Electronic gaming has changed a lot over the years, and we at Never Say Dice have been lucky enough to experience these changes first-hand. As the scope and potential of games has grown, so too have distribution networks, allowing us to find and buy games that physical stores might not have thought worthy to stock. The shift to digital distribution has brought countless benefits (and, we must acknowledge, a fair number of drawbacks), but it’s completely removed one element that seemed an integral part of electronic gaming in our youths: the printed manual. This week, we thought we’d take a moment to appreciate this now-lost aspect of physical gaming media and how it helped define the gaming experience of its era. - B
B: The shift away from manuals predates the rise of the digital storefront, of course. As storage media developed and games were able to integrate more and more of the material that had to be offloaded into a physical manual, packaging got smaller and smaller. In the cartridge and floppy eras, games had to be sold in boxes that made stocking and displaying them easier - particularly when the game was spread across a handful of discs. This allowed for a wide range of printed materials: not only manuals of all shapes and sizes, but also foldable maps, feelies, and the dreaded Copy Protection Wheel. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego always came in a deliciously hefty box that contained, in addition to the game itself and its documentation, a copy of that year’s World Almanac. CD-based games were generally packaged the same as their musical counterparts, but the larger jewel cases could allow for printed media of considerable thickness. But the much slimmer and more compact DVD-style case cut down on space significantly, just as the huge jump in storage capacity allowed for in-game documentation and tutorials made instruction manuals redundant.
A: We also need to face facts, most of us didn’t really appreciate manuals to begin with. While they did contain information about how to play the game, often the entire button layout, we didn’t really need them. With console games, there weren’t really that many buttons, and you were bound to lose a couple of mans anyway - so you knew you’d just figure it out as you went along. There were only so many combinations (okay, maybe a few more than a couple), and you could just look it up later if there was something you couldn’t quite figure out. You didn’t normally need those manuals. There were, of course, exceptions, as Bugsy mentioned above. Some games, particularly those on computers, required you have a full manual so you could answer copy protection questions. There were also even a few games that were only meant to be played right alongside the manual, following along page by page as you progressed through the game. The majority of gameplay was just you figuring it all out.
B: There was far more to a good game manual than basic instruction, something I really got to appreciate as a "computer kid" without a contemporary console at home. I'll proudly admit to carrying manuals to school to read between assignments or at lunch. There was so, so much to absorb - the manual was where lore (as we’d call it today) lived. Some of it gave context to the game, some of it was completely superfluous and had little (or nothing) to do with the game itself, and some of it was vital to engaging with the game as intended… and all three are fascinating to me. For simpler games, the narratives presented via manual tended to be flavortext as best, but sometimes they'd build out surprisingly complex stories or ones that were just plain bizarre. Adventure games with original settings, in particular, would have manuals that went into great worldbuilding detail that may or may not have been reflected in the game itself. My favorites were when you'd see in-universe publications or advertisements sprinkled in - it made the game world so much more real, as if it was breaking out of the virtual space into our own world. LucasArts and Infocom were legendary for their "feelies," but they took the same approach with the manuals themselves, jamming them with detailed art and even scrawled notes from the games' characters. Titles with a more strategic bent would have their rules and structures spelled out with specific details and examples, which meant they were vital if you didn't have the time and focus to learn by trial and error (like, say, if you were a kid, for example). Equally vital were bits of information that only existed in the manual. Andy mentioned room descriptions above, but games like The Bard's Tale had spell names (and the abbreviations they expected you to enter) only available in the manual - you simply wouldn't be able to use magic if you didn't have a copy at hand... it's not like there as an internet to look stuff up back then! Finally, if you were really lucky, there would be little quotes and messages from the game's creators about what they were going for, the things that influenced them, the parts they were proud of, and, of course tips and tricks. That little look behind the curtain was utterly magic to a kid like me who hungered to know how beloved media was made.
B: Game guides and hint books certainly deserve more attention - they always kind of messed with me a little bit, not necessarily because they felt like "cheating," but more that they blurred the lines between the player, the game, and the way the engaged with each other... especially if it was a game I had been playing for a long time. Seeing and reading about things that I hadn't yet experienced in the game messed with my suspension of disbelief, but also made the game as a whole tangible in a way that I hadn't experienced in my time floundering around with it. (And I floundered quite a bit as a kid.) One trend that certainly didn't help things (much as I appreciate the effort) were game guides that put the game story in prose, sometimes even as a journal or record of a character other than your own going through the same thing. The sensation is a lot like you might have with a modern game featuring character creation, where you've spent so long as your personal character that you can't imagine them looking any different... then you see footage of someone else's Commander Shepherd (for instance) and you experience a sense of cognitive dissonance as your brain struggles to adjust to the game (as a general possibility) versus the game (as you've experienced it ) versus the game footage in front of you.
But the best manuals and game guides (and fold-out maps) were always going to be susceptible to this kind of thing, breaking the third wall by design even if it was simply walking you through the game's details in a particularly engrossing way. They took an aspect of the game world and dropped it into our own, in a form we could take anywhere (even to school) regardless of where we actually experienced that game world. It can be a powerful experience when handled right, and become part of the way we conceptualize the game - whether it be evocative prose, paper that looks like aged parchment, color magazines and pamphlets from the game's world, or even actual photos with costumes and models. And if there's a takeaway for the rest of us, it's thinking about the way that feeling connects with an audience beyond them simply partaking of the media. What can you do to make it real, not necessarily "realistic," but real to the imagination in that moment in time? The possibilities are as open and ready as the "notes" pages they used to include in manuals to reach a certain page count. If we learn anything from game manuals, it's that the worlds we build don't have to be limited by the spaces that contain them.
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