Game Manuals

Tabbing out to read a PDF? What year do you think it is? Here in 2013, everyone has tablets, which actually make PDFs slightly more convenient than paper manuals.

I get what you are saying, and I actually agree that you shouldn't need a manual to learn the basic functionality and controls of a game. But I also think, as I mentioned above, that the best manuals go way beyond that, and provide a level of flavor and an in-depth breakdown of mechanics that goes beyond what it is practical to present in-game. I'm not sure how you would present the super-detailed breakdown of combat odds and shifts that is in the Unity of Command manual, aside from just making that content readable within the game. Which isn't really getting rid of the manual, per se, it's just changing how you access it. Personally, I think having that info accessible as a PDF is a bit more convenient, though. I can reference it while I'm looking over the disposition of my forces in a scenario, or even give it a read while I'm sitting on the couch. And actually, this is a great example of a modern manual that supplements in-game training, because you don't really need to read the manual to play the game. The game has a great tutorial that shows you the controls and all the basic concepts; the manual just provides an extra level of depth, once you get past the stage of learning how to play the game and want to understand how all the underlying mechanics work.

The Falcon 4.0 manual was a great on-the-fly reference. The three-ring binder format let you prop it open in front of you so that you could reference training info in flight, without needing to take your hands off the controls. Oldschool though it may be, it was a remarkably effective solution.

The Fallout manual was a great combination of useful reference and thematic flavor that just made it a great addition to a great game. It was simply fun to read, filled with goofy background stuff like this:





And weird extras* like this:




On top of that, it had a detailed breakdown of all the character stats and skills and a basic equipment list, much like what you'd expect from a pen & paper RPG manual. And for what it's worth, I have never played a videogame RPG that did not benefit from having that sort of out-of-game reference. Maybe it's possible to present all that information in-game in a way that is easier to use than a purpose-built external reference, but if so, I've never seen it, and I play a lot of RPGs. Look at it this way: there's a reason why players invariably put together detailed wikis when they don't have a comprehensive manual to fall back on, and it's not because 2013 games have become great at picking up the informational slack.

Manuals are definitely an outdated concept today, but not because they have ceased to be useful or can no longer be entertaining or interesting. The reason is simply that game development has gotten very expensive, and publishers cut costs wherever they can.


*(Tim Cain always puts recipes in his games. He used to hide them as Easter eggs, but in Fallout, he put them right in the manual. Karen and I still use his chocolate chip pumpkin muffins, from Stonekeep, to this very day. Good muffins!)

I think they did a lot of somethings right, and I think their approach--leaving shitloads of information in the game hidden and expecting players to discover it on their own and share it with each other--worked out great. But I'm not the one asking game developers

And telling people that

I'll note, too, that a common modern practice for games that really benefit from detailed manuals, like RPGs, is to outsource the job to whomever is doing the strategy guide. The Skyrim strategy guide, for example, is great. But only part of it is actually a strategy guide. The first 100 pages or so are arguably the real game manual--a detailed description of character creation and stats and how the basic game mechanics work. It replaces the near-useless pamphlet of a manual that came with the game.

The Dark Souls strategy guide is the same way. It's brilliant, but a sizable chunk of it is arguably the manual that should have come with the game, in place of the pathetic pamphlet that it actually got.

Demon's Souls, by contrast, had a great manual. And a great strategy guide, if you got the collector's edition.

I...uh. I like tutorials.

I occasionally try to play games in genres I've never played before, and I really appreciate it when they tell me how things work, and let me try it out in a relatively low-key environment, rather than assuming I've played a zillion games like it before. And I've given up on various games in frustration because they clearly did assume that EVERYONE EVER who might possibly want to play their game would've played others in that genre, and know that the controls are standard, and be adept at those controls.

I also think it's nice when tutorials are optional or skippable, especially for games where having multiple characters/playthroughs is relevant. But it is kinda alienating at times when I try a game, and discover that it believes I am not its audience at all.

I guess it all depends on your definition of "optional," because I agree that you shouldn't need to reference a manual to learn the basics of how to control and play a game. At the same time I think a number of game types (especially strategy games and RPGs... and sims, though those don't get made much any more) do benefit from having a reference that explains the game's systems in more depth than "Press W to move forward," and that's "optional" in the sense that anything that makes the game better but isn't strictly necessary to play (like good writing) is "optional." Whether you want to do it in some external format (book, PDF) or in an in-game format (like the Civilopedia) is sort of academic, though I'll say that I don't think I've ever seen an in-game reference of that sort that wasn't at least twice as clunky to use as a simple, physical book. That goes doubly for console games, where you have to navigate the in-game reference with a controller. If you have some examples of games where that works well, though, feel free to post them!

