[...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors “just enjoy the game;” instead they must “stop every 20 seconds to write something.” ...]
Is this really the case?
I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through more than once. So there's plenty of chance to enjoy the game without "dissection", then document the success on the next take.
The way the article put it makes it look like it's a kind of OCD behavior. Which sounds unfair.
I would argue this the most likely case - I do similar with movies. It's usually not until the 2nd or even 3rd time through a movie I'll really pay attention and 'understand' the plot, I spend a lot of time focused on the background and technical aspects, trying to pick up on Easter eggs for instance, or marvelling at how well something was shot.
You can ask me how I liked the movie, but it's highly unlikely I'll have any idea what happened or even the characters' names, but you bet I'll be remembering a certain shot, a piece of music, maybe the way a prop worked. Am I enjoying the movie wrong? Or just enjoying it in my own way?
(Just to throw out an anecdote, my high school physics teacher had us watch the 1998 movie Contact over a couple classes. That scene near the beginning after the father collapses, where our main character runs upstairs to the bathroom for medicine, I don't know what it was about that shit but it stuck with me for a long time. It was about 5 years later I finally sat down and watched the movie, twice back to back actually, that I realized what was going on and couple appreciate the film even further)
My jaw hit my lap in the theater when I saw that shot. To this day, the DVD for Contact is my favorite with the amount of BTS included. Actually, it was the first DVD I ever purchased just hoping there would be something interesting.
That's the one. It's an impossible looking shot that even if you know how to do VFX is hard to figure out. It's actually done with a combination of some pretty simple techniques, but like any good bit of magic, it only seems obvious after you've been told the trick.
PangeaPanga (a very good Mario player) made this Super Mario World hack named "Item Abuse 3" in 2015. The hack isn't human viable, it just contains so many frame perfect tricks that must be performed over and over or you die. Designing games, even very hard games is probably something the author can understand.
But this isn't about Panga's achievement, it's a TAS, a Tool Assisted Speedrun of Panga's hack. For Item Abuse 3 to make any sense Panga had to release a TAS of it anyway, as "Look this Mario hack is impossible" is not at all interesting, so the TAS is the only way to show that it's a complete technically beatable game that is also too hard to be possible.
But the TAS video I've linked above isn't Panga's proof of concept TAS, it's an independent effort. A whole group of people co-operatively came up with a way to beat this impossible SMW hack faster than Panga, spending hours on one trick, slowly making their way through the whole hack to shave off less than one minute.
Still that ought to be enough right? Nope. Here's XHF01X's even faster TAS of the same hack which entirely skips some of the already impossible stuff by doing even more impossible things.
My internal monologue when I do anything even for the first time is always as if I am “writing a guide”. Taking something apart, cooking, playing a game, etc. It doesn’t prevent me from enjoying things and I don’t think actually writing it down would be that different
I’ve thought about how I would create a game walkthrough and taking short notes or audio/video recording while thinking out loud and then expanding it at the end of the session wouldn’t be too difficult or intrusive.
Yeah I think it's a bit unfair too. Taking things apart to learn how they work is fun, it's part of the hacker mindset. I view FAQ and walkthrough creation the same way.
Teaching is also the best way to learn or retain knowledge, and the process helps you get to know and appreciate a game you already enjoy.
I've never done that but I've played many games where I spent more time outside the game thinking and plotting and planning than I do actually playing the game. I mean, there's a reason people sometimes tease Path of Exile by calling it "Path of Excel" because of all the interactions you can reason out.
It also says "erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best" though. That's more than just interruption. The difference here is probably one of degree more than anything, you can take anything too far.
Speaking as someone with several Steam guides and at least one on Gamefaqs, this is silly. Yes, sometimes I had to take notes manually, but for some other games, I made the guides I did by reading the game's data files.
It's far easier to make item tables when you can read the data file saying it's a 2% drop or what have you.
In a lot of cases, people play the game through first before doing follow-up playthroughs dissecting it.
And dissecting (or tangentially related, speedrunning) the game is its own fun.
