Not only of game design. People never read things that they don't expect or want to read. Message boxes are wonderful in this regard. Users trained themselves to dismiss those without ever reading them. Usually Cancel or No will close the message box and destroy nothing. Heck, I frequently even see people getting annoyed at message boxes that have a little □ Don't show this message again checkbox without ever noticing that they could get rid of them forever. Simply because they won't read.

This is bullshit. Somehow, the games made 20 years ago didn't know this rule and were totally fine. We're training people to be stupid. You can't reasonably expect that a complex program will be perfectly usable for the newbie from the get-go, and trying to assume that only makes the problem worse for the future.

I’d like to agree with you that games 20-30 years ago were unashamedly complex and were the better for it, but maybe they were made for a different audience, i.e. the small percentage of people who had invested in a home computer in the first place.

Also: “In fact, users don't read anything.”

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....