What’s the sweet spot between ARPGs and visual novels? Or: how do you feel about games that require a ton of reading?

I find that there’s a certain sweet spot that some games — visual novels or not — are able to hit for me, where there’s just the right amount of reading. I always want my games to have some degree of interactivity: I don’t want a videogame to be a completely passive experience where I spend most of my time reading text on a screen. I feel like games are a completely different medium than books: if I decide to pick up a book, my brain enters “reading mode” and I’ll fully immerse myself into that. But if I have a controller in my hand and I’m looking at a screen, I want to do something other than just read; otherwise, I quickly become bored and start drifting away.

Which is funny, because my favorite gaming genre overall is RPGs, which have historically had a ton of text for you to read. But even so, there are factors that re-shape this experience away from a purely literary endeavor and towards an interactive activity. Reading dialogue is considerably more dynamic and movie-like when your characters are moving around on the screen, emoting, and interacting with the environment as opposed to static screens long descriptions, narration, or exposition. Voice acting and even character portraits with different expressions and animated mouths turn the experience more into a short bit of animated dialogue — a temporary break from the action, preferably not overwhelming enough to dominate your attention and frame your experience.

There have been many story-heavy games I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, such as Triangle Strategy. Browsing through gaming communities on the internet, I’ve seen quite a few people turned away from how much story and lore there is in that game — they become impatient, since the game takes “too long” delivering story before getting to the action. It was never a problem for me, personally: I was immersed in that story enough that I could sit through the cinematics and read the text while craving more, never growing bored.

On the other side of the equation, I recently tried Citizen Sleeper after seeing some praise for it in my gaming circles, and it became quickly evident that the game wasn’t for me — in fact, that experience was what motivated me to write this article in the first place. The amount of reading required by that game exceeded some invisible parameter on my mind where it was asking too much of me. I simply didn’t care enough about that world yet to invest so much time reading laborious descriptions. I wanted to play a game first. Had it been a novel, my expectations would have likely been different.

How about you? Where do you sit on the spectrum between reader and gamer? How much reading is too much for you? Do you get bored and crave some action, or do you want the words on the screen to be injected into your veins, in an almost limitless fashion?