Some really dumb people in this thread.
Reading the manual was a great experience because the developers put in a truckload of work into making them well-written as well as informative. It was a way to get you learning about the lore of the game on top of getting you excited for the journey ahead, as you flipped the pages while riding the bus back home in giddy anticipation.
If you didn't read the splendid manual for Arcanum, or the FACS for the various Quest for Glories, or the content-rich manuals for Blizzard games like Diablo/Warcraft 1-2... then boy, do I feel sorry for you.
In the end, the problem is two-fold. Developers have lost the ability to write, but it must've happened in part because gamers were unwilling to read.
Exactly. The manual for Baldur's Gate was a great example. I didn't know anything about the Forgotten Realms, and reading the manual made me realize what I was getting into. Not just the creature bestiary, but the factions in the realms, notable characters, itemization, and the flavour/tone it set by describing the areas, shops, and inns available in the game - including the backstory of the characters that ran them.
But from a technical point of view, games still haven't got to the point where they communicate to the player what they can and can't do. And what the developer will allow them to do (like Sawyerism). I might get into writing a long post on this. In the Zx Spectrum days, there was a motorbike racing game - it didn't have enough memory to differentiate between the track and the grass/border. So you just pressed accelerate, and as so as you hit the invisible wall/track edge you didn't even lose any speed. So easy to identify there.
So bear with me here. Fast forward about 30 years and I'm playing X3:Albion prelude. There are contested/warzone sectors in space. When you're in the sector nobody attacks you. When you're out of the sector and send your ships in, every faction in the sector blows your ship to smitherees. Some poor soul asked why on the Egosoft forums, and it started a debate where autists were raging about Hitler and his war of attrition tactics in WW2 vs psychological warfare on the enemy, and how the enemy
wouldn't attack enemy officers. Because of reasons, I think.
So is it a limitation of the engine, a developer decision, or a bug? Why not just release a sentence in the manual stating that factions don't want resources getting through warzones. Still doesn't make sense, but illustrates how the game works.
There are multiple examples in this game (like mining), but you need a manual as a technical frame of reference. It works the other way as well (as a poster above stated with the Syndicate example) in the sense that you need to know what the game can do.
It would also have been nice for Sawyer to explain his thinking.