Sunday Blogday: Strategy Guides
I get so caught up in deadlines and guidelines for my writing projects as well as those I complete for freelance clients that I'm often too tired to transfer idle thoughts to paper. Sunday Blogday is a new weekly column of sorts which I'll use to share whatever random topic's been bouncing through my brain. I just crank these out without editing; the goal is to just WRITE, not watch for grammar police speed traps.
Even in this age of GameFAQs, YouTube, and Twitch.TV, I enjoy reading strategy guides for video games. They are, as strategy guide writer David Hodgson described them, travel guides for places that don't exist. I collect strategy guides, actually. I often pick up guides for games I don't own or have already finished just for something to read. When I was a kid, I'd take strategy guides to school and read them during lessons with no shame. Learning the location of all the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3 was more important than solving word problems in math.
My mom and teachers caught on to my act (how could they miss it?) and forbade me to bring the books to school. But I stayed one step ahead of them. Oh yes. I'd slip them between the folders of my Trapper Keeper and break them out during study periods. They were like powder to the gaming itch I couldn't dig into with my fingernails while I was at school, and they were also just as acceptable to me as novels. Reading my Ocarina of Time strategy guides (I had 3 at last count) cover to cover, following along with Link as he cleared out the Great Deku Tree, met the Princess Zelda, and grew into the young man who would face Ganondorf in battle to decide the fate of Hyrule, was as captivating a tale as any of the "chapter books" I read during elementary school days.
I also appreciate and enjoy the graphic design work that goes into putting a strategy guide together. GameFAQS guides are just a bunch of text on a screen. Strategy guides are colorful, like atlases. Collector's edition guides are a thing, now. Hardcover, gold-edged pages, and bonus materials such as cloth maps for sprawling RPGs like Zelda: Skyward Sword. They're huge productions, these books, and part of me wanted to know what it would be like to make one. (Wanna walk in their shoes? Here's a link to an article about a strategy guide writer.)
--
I got many secondhand accounts of the rigors of strategy guide production during my short-lived IGN tenure. Some of my friends at the office worked in the strategy guide department and got access to the newest games around the same time as the writers reviewing the games. The guide had to be ready to go live on the site within a few days of the game's release so our readers would come to us instead of the competition.
To my dismay, I learned that, for many of the guide writers, putting together strategy guides sucks all the fun and magic out of a video game. When you're writing a guide, you don't have the luxury of reaching a crossroads, deciding to turn left, and wonder idly what had awaited you straight ahead and to the right. You have to go down every path. Find every optional item. Complete every optional quest. Explore every nook and cranny of the game world--not for fun, but because your database of all 300-some Pokémon will be incomplete and therefore unusable if you don't traverse every square inch of every virtual city dozens and dozens of times.
After talking with editors drunk on exhaustion and full of vitriol for a game I loved because I only had to play through it once and could stop halfway through hitting that elusive 100% completion rating, I decided against writing strategy guides professionally. What if I ended up having to write a guide for a game I hated or, worse, felt ambivalent toward? "Hey, welcome aboard the team, Craddock! Here's the latest Madden game. Go write stats for all the athletes." No thank you.
Still, my curiosity over what it would be like to put together a strategy guide lingered. I had no desire to write a guide for an RPG. Those games are notoriously lengthy, requiring 50+ hours to complete if you want to do and see everything. And I usually do. But Adult David doesn't have Kid David's carefree weekends and vacation terms to do nothing but sit around and play video games. If Adult David were to write a strategy guide, he would do it for a game that could be completed in 6-8 hours, 10 hours max, and for a game he found fun enough to play through more than once.
Enter Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional Games' survival horror opus released in 2010. Newer survival horror games have been bastardized in an attempt to broaden the audience and reach Call of Duty-like sales numbers. As a result, formerly decision-based survival horror franchises like Resident Evil play more like shoot-everything-that-moves action games instead of tense horror experiences where every healing item consumed, every bullet fired, dramatically affects your odds of survival.
