Brain Grease

It's study time! It looks like pronouns help people conserve brain power. A pronoun, as you may remember, takes the place of a proper noun: he, she and it instead of Bob, Betty and Marilyn Manson. When you encounter a proper name, your brain loads up all the info you need to remember what the person looks like, their history, etc. A pronoun will let the brain recognize who it is you're talking about, but won't load up excess info.

This is kind of cool, in that one of the main stumbling blocks we encounter in games is how to communicate with the player in an efficient and streamlined way. In knowing that proper names cause a bit of "brain lag" when called, we can account for that and write around it. An example would be that the dialog only deals with a single person or a named group (he, or they) instead of two or more distinct individuals ("Steve" and "Mike" and "Jeff").

The faster people can understand what you're saying the less they will totally ignore it and pay for it later.