"Gamers" and storytelling

Are "gamers" too stupid to understand a story unless it's shoved down their throat and literaly told to them?

I just read an interview of Tobe Hooper (director of famous movies such as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in a magazine. He was bashing modern american movies for often having a part in the movie where they HAVE to explain everything that's going on with words, to explain it to the audiance. He claims that it's better express things with the visual and sound, and let the audiance understand it that way.
Then he says "unless that audiance plays video games all day, they should be able to understand".

It didn't even take me one second to understand what he meant by that. After talking with many, many, many people on forums (and /v/) about my fav video games (FF8 and SH series), I've come to realize that probably the vast majority of people who have played and finished those games (sometimes several times), have no idea what is going on except for the basic stuff. Oh, and if you start to explain it to them they'll often reject it and say "nah this is just stupid fan theories". That reason is because games like the SH series have a different kind of storytelling, they do not tell everything through words, but rather through visuals, sounds, but also gameplay elements.

So /games/, are gamers really stupid in general and unable to understand a story? is it a generation thing, are people nowadays getting more stupid ? is it really generalizing too much ? is storytelling in video games doomed to having no depth ?