy and convince me to quickly stop playing a game.

First, I hate it when a game reveals important information through voice actors. If it’s important, it should go into some kind of journal that I can reread at my leisure as a reference, when I’ve figured out which information is most important to me — something I usually don’t know in advance. Voice acting is often bad enough that I turn it off anyway, so a game that relies on it will confuse me totally. Text is for essential information, VO is for added flavor.

Second, revealing words one at a time is ANNOYING AS READING THEM IN ALL CAPS. It’s a way of taking the biggest advantage of text, the fact that I can rip through it at my own pace, and saddling it with the biggest disadvantage of voice acting, the fact that I need to slowly wait for something to finish that’s occurring at a pace I can’t control.

Third, I dislike it when text boxes jump on top of speakers. I want them to occupy their own proper space in a single box for all speakers, which organizes them in a conversation just like a novel would.

Breaking long lines into columns is a solid idea, though. I find narrow columns with lots of lines to be better than wide columns with few lines. Coloring key words isn’t a terrible idea, but it does create a cartoony look for a game that won’t work for something serious.

The most important rule for getting players to read text is to have well-written, evocative text. Planescape: Torment had massive amounts of text that disobeyed all these rules, and yet I still read all of it — because the writing was precisely why I wanted to keep playing the game. In fact, I often got frustrated with the extended battle stuff, because it was interfering with the story I was reading! I agree that Shadowrun Returns was pretty good material too. If you make a game that compares favorably with a novel, then the same people who read doorstop-size fantasy novels will have patience for your game. Don’t underestimate players by dumbing things down too much.