I felt it when I was playing Diablo 3 a few years ago; the 'core' game is a four chapter story (5th added with DLC) where you go through it with your character. But after that you can replay it at higher difficulties - again, nothing new there. But there are a dozen difficulty levels after 'normal', so you can keep going. And the goals shift. You no longer play to get through the game's story, you start to play to find better gear, gather materials, cross your fingers and hope to find a rare enemy that gives you access to a secret area. Eventually, the levels became a blur, the story something you just skip over because the in-game writing / voice acting is pretty poor (cutscenes are on point though). Later on they added Adventure Mode, allowing you to skip through the game world out of order and pursue different goals (e.g. "kill this enemy in this area") across the maps to work towards a reward, and Rifts, (semi)randomly generated dungeons that you are challenged to run as fast and frequently as possible. Finally there's Greater Rifts, challenge modes where the global goal for all players is to get to the highest, most difficult level. They further extended the lifetime and replayability of the game by adding Seasons, where you create a new character to get through the game for unique / one-off rewards.
I'm not sure where I'm going with that but long story short, there are many ways to enjoy a game that are not limited to the game itself as it's meant to be played.
Disclaimer: I run a fan website for a long-running game franchise where some of our members have gone really deep into the game(s), destructuring it, learning to and writing code to read and edit save files, going through the internet archive and contacting people to try and find and salvage old, defunct instalments and side projects of said series (like online modes, mobile games on feature phones), etcetera. Others (re)translate the games, write down novelized versions of games and movies, create art, discuss theories, make predictions about future instalments, etcetera.
I wouldn't have met my girlfriend if I had 'just' played a game.
As a kid I enjoyed games so much that I felt the need to understand and create them. That’s how I started doing this. The craving to pick every detail apart was incredibly gratifying to satiate and actually made it so I got so much more out of the games. It gave me insight into all aspects of creating them, which was more or less my passion and obsession for a very long time.
As a kid I loved Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System so much I tracked all the stats of the monsters, characters, mapped every maze, etc. I basically wrote an in-depth GameFAQ on pen and paper. I did it because I loved the game. I also tried various things (like trying to kill the Succubus who is supposed to kill you the first time — you could). I’ve also played the game through countless times (the most recent time being last year when Ages came out). I didn’t not enjoy the game. I enjoyed it far more than most people and in deeper ways.
I think there is an idea that if you look too hard at any art form (paint, film, comics, music...) you kill the magic. I’m not sure who believes that idea. The more I learn about any art form and the greater my skill at analyzing it, the more enjoyment I get from it.
Yeah I always assumed the people that write these have played the game a bunch of times. There will always be superfans, and its kind of cool they have an creative outlet for their passion that helps others.
I always look on how the game do the math, once I know how it computes probability I always lose interest on it. Discovering that through game play is entertaining for me.
I used to LOVE reading GameFAQs walkthroughs for RPGs as a kid. The fact it was just a big text document made it super easy to hide in my "computer typing" classes too.
I'm kind of sad that the whole scene has largely slowed down, at least for modern games... Now you can just find video guides on any subsection of a game you're playing; or follow an IGN guide. I have huge respect for authors of the oldschool guides though.
Next, we're looking for a staff. Felen Maryon's staff. It's an ebony staff, too. Oooh. However, Felen is a powerful wizard and will most likely kill you in one wave of his hand. If you want the job, take it. If not, pass.
Felen Maryon is in Tel Branora, to the south, and he's one of Mistress Therana's personal retainers. If you know little about the Telvanni, let me inform you that Therana is one of the six head honchos, and this personal retainer will be a damn sight powerful. But hey, it's your skin :)
Take the boat to Tel Branora, and head towards the tower off to your left. Follow the paths up as far as you can, then enter the Upper Tower. More info about telvanni - the most powerful people in each tower always live at the very top. And you were given the levitation potions because you'll need them. Telvanni aren't real fond of stairs.
Follow the tunnel opposite the doorway up, then take either door to Therana's Chamber. Use one of the potions to ascend the chute, and you'll find Felen in one of the end rooms. Note the shiny staff behind him.
SAVE, importantly. You'll screw this up a few times before you get it right, I know I did. Firstly, if you're REALLY good you can get the staff without even using magic, simply sneak around behind him until the hand appears, and seize the moment.
But if you're like me, you're not that good :( So have your custom Chameleon spell handy. The idea is to get both the sneak hand and chameleon working in your favour, and the easiest way to do this is to get BEHIND the bookcase it rests against. You'll always have the sneak hand, even if he faces the bookcase.
Cast your chameleon, and swipe the staff without a hitch. Hike back to Sadrith Mora, and proudly show it over to Big Helende. You good little thief, you."