I like them if I can skip them, and if they're actually useful. Some games (I AM LOOKING AT YOU, CRUSADER KINGS II) have crappy tutorials, and make the player feel like they have even less of a goddamn idea what's going on than they did when they started it.

Finally you see the light!

And Bruce Geryk should write them all.

I remember Rise of Nations being the first game that I noticed had really great in-game documentation. The key thing there was that it wasn't an in-game equivalent of a manual--in that case I agree with Ben Sones that the physical manual is usually better--but rather it was provided in brief, contextual snippets that always seemed to tell you what you wanted to know right then without making you wade through a ton of other stuff on the way.

That's a pretty disingenuous way to engage his argument.

There are literally several:

1. The information in question is lengthy and detailed. In-game reference is great for short snippets of information that you might need to reference during play, but not so great for lengthy reading. I gave several examples of this, like the explanation of how combat odds and battle resolution works in Unity of Command. This is not something you look at quickly and go back to playing; it's a lengthy and dense explanation of the nuts and bolts of the system that requires at least a half an hour of your undivided attention to read through and understand. What, exactly, would be the point of providing this inside the game? I mean, you could, but reading it is going to take you away from playing for a good chunk of time regardless of whether you open it from an in-game menu or read it in PDF form. And with a PDF, I can read it on the couch.

2. Reference materials like keybinding charts and tables of information are just fundamentally more useful in hardcopy form. There's a limit to how much text and info you can fit onto a 1080p display, and tables are generally a lot easier to read if you can look at more than one tiny portion of the table at a time. Looking at the weapon charts in the Skyrim and Dark Souls guides... you could try to cram that stuff into an in-game display... in fact, both of those games do. But it's easier to read and make comparisons in the guide, which fits more information into a spread than you could cram into six or seven screens in the game. Unit charts in strategy games are a similar case. The Heroes of Might and Magic games used to come with a really handy reference that let you see the upgrade paths and unit lists for all of the different town types all at once. Could you put all that info in the game? You can, because that's what they do now. But the old hard copy chart was a much more useful reference.

That's begging the question. "I'm right because I'm right." Well, I say it's fine to go outside the game to access some types of information, so where does that leave us?

I can, obviously. Many games do. It works really well for small, digestible bits of information, and I very much like the trend towards providing contextual help inside the game. I mean, I don't think we're as far apart on this as you believe, because I'd agree that developers should do that as much as possible. I just don't think it's practical for everything. And by and large, what has happened is that developers have gone towards only providing information in-game, and at the same time they have simply stopped providing the sort of highly detailed information that used to come with games as a matter of course (and still does come with some, see: Unity of Command, or the Dominions 3 manual). And maybe you're fine with that. I'm not.

You grant an exemption to flight sims, I grant an exemption to shooters and first/third-person actions games. By and large, those sorts of games just don't have the sort of detailed systems that you find in an RPG or a strategy game, and they tend to be highly friendly to a "learn by doing" approach. That's cool, because I'm not saying that every game needs a manual. But in a game where I might want to access information on more than one contextual item at a time--say an RPG that has 50 different types of light armor that I might want to compare--a good manual is really helpful.

Not necessarily. But it doesn't exactly support your argument, either.

All my favorite memories of manuals are of excitedly reading them while in the car on the way home from the store. We lived in the sticks, so it was generally an hour-long drive to any place that sold games, so I had plenty of time to read and reread. Generally the game I was imagining by the time I got home would be much better than the one I actually had. Sometimes I didn't even notice.

So yeah, I don't think it's really the manuals I'm nostalgic for.

That's how all consumer opinions operate.
We prefer something, and we expect to get what we prefer.

I think that HERP DERP WON'T PLAY IF I HAVE TO READ A MANUAL is an incredibly silly position, but whatever.

Honestly, I'd much rather see more games that gave you a RTFM screen when you started and threw you in at the deep end, mechanically speaking. Assume that the player has read up on how things work, maybe toyed around in a practice mode, and then present interesting, complex challenges from the outset.

I loathe the Standard Earlygame Section wherein it's assumed that you're learning the mechanics as you go along, so you're given an hour or two with only very simple tasks. A lack of options alongside a lack of difficulty means that there are way too many titles on the market which are boring in the early phases of the game; all of the interesting mechanics are gated away to avoid overwhelming players that don't bother to read up before they start.

I mean, even Dark Souls isn't entirely exempt here. The escape from the Undead Asylum and the first visit to the Undead Burg are much simpler and less open than the rest of the game. The enemies are just Hollows, with simple patterns, easy tells, and weak stats. The environment is very, very restricted - if you don't have the Master Key, it's downright linear.

I would not have been upset at all if From had shipped the game with a big instruction binder, and then built the opening areas around the assumption that I already had some basic grasp on how to operate.

Super Metroid is a masterfully designed game.

