What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?
firstmonday.org
firstmonday.org
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.
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)
(Also, I completely agree with your view.)
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07PB7BK7L/
Spoiler warning: don't read the reviews until after you watch it. And then read a few of the one-star reviews for some hilarity.
Two words: "continuity errors"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuZMvMtZCWU
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.
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.
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.
> I spent more time outside the game thinking and plotting and planning than I do actually playing the game
So you support the article's statements.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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 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.