I think mybe part of why it doesn't work so much for modern games is that modern games are constantly being patched and updated. You could write a big detailed guide and then the next day, the devs push an update which changes everything.
This makes modern games less "real", in a pseudo-physics sense: experiments that you perform in them do not replicate over time, due to bugfix patches etc. Sort of like if, after physicists announced the results of the double-slit experiment, God force-installed a "fix quantum mechanics glitches" patch to make it no longer work.
Definitely. Still though, many modern games' players would be well served by the FAQs of old instead of ad-laden, poorly researched wikis. And even for those games frequently updated, eventually they do tend to crystallize into a final version after 3-5 years. It's only games like Dota 2 which are constantly getting balance* patches which are a constant sync battle of development and documentation.
* more like humans are incapable of balancing a game of Dota 2's complexity. The cynic in me thinks they don't want to balance it, that that's part of their monetization strategy. Long term I think a balanced game is more fun for everyone, though.
One way to balance a game like Dota 2 would be a continuous rebalancing. Parametrize each hero's stats by a "power-parameter". This doesn't have to crank all the stats up equally. One hero could benefit in one way by more power, while another hero benefits in a different way. Then automatically adjust the power-parameter based on win-rates in different skill segments and how often a hero is chosen. The targets should not necessarily be equal, you may want say beginner friendly heroes that lose steam at the upper level. In the end, the goal should be a fun meta.
Like if you were to balance rock-paper-scissors, and you want a meta where rock is played the majority of the time, you might want to give rock an adjustable chance of beating paper.
It's slowed down, definitely, but if you tweak what you're looking for you'll still find it, just spread out more.
Being older, I don't have as much time as I used to to play games, so I'll generally look at the various trophy guides for how to go through games that I'll likely only be able to play through once, and get the most out of them.
It reminds me a lot of what I used to see on GameFAQs back in the 90s/00s.
I know exactly what you mean, sometimes I could get a hold of a guidebook for a game that I didn't even have the system for; I just enjoyed reading about the world and the systems at play inside of it. Hell, I've never even played NetHack, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Guidebook. It's this weird combination of technical documentation and fantasy world-building that I for some reason find fascinating.
Nothing beats a high quality FAQ with ctrl+f searching shortcuts. Loads instantly, can be downloaded offline, etc. Now every game has its own wikia instead and you have to wade through garbage to find the info you are looking for.
In high school I had to print off pages because we could only use the Internet late at night (dial-up), and definitely couldn't have the computer up and running while we were also playing a game. Pick one.
In college my Freshman computer was extremely under-powered, so it was often easier to print off a few pages of what I needed at the computer lab, and then bring them back to my dorm.
I think I still have FF7 materia print-offs in a box somewhere. :)
The ASCII art that these folks did to set up their chapter headings was beautiful. I remember seeing them making huge block lettering, scenery, and even characters drawn in ASCII art just to give an intro to like a GameBoy game walkthrough. The love and effort poured into these showed
In the mid 2000s I had a job building html marketing emails (legal "spam" basically). The main targets were enterprise tech managers. I quickly found out that we could double the click rate on the emails by including a plain text version (Lotus Notes email client was still a thing and many tech people had it set to read only the plain text mime part of emails).
Clients were scepticall at first because they wanted to make sure that the user was seeing all the visual branding in the html+images. To convince them, I started using gamefaq style ASCII typography tricks to make a visual representation of the layout. It worked great.
Some of both, look into Figlet and you’ll probably see a lot of fonts you recognize from guides, there are tools to turn images into text... but there are also specialized text editors designed for Drawing Stuff, as well.
This is a weird piece. Writing generally pays poorly for most people and JK Rowling's first check was like $2000. Children's authors didn't get rich when she was writing the initial drafts of Harry Potter. It was her series that changed that fact and made it easier for other children's authors.
Anyway, a lot of people do a thing to do the thing. Money isn't everything.
It's weird this piece seems to be agog at the idea that motives other than money even exist.
You also can't compare the effort in writing a novel, which involves a huge amount of time planning the story and narrative structure, researching, editing dialogue, multiple re-writes and more, with writing a walkthorough which just involves describing what you see as you play the game.
The difficult bit of writing isn't the physical act of typing, it's all the time spent working out what to write. There's orders of magnitude less time needed for that in these.
