
What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs? - miobrien
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7925/6630
======
zoomablemind
[...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.

~~~
wlesieutre
Or they enjoy dissecting games as they play through, and the author is over
here shouting _no, you’re enjoying it wrong!_

~~~
FractalParadigm
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)

~~~
amitport
The mirror scene:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg)

(Also, I completely agree with your view.)

~~~
dgellow
Wow, with the commentary it's also really cool
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxa3j8bK-c4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxa3j8bK-c4)

------
BookPage
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.

~~~
xamuel
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.

~~~
dota_fanatic
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.

~~~
im3w1l
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.

------
umvi
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.

~~~
james-skemp
Additional benefit: could be printed.

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. :)

------
vnxli
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

~~~
fakedang
I thought those were auto-generated somehow. Never suspected that people
actually put effort into them!

~~~
egypturnash
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.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

~~~
ascorbic
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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
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.

------
Kednicma
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.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6pA15xuFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6pA15xuFc)

------
ascorbic
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.

------
causality0
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.

------
UI_at_80x24
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. ;-)

~~~
danbolt
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!

------
29athrowaway
Before online walkthroughs you read official guides from Nintendo Power, or
you contacted your local game guru via the guy that knew a guy.

~~~
tasogare
And then you spend 10 hours trying to surf on a truck in the hope of getting
that #251.

~~~
29athrowaway
No guide would work for TMNT, though. That game had randomized enemies and it
was frustrating as hell.

------
snarfy
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.

------
adflux
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

------
earthboundkid
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.

~~~
danbolt
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.

------
bangonkeyboard
See if you can spot why this walkthrough is noteworthy:
[https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-
metroid/faqs...](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-
metroid/faqs/10114)

~~~
srtjstjsj
Will you tell us?

~~~
s4vo
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.

