Hard to disagree with this

Austin Modine reports on a presentation by Jeffrey Kaplan, former lead designer for World of Warcraft:

Speaking at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kaplan — who's now helming Blizzard's next unannounced MMO — said game makers often suffer from "medium envy", where they try to deliver a compelling story by writing reams of dialog and narrative without keeping in mind it's a video game.

"Basically — and I'm speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back — we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game because nobody wants to read it," Kaplan said, adding that he's as guilty of this fault as anyone else.

"We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game," said Kaplan. "We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorcerse, Tolstoy, or the Beatles, the better off we are."

Kaplan said WoW has attempted to avoid drowning the player in dialog by limiting designers to only 511 characters in their quest descriptions.

Although I don't play WoW, I find the same thing in Guild Wars: as soon as the quest description is long enough that you need to scroll the dialog box to read all of it, the chances of just clicking through go way up. I read a lot, both on- and offline, so if I'm likely to click-without-reading, how much more likely is someone who has a lower tolerance for reading in any medium?