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Rob Zacny

Episode 239: A Blizzard of Enthusiasm

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On the other hand (because I am Contrarian Man in this thread, for some reason) the manual was beautiful and rich with detailed descriptions of everything, and I remember it bringing me some joy as a young person. I'll take an awesome albeit slightly inaccurate manual over a post-beta glorified reference sheet.

 

Ah, manuals. Let us all take a moment to remember how great they could be. We will miss them.

 

I think (hope...) they'll be back.  We're at an in-between period at the moment.

 

The first reason manuals have been disappearing, obviously, is the increasing average complexity of games.  Obviously, this is somewhat less true for hardcore strategy, where even in the late 80s it was possible to build extremely complicated games, but for most games complexity has been climbing steadily as computers and development software have supported it.

 

The second reason is the number of chefs in the kitchen. The indie movement can somewhat be seen as a backlash against this (though it's also arguably about work/life balance and many other things), but most modern game development involves at least two of: large teams, focus groups, long betas, distant rights-holders with Ideas, and/or authority figures with whims. All of these tend to pull the design around even late in development, which means that the manual either needs to be vague, or it needs to be written while upper management is looking angrily back and forth between the manual writer and a calendar stuck to the wall by a dagger through the first day of the next financial quarter. Meanwhile, out in the dev area, the day-one patch is in development, and it's going to invalidate 10% of the manual...

 

The third reason is purely that manuals are expensive, and the software industry in general has gradually been discovering that most people don't really read, per se, unless they have to. This (and other forces) have led to decades of UI research and experimentation, which has resulted in games and other software that try to build systems with high affordance (ie: everything looks like it behaves the way it actually will when you interact with it) and contextual information (tool tips, dynamic status bars...) so that the sharp bits are hopefully sanded off the learning curve.

 

The fourth reason, arguably, is that games have been becoming less abstract as time goes on, simply because graphics and processing horsepower have improved so much. If you look at early video games (and if you're a teacher, here's a fun project to try with a class...), you could take pretty much any game and totally change the theme, setting and feel of the game by replacing the box art, back of the box blurb, and manual. Pong was "table tennis", but you could have called it "hockey" or "bomb blocker" or "hackey sack". Each ensuing generation reduced the abstraction, so as time passed you could get theme, character and story from the game itself instead of having to read block text from the manual or the box.

 

So, here we are now.  It's expensive to produce a manual, the dynamic nature of current development practices means it's hard to make a manual that's up to date and relevant, and modern GUIs (theoretically, if not always in practice...) and reduced abstraction obviate the need for a lot of what we used to need manuals for. It's looking pretty hopeless for manuals.

 

I think we might see them again, though. Not on paper, except in rare cases or unless we print them ourselves, but still, I think the manual may return in electronic form.

 

The critical thing is development support.  What we need is tools to generate documentation from the source code, and then synthesize that with properly written text supplied by an author and stitch it together into a cohesive manual. The manual structure could be designed by the author, who could supply most of the text and specify what gets pulled in from code.

 

I think it's only a matter of time before a system like that gets built; we've had stabs at it in the past with a different focus (eg. Knuth's "Literate Programming"), but the support frameworks are mostly in place, and we could fairly easily build a system where you could have a properly written manual constructed by a human author, but which was populated as needed by dynamic content pulled from the game source.

 

It still won't make sense for most games; most games simply don't need manuals any more.  For games with some complexity to them, however, I think once the tools are available we'll see (pdf) manuals return.

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Might I add two more thing about manuals?

 

Due technological limitations (mostly storage limitations) older games could not have all the needed text ingame, they had often, specially in case of rpgs to have spells, class, weapons and even dialogue in the manual because they could not fit in on those old diskettes (5 1/4 and newer ones). Today, there is almost no reason to leave any info in the manual, since all could be easily ingame and storage isn´t a problem in most cases.

 

Also, today most games came in boxes of the same type and size which no doubt make easier for production, logistic and shop organization, but they can´t fit in a huge manual. Back, each game would came in a boxes with different types and sizes. I wonder how much trouble that could cause for production, organization and logistics. At least for me, while I was placing my old boxes in shelf I had problem with one game or another which didn´t fit in.

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If you haven't already, look up some manuals for Warcraft 1, Arcanum, Baldur's Gate, and you will see how awesome the writing and presentation used to be. Yes, you can present the in-game lore through the gameplay, but sometimes that just doesn't work. If a game has a particular narrative style, the manual is a great way to flesh out the world in a different way. I collect video game manuals for every game I play (alas many games don't even make them anymore), and the classic ones are a blast to read through once in a while. Certain strategy guides are also awesome, with Master of Magic and Civilization being prime examples. 

 

The key to a good manual is not merely having information you need to play the game... that is just a market requirement. You need to put love, thought, creativity, and a good writer & artist working together to create something special. Every game can benefit from a well designed manual, especially now that tutorials and gameplay help no longer need to be a major part of it.

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Certain strategy guides are also awesome, with Master of Magic and Civilization being prime examples.

 

I have the Prima strategy guide that came with the "Planetary Pack" for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri up on my bookshelf. The cover looks silly next to works of "proper" fiction, but between the technology and secret project descriptions, it's honestly as good sci-fi as anything else there.

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No manual will beat Fallout's if you ask me. The only game manual I've hung onto.

 

I dunno, the description book from Wasteland was pretty good.  Especially the fake descriptions that were there to throw you off if you went reading for spoilers.

 

Honestly, though, at that point we're getting rather close to interactive fiction, and then I just point to Suspended and some of the other mad stuff Infocom did in their heyday.

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It's nice to see that Rob Zacny has let go of his mad dream to rebrand Lords Managements "lordly management sims", or whatever that godawful moniker was. :)

-Tom

I think that's mostly Rob humoring us with an Idle Thumbs meme.

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Whaddayamean 'meme'? Lords Management is the actual new name of the genre.

 

Interesting!  How is it distinct from Lords Managements?

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Well, it's much better. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena is... kinda clunky and 90s? Lords Management, now there's a term for the future now.

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Well, it's much better. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena is... kinda clunky and 90s? Lords Management, now there's a term for the future now.

 

I don't know that we can count Lords Managements out until the term appears on the cover of Wired.  Once that happens, its time is definitely done.

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If Crusader Kings didn't exist you might have an argument for Lords Management as a reasonable replacement of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, but the existence of the game demonstrates the absurdity and inappropriateness of the title for that genre.

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If Crusader Kings didn't exist you might have an argument for Lords Management as a reasonable replacement of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, but the existence of the game demonstrates the absurdity and inappropriateness of the title for that genre.

 

Yeah, I have to admit "Lords Management" makes me think of Paradox stuff, not multiplayer competitive ARPG.

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