With Amnesia, Frictional stripped out all the action to create a frail and vulnerable character incapable of lifting a finger or anything else against the walking nightmares pursuing him. Every encounter in Amnesia is significant because you are utterly helpless to defend yourself. When you see an enemy, your options are to hide in the dark, which ebbs at your sanity meter and converts you into a gibbering wreck tormented by visions and only able to crawl around on the floor. Or stay out in the light where the monster can see you and fall after one hit, maybe two.
Amnesia also contains lots of puzzles that involve gathering items from around the environment and combining them in specific ways, such as mixing together ingredients for acid to melt through a locked door. Knowing that some players only consulted guides when they needed to conquer a specific challenge while others would want to follow the roadmap from the beginning of the game to the end, I decided to write a guide broken into numbered steps. Players could either follow the steps that led them to the victory screen at the end of the long, harrowing adventure, or look up a specific question in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the guide, jump right to the step where they could find their answer, solve it, and continue playing the game under their own power.
To write my guide, I played through Amnesia twice. Once just to play through it and soak up the terror (and it is terrifying), and then a second time, going through slowly and writing down each step to progress through areas and solve puzzles. I did not, however, toss in mentions of when and where monsters appeared. Using a guide to get past a tricky puzzle is one thing. After tension comes the payoff, the "jump out of your chair" fright fest when a monster finally rears its deformed, misshapen head after long stretches of expecting him (it) to pop out from around every corner. Revealing the when and where of monster ambuscades would be like taking a pin and popping the balloon of tension before it was full and tied off.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in September '10. It's now three years later and I still haven't posted the guide to GameFAQS. It won't end up as elaborate a production as the dozens of guide that occupy my bookshelves, but it is a guide, and I had fun writing it, and I do hope to submit it one day. At the very least, I had a blast writing it, and doing so gave me the opportunity to experience a fraction of what my former colleagues went through day in and day out.
Even in this age of GameFAQs, YouTube, and Twitch.TV, I enjoy reading strategy guides for video games. They are, as strategy guide writer David Hodgson described them, travel guides for places that don't exist. I collect strategy guides, actually. I often pick up guides for games I don't own or have already finished just for something to read. When I was a kid, I'd take strategy guides to school and read them during lessons with no shame. Learning the location of all the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3 was more important than solving word problems in math.
My mom and teachers caught on to my act (how could they miss it?) and forbade me to bring the books to school. But I stayed one step ahead of them. Oh yes. I'd slip them between the folders of my Trapper Keeper and break them out during study periods. They were like powder to the gaming itch I couldn't dig into with my fingernails while I was at school, and they were also just as acceptable to me as novels. Reading my Ocarina of Time strategy guides (I had 3 at last count) cover to cover, following along with Link as he cleared out the Great Deku Tree, met the Princess Zelda, and grew into the young man who would face Ganondorf in battle to decide the fate of Hyrule, was as captivating a tale as any of the "chapter books" I read during elementary school days.
I also appreciate and enjoy the graphic design work that goes into putting a strategy guide together. GameFAQS guides are just a bunch of text on a screen. Strategy guides are colorful, like atlases. Collector's edition guides are a thing, now. Hardcover, gold-edged pages, and bonus materials such as cloth maps for sprawling RPGs like Zelda: Skyward Sword. They're huge productions, these books, and part of me wanted to know what it would be like to make one. (Wanna walk in their shoes? Here's a link to an article about a strategy guide writer.)
--
I got many secondhand accounts of the rigors of strategy guide production during my short-lived IGN tenure. Some of my friends at the office worked in the strategy guide department and got access to the newest games around the same time as the writers reviewing the games. The guide had to be ready to go live on the site within a few days of the game's release so our readers would come to us instead of the competition.
To my dismay, I learned that, for many of the guide writers, putting together strategy guides sucks all the fun and magic out of a video game. When you're writing a guide, you don't have the luxury of reaching a crossroads, deciding to turn left, and wonder idly what had awaited you straight ahead and to the right. You have to go down every path. Find every optional item. Complete every optional quest. Explore every nook and cranny of the game world--not for fun, but because your database of all 300-some Pokémon will be incomplete and therefore unusable