A large part of this is that your options always look more restricted than they are.

You can go for the Varia Suit before you visit Norfair, if you want. There's never actually any situation in the game that requires things like the High-Jump boots if you grasp the nuances of the mechanics. The list of apparently-guided situations where there's nothing stopping you from going off the rails is huge.

If you don't understand the mechanics, you have simple environments to become accustomed to them.

If you do understand the mechanics, you can just go right over or around most of those. There's never any need to do them normally.

I am fine with that.

What I'm not fine with is having the simple option forced on me. (Which is really why the Master Key is such a fantastic design decision on From's part - someone deserves a medal for that. It's basically a switch you flick to turn the guardrails off.)

If the analogy is that of a guiding hand - Super Metroid is a game that has no problem with your swatting that hand away so that you can take whatever silly route through the game you like. This is, unfortunately, not the common way of approaching this problem.

You have three paths of varying difficulty open to you at that point even without the Master Key.

But I think what you're really getting at is the boring one-to-two-hour-long "tutorial" phase that does show up in probably most games these days, and yes, I'd absolutely rather spend a few minutes flipping through a well-executed manual than sit there begging the game to just shut up and let me play already. It's only a relevant solution when the early part of the game is poorly executed, but it seems like it is more often than not.

I'm fine with the sandbox, but it shouldn't be tied to the early stages of the main game.

Training mode. I'm serious. It's almost exclusively a fighting game thing, but it should be standard in any game with any mechanical depth at all. Just pick the sandbox out from the main menu and play around with your moves/physics/etc. to your heart's content. Spawn in some enemies or obstacles to work with if you like. Hell, show some hitboxes. You don't need to tie it to the game's progression, you don't need to control how much (or how little) access the player has to it, you don't need to justify it in narrative. It's there for as much (or as little) use as the player desires.

For bonus points, let the player pull this up from the pause menu. At any time during gameplay. (assuming you can pause anyway; online multiplayer need not apply)

This.
And writing tutorials is both painful and mind-numbing.

This is an increasingly confusing standard that you've applied with respect to the Souls games, and I think you're mixing aspirational ideals of design with things that make it sound like games are bad and people are bad for liking them. Also, what the devs feel they need to give me is of purely academic interest to most players; it's what we need to get started in the game *and* then what we need to supplement the experience as we go.

See, dammit. This is something I think most everyone would agree with, and I wish it had come out more clearly amid the middle fingers delivered above. Although I believe the "I am a visual/auditory/narrative/etc learner" thing is mostly crap in terms of the science, it does mean that developers (and teachers) are in a space where they are trying to make something not only intelligible to their audience but enjoyable as well. Towards that end, I think the right answer for all but the simplest games is to have multiple, overlapping ways of teaching you the game that are purposefully designed and paced to offer alternatives to players according to their tastes.

That means, for instance, that Afti's not wrong when he says he dislikes the thinly veiled tutorial first level(s), as they are often removing core parts of gameplay and fucking up the pacing for everybody in order to appeal to the complete new player. In that light, Dark Souls' asylum is an interesting but not particularly innovative take on teaching (although it's much more well-justified thematically), and if it weren't for the burg and the parish being so excellent in comparison the game would have a few things to answer for.

I think this is where you get into murkier waters, because I think you're really focused on a dev perspective versus a player perspective, but you're right. I remember the AC controls being an issue, notoriously with a preview gone awry, and the reason was in many ways that the journo in question demanded to learn it his own way when it was in fact something difficult to grasp if you're used to traditional 3d action setups. I don't remember enough about AC2 to remember. I have some recent experience with Dead Space 3, a game about as hard to beat as falling off a log, where really simple things became really hard in coop because they hadn't been as thoroughly balanced for difficulty *and* players being new to the experience (ie it was assumed you'd already beat it solo where you have an AI player to model actions for you or simply only one person can fuck it up).

Going back to AC2, what I remember about the later games is mainly that the rough edges in the early levels were definitely not apparent to the devs in question or they never would have done them like that.

I don't think that's what I'm saying, and I don't think manuals should aspire to contain most or all of a game's elements. I'm totally with you that the manual shouldn't be the *only* way of explaining things, nor is it a mandatory way. But that doesn't translate to a positive case against manuals, it just means that we fall back on the relatively uncontroversial "include different ways to explain things to your players, and more options in this as your game becomes more complex".

I guess I just don't see where people were arguing against including things "in game" in a variety of forms. Some just like having a manual as well, and find the proliferation of clumsy, under-designed "in game" explanations standing in the way of otherwise competent games annoying. So it's really a place where there's room for a lot of compromise.

What if you were playing 'Oxford Librarian Simulator 2009'?

Note to self: don't joke when Charles has his po-faced game designer hat on.

I read it once, I'm not reading it again!