What makes briefings / journals work?

AJ · 2005-06-16T21:05:16

Why do players accept briefings, after action reports, and mission / quest logs? You might think this is a silly question, but have you ever noticed that briefings and journals provide a huge amount of bang for the buck? Expository text relates to you events that you can't see or expect to see, and gives context for what you do see. This seems to me an extraordinarily cheap way of adding content to a game. But why do players accept it, when the drive is toward more realization of all aspects of the virtual fantasy that a game is? Is it because we implicitly accept an accounting of events, without expecting them to be fully realized, simply because it relates to limits we live and accept in real life?