Yeah, JK Rowling has said that she wrote like twenty drafts of the first chapter of the first book and if you had read all twenty of them, you would basically know the entire story line. She has said the story came to her fully formed and then she spent ages trying to figure out the right way to tell it.
She used to walk her kid in a stroller until the kid fell asleep, then duck into an eatery of some sort owned by friends and write while the kid was sleeping. She would joke "When I'm famous, I will tell the world about your place!" and then did that after she actually got famous.
I think it took her like five years to get the first book written and published.
Jacob Geller had interesting commentary along these same lines last week [0]. In some ways, a walkthrough is an extremely detailed first-person critique: Exploring the game with the walkthrough as a guide, the author highlights each element of the game which they want you to experience.
Why does anyone write anything on the internet? Why am I writing this? People write for lots of reasons, and the motivation for writing walkthoughs and FAQs aren't any different to anything else: because people like expressing themselves, they like getting recognition (even if it's meaningless internet points), they're writing something to use themself, or they like the idea of helping out a project they support.
It would be an honor to write a gamefaq. I'm not a creative individual. I'm never going to write a novel or a foundational technical work. If there was a game I knew very well that didn't already have a comprehensive guide, though? I could create something that would be referenced for decades.
How is this any different then old-school CRPG's and needing to make your own map using graph paper of dungeons?
I remember NEEDING to do this in Pools of Radiance (IIRC), just to get around the dungeon, and make sure I found everything on the level. For those that don't remember the game, you moved one square at a time in a N,E,S,W direction. one move = one square on the graph paper.
No helpful pointer arrows like on Skyrim. You had to take notes, and map out the levels. It was far too easy to spend hours in a dungeon never finding the the door to get to the treasure/clue/quest item.
So some of these guides would be no different then sharing those maps with friends. Of course I had no friends at the time. ;-)
I’ve been playing the Nintendo Switch port of Phantasy Star lately, and there are some parts of the game where it’s not 100% intuitive where to go or what to do next (eg: hidden passages that look like walls in first-person view, asking an NPC the same question multiple times until they give a different response, etc.).
I really like the game’s charm and character, but there are elements that likely are more meant for a child playing over her summer vacation in the 1980s rather than an adult millennial in 2020. Being able to quickly look up the next step has been a huge boon to enjoying it for me. I’m thankful for those GameFAQs writers putting the time in!
It’s not, and I would say that the aggregation of those text guides happened at a special time because it became so much easier to share game knowledge while the guides themselves retained a DIY paper feel.
One thing a lot of modern games have changed is that they take the notes for you. I really like when the game has a bestiary and drop tables and museums/collections built into the game so you don't have to alt-tab to the wiki all the time.
I was the local game guru once upon a time. Got a free rental out of it one time after they had a customer who was stuck call me for hints on a game.
Also you could write letters to Nintendo Power. They told me what the spells in Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord did and explained why the "Octopus Eraser" in Earthbound that they showed in a screenshot got changed to "Pencil Eraser" in the actual US release.
I wrote an FAQ about 20 years ago. I did it because it was fun, of course. I loved the game and wanted the secrets that I knew that nobody else knew to be published somewhere.
I remember one of the other players created a game guide for the game that was published and made a couple million off it. So there's that too.
So this is not relevant at all but I thought I would share anyways. In high school I wrote a 30 page business plan on selling World of Warcraft guides. Keep in mind that WoW at its peak had more than 11 million players, all of which were paying around 14 dollars per month. Youtube, wow wiki and other sources of information weren't popular yet, so knowledge spread mostly from person through person. One of the many reasons people were already willing to pay substantial amounts for guides
We’re told that we need capitalism because people are naturally lazy and won’t work unless compelled. But we see counter-evidence: people want glory (even lame nerd glory, like HN karma or writing a FAQ), and they’ll work for that, not just money.
I feel like the “managing burnout” articles and discussions here on HN add to that too. Even when given incentive via a salary it can be mentally or emotionally hard to stay motivated at one’s job. I appreciate that articles like this are helping us understand why people like to do things better.
I took a cursory look; the text is justified basically everywhere. If you take a look at the FAQ, the author mentions he did it all by hand ("carefully selected words", I may be misquoting) without the use of any software. Pretty neat, if not rather obsessive.
Is this really the case?
I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through more than once. So there's plenty of chance to enjoy the game without "dissection", then document the success on the next take.
The way the article put it makes it look like it's a kind of OCD behavior. Which sounds unfair.