Many years ago I went a couple of times to an event organized by some university student group where you could be introduced to and play all kinds of tabletop board games. I thought it would be a good way to have fun and socialize, and perhaps even find interesting tabletop games.
One of the organizers there, however, pretty much ruined the entire thing for me. The reason for it was that it seemed like he just loved the sound of his own voice, and when he started introducing some new board game to a small group of interested players, he would just explain... and explain... and explain... and explain... and explain... endlessly. He would literally take like 15 minutes explaining and explaining some board game (that wasn't actually even all that hugely complicated; it's not like it was Warhammer or some other enormously complex game.) Rather than, you know, actually allowing people to learn by playing.
The problem was, of course, that such a huge info dump is impossible to follow and remember. It's completely useless to explain a complex board game for fifteen minutes because no person in existence can remember all of that at once, especially when they have absolutely no experience with the game itself, no context, and all they hear are words and more words disconnected from any actual hands-on playing experience. Thus, I would just doze off after a minute or two, and listen to the huge stream of meaningless word salad for 10+ minutes, completely bored out of my skull. Those 15 minutes could have been used to actually play the game and learn the concepts in that manner, one by one as they come up during the game. After what felt like an absolute eternity the game would finally be started, and almost nothing of what he explained helped at all to play the game, because nobody can remember all of that. It was literally completely wasted 15 minutes for absolutely no benefit. We would learn from the first 5 minutes of actually playing the game way more than during that 15-minute verbal diarrhea info dump.
Way too many video games, especially nowadays, commit this exact same mistake: Quite often during the very beginning parts of the game, before the player has had any chance of getting any hands-on experience about the game, it will throw textbox tutorial after textbox tutorial at the player, usually interrupting gameplay, and way too often either explaining complete trivialities, or showing an info dump that the player has zero chance of learning because there's too much information at once, completely disconnected from any actual hands-on playing experience (and thus the player has no way of connecting what the tutorial is saying to the actual gameplay, making it harder to remember.)
(When it comes to explaining completely trivial things, which is way too common especially in a certain type of Japanese RPG games, it almost feels like the developers have the mentality of "we went through all this trouble to implement a tutorial system, let's use it to the fullest, dammit!" and start throwing the most trivial things at the player, like how to click on a button or exit from a menu, which would be completely obvious to anybody without it having to be explained.)
Sometimes, however, this kind of needless exposition and explanations can also extend to storytelling itself, which thus can affect not only video games but also movies, TV series and even books.
Movies, especially those that are based on stories originally told in another medium (usually a book or a game), tend to be especially egregious in this regard.
One particularly notorious and aggravating example is the 2021 film adaptation of Dune.
The opening scene of the book doesn't happen until about 20 minutes into the movie. The first 20 minutes are nothing but boring exposition.
This is not how you tell a story! Frank Herbert, when he wrote the book, understood how to tell a story in an interesting manner, in a way that immediately engages the audience. You start with something that grabs your attention, picks your curiosity, excites your imagination.
You don't start with 20 minutes of exposition!
Clearly the scriptwriters of the movie did not understand this at all, and felt the average audience is so stupid that they need 20 minutes of exposition before they can "understand" what's going on. They apparently felt that if they just did what the book did, then the audience wouldn't understand and would be confused. They clearly didn't understand about good writing at all.
And this is, by far, not the only example, just one of the most egregious recent ones.
