Onboarding Fatigue

The resistance developed by experienced players toward any form of onboarding, causing them to skip tutorials reflexively, often missing mechanics the game genuinely needed to explain.

In games, this means

A player who has onboarded into hundreds of games over their lifetime has a conditioned skip-everything reflex. They will dismiss tooltips, mash through dialogue, and ignore contextual hints, then complain that a mechanic was never explained. Designing for onboarding-fatigued players means front-loading only the minimum, making systems self-evident through play, and never using a text prompt when a physical interaction can teach the same lesson.