Wild Spoiler appeared!... Surprise Factor fainted!

[Hoeloe]

I know exactly what you mean, though I strongly suspect that some of the hoaxes we fell for as children were simply because... we were children. I can look at a rumour now and tell you if I think it's real or not, without knowing any information on it prior to that, because I have a better understanding of how systems work, simply from growing up.

Having said that, I do, to some extent, agree about spoilers being too easy to come across. For example, I was half way through watching "Game of Thrones" a while ago, and my brother went onto Youtube to show me some of the soundtracks. I'll spoiler the rest of this just in case any of you don't want it spoiled.

Spoiler

He put "Eddard Stark" into the search bar and the first search suggestion was "Eddard Stark death".

I was just thinking: "Great. Now I know what happens. That was fun."

It was still a good watch, but would have been better if I didn't know what happened. Although, having said that, as games get larger, searching for hours on end to find every last detail becomes harder and harder. In the first few Pokemon games, it was fairly simple, since it was always obvious where you could walk, but that's not the case for more recent games. Take Zelda, for example. If you compare the size of Ocarina of Time to the size of Twilight Princess, Ocarinas main field is only just bigger than the first small portion of Twilights. It was hard enough finding everything in OoT, let alone with a much larger area to search. Having said that, TP did have in-game hints to make this easier, and a lot of the field was very obviously completely empty.

I like to try, if possible, to play through games without a walkthrough, because I don't like spoilers, but if I'm going to be wandering around searching for things, I tend to crack them out when I get stuck.