Interrupting Tutorials/Messages[]
Games are fast becoming increasingly complex and thus are requiring the player to understand more and more about the mechanisms. In an effort to appeal to these needs, games commonly have incoming messages to inform the player of necessary things. However, when these notifications surprise the player and appear over the gameplay space, it jars the flow of the experience. This is most noticeable when the player is in the middle of another action and a notification dialogue, meant to be helpful, suddenly appears on the screen proving to be just as much a nuisance as a boon, if not more so. Many games do this in the form of dialogues between characters, in game inboxes, and tutorials.
Examples[]
Gauntlet[]
In Gauntlet players battle enemies to advance through the levels. In the middle of doing so the game pauses many times on the first level to tell the player about chests, doors, and other things that not only interrupt gameplay, thus endangering the player, but also do not add any information that is pressingly important to be understood. While attacking a ghost, for instance, the player may pick up food then the game will notify them as to what the food does. A better way of accomplishing this would be to simply have the food heal the player and light up the health numbers on the side of the screen so that the player is clued into what is happening without being distracted from the action and, in this case, face the irony of an info box on a healing item causing them to lose health.
ArcaniA[]
In the start of ArcaniA the player is released into the world and being able to explore the enviroment around. Unfortunately, it feels like it should tell the player about every mechanic in a big text box. These textboxes appear at certain points in the start. So if you pass a point, a big box will appear in front of everything and the game pauses. Here is a picture of a block plus my character frozen mid air.
