Oatmeal Agitante

Interactive fiction experimental principle: The player should never be incentivized to skim text

Examples of established skim-worthy patterns: error messages, sentences that tell you your location or other basic information

There is an unacknowledged skill in playing parser games- efficiently skimming text while holding another problem in your head

Another related problem is the tendency of the player's haphazard traversal of the gamespace to create a long repetitive lexical record

This is one of the reasons I find free exploration somewhat of an anti-pattern in games. It can become deeply tedious.

The other reason is it sacrifices authorial control for no substantial return.

If you implement free exploration, or incentivize skimming, it had better be because you *want* the player to ignore some things,