In WoW (World of Warcraft), players skip all quest descriptions, and mindlessly spam "auto attack button", ignore the environment, lore, NPCs as they never existed. I.e., they enter a brain dead "mode". If you ask someone of them what he saw, he won't be able to remember a thing. Except the "Lvl 60" number.
I noticed that in my game, if I include lot of mobs i.e. 1 pack for every 10 seconds of distance traveled, the same effect happens. Players ignore all lore and are inflicted with amnesia.
I also noticed that if my dungeon starts empty e.g. the first 30 meters completely barren of mobs, the players go Lore heavy mode and spend every inch and cranny to find everything.
Question: How can I make a player switch to Normal Brain mode (craves for lore) after a group of enemies have been killed?
Answer
While the other answers give you good advice how to achieve your stated goal, I'd like you to consider a different angle.
Games can be put on an axis that goes from "experience" to "test of skill". All the old arcade games are almost completely on the "test of skill" side. Understandable, if the player being upset is not as important as that he just put 14 coins in the machine. However, coins are completely irrelevant for gaming at home, while word of mouth or a journalist saying they really enjoyed it (= the experience) could boost your sales. Games always have at least a bit of both though. The issue you describe is a clash of the two.
Your players are in "test of skill" mode, which is a lot like sports. You are "on edge", stuck to the controls, constantly making new decision. Missing the right moment would have bad consequences. If there's some text irrelevant to the current chaos, you just want to get rid of it, so you can focus on the task at hand again.
Now you want them to read the lore, which is more on the "experience" side: Sit back in the chair, scratch that itch you had, take a sip from your drink. That's quite a mood change, and that's not too easy for the brain. To be honest, when I read "every 10 seconds", that sounded incredibly stressful at first.
So my advice would be to make the switch less frequent.
Safe vs. unsafe Locations
For example, look at how a lot of RPGs do it: Display most of the lore in the safe city and then you go out to the wilderness for fighting. You fight through a dungeon without too many interruptions by lore. You defeat the boss and now the dungeon is safe, the player more at ease, so that's good timing to let the defeated boss reveal some more lore. But even then, in a lot of cases the bigger part of the story progression happens when you're back in the city.
Telling your story "on the way" is very entertaining though, don't bin that completely! It's actually really engaging if you go with the writing advice "show, don't tell": Instead of explaining in a text how the man is dead, he was shot by an arrow and from the arrow you see it was goblin, prefer to have your party see him being shot by a goblin when they enter the scene.
That's more work though, you'll have to decide if it's worth it. However, if it's not worth it, it's probably still better to have the player pick up a rune stone and the old wise man back in the city will decipher it later, instead of interrupting the fighting flow. This rune is then something they fought for, so they'll probably want to read it - just not right now.
Lowering the amount of switches between test of skill and experience will also make it less work for the players who only play for the technical part and just don't care about the story. In the end, it's not like these people will pay less for your game because they aren't using it 100%.
I'd advise you to have a look at Bartle's taxonomy of player types. For example, lore would generally not be as important to the "Killer" type ("They thrive on competition with other players"), but I'd expect more than a fair share of those in an MMORPG.
User Mooing Duck mentioned a game where story was narrated while you play the game. This made me realize that my answer could be interpreted more extreme than it was intended. So, just to be clear: "Experience" and "Test of Skill" are not an either-or thing - it's an axis and every moment in your game will be somewhere in between the two. The situations discussed previously were more towards either side of the axis, but that is not an issue. The issue was big change of where you are on the axis, done often and abrupt.
What Mooing Duck mentioned is more in the center. Being closer to the center allows you to make the switches smaller. Maybe you can even get rid of them altogether, which makes for a really coherent experience (the general meaning of the word "experience" this time).
However, you're working on an MMORPG. The people who are only interested in the sports part - taking down a boss with a team, repeatedly, because they want to get better at it - can be expected to make up a considerable part of your player base. If your narration is only decent, but not great, they might easily prefer no narration at all.
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