Comment by 12_throw_away

Recently I was playing a not-very-good video game that was pumped full of stop-what-you're-doing-and-read-this tutorial pop-ups. What percentage of the audience really needs the entire game to stop so we can read "use the left stick to move, press x to continue"? Even if this is literally first game you have ever played, I can't see how a flurry of messages that are not even actionable until dismissed will do anything but cause anxiety.

Thinking about other forms of media, the film industry just expects that its consumers will have some basic visual media literacy. Like, let's say you're watching your first ever movie, and there's a fade-out to represent a time jump. The movie does not stop with a dismissable pop-up explaining what it represents - the vast, vast majority of the audience already intuitively understands it, and the rest can probably figure it out from context. The only requirement to pull this off is an extremely minimal amount of respect for your audience / users!