[yetanotheruser]

What if it’s a function of age, rather than amount of tech we’re exposed to?

For example, I feel younger people are able to focus for longer periods of time on reading long form texts, and an older person may benefit more from finding specific sections from a longer work that they may find interesting or useful that they can read.

As you age there is much more repetition in things than you are consuming. Maybe it’s not bad to be filtering out certain repetitions while hopefully not filtering out things that go against any personal biases.

Furthermore, the books I’m interested in reading now I feel require more time, maybe even a year or two, whereas when I was younger I was really interested in reading massive amounts just for the sake of it.

[pavelbr]

As a young person (high school) I can assure you that this is most probably false.

[watwut]

Young adults read the most books, statistically. It is biggest market. They read less then previous generation used to read at their age, but they still read more then previous generation reads now.

[mulcahey]

In fact, the opposite might be more true - kids growing up these days with worse attention spans than the previous generation

[katastic]

Absolutely. When I was a kid, I'd skip tutorials, I'd skip text in RPGs. I just wanted to get to the ACTION.

As I'm older, I'm actually able to sit down and appreciate slower-form / long-form RPGs with lots of text that adds the real texture to the graphics--which only really form a symbolic / tactical representation of the world, and the flavors, the smells, all come from text. In many ways, the game mechanics of most games are all the same and the flavor is what sets them apart.

Exile 3: Ruined World for example. (And the two remakes Avernum 1 and 2 series.) Are legendary for their novel length text and story.

When I was a kid, I spent my time playing with character options, trying out new diseases (more diseases = less XP per level--neat idea) and skipping texts to explore. But then I'd always get stuck at some point because I missed a key piece of text when I skimmed

(That's actually one "game sin" I hate in many games. If you're going to have important text buried in tons of flavor text, COLOR or EMPHASISE IT. The last thing you want is a player who gets tired one night, skips ONE line that was important, and then hates your game because they're frustrated without information they should have had.)