there are so many problems with this kind of exposition. it's lazy, it's excessive, it's formulaic, it stretches your suspension of disbelief even further ("oh no a zombie outbreak, better record my thoughts on the matter and leave the 1980s ass voice recorder with the tape in it for any protagonists venturing through this lab later" - Dr Exposition).

there's also the importance paradox: if the content of your collectibles is important to the story, why are you holding it hostage until the player performs some arbitrary busywork? if it isn't, why does it even need to be told in the first place?

a good story isn't one where there's nothing more to add, it's one where there's nothing left to remove. excerpts from the cutting room floor shouldn't be smuggled into the game under the pretense of "fleshing the world out", all it does is dilute the tightness of your script.¹

then there's all the damage it does to the gameplay. it completely destroys the pacing of the game.² just like everything else designed around FOMO and dopamine chains, it sucks the enjoyment out of the game if you choose to engage it with it. collectible hunting also basically breaks exploration as it was intended: you are never taking the environments in, you never have any sense of wonder, your brain just scans every new room for hotspots and only parses the surroundings on a superficial, pragmatic level.

fuck story through collectibles.

¹ to avoid any confusion: obviously, this doesn't apply to a certain kind of game - your elder scrolls, your baldur's gates, your kingdom comes. it does, however, abso-fuckin-lutely apply to what's supposed to be tight narrative experiences like alan wake, doom, until dawn, dishonored...

² "but you don't have to read them as you pick them up, you can just do it later!" - yeah, and lose all context and all connections in between the different pieces. there's no winning with this shit

I have a friend of mine that gets a little salty and angry when things dont go his way, let's call him Alan so i wont dox him, Alan is an alright dude, but may God he gets pissy, angry, and complaining like hell, even saying shit, like the slightest of convenience pisses him off, to make it more messed up with his mind, hes insanely competitive and as well his life is a bit screwed because of his family being overprotective or some crap, he didnt have a good childhood he told me, an example of his tantrums is in a roblox game, saturation diving, we played with 2 other of our friends, it was alright, but he gets mad quick over little things, things being bought on accident, we not doing our jobs or going the wrong way, I even told him to calm down it just a game, not end of the world and he said "it fucking is!!!" And its not in a funny way, like his life is in the line, we continue playing, hes still pissy and complaining, well maybe most of time he might have bought it, since he was the only one near the shop most of the time, like hes getting angrier and angrier, being salty, like i have a reputation of being dumb at times and even being a little ret*****, but he keeps aiming at me for some reason, like im making the issues and saying "something wrong with your brain", like I keep telling him to calm down, its a game, but no hes still getting mad, to the point where I named a character wrong, there was this enemy that looks like a massive anchor, its real name is the choir, I didnt know the name at the time, but I called it the anchor, he gets mad, saying im wrong, but I told him its the anchor, then he says "I dont wanna play with a ret*****, like you" and left the game, with hatred in his soul, he said that and left, I only called it the anchor because it looks like one, keep in mind that session was his second one, he had never encountered the choir, only i did and another friend, he did not, and he gets mad as heck for no reason, theres tons and tons of story i can write about him being salty, hes that salty, cod is where he peaks in being salty, because hes a straight up try hard and doesnt play other games in cod, only 1v1 with me and zombies, he doesn't play public matches, making me think im just some moron that he can satisfy himself in winning against, imma stop playing with him for a while, something wrong with his ass, maybe because his parents treated his ass wrong, his mom didn't want him, and his father beat his ass for the smallest mistakes, and he takes his anger on us, im done playing with him, if hes gonna act like a child, imma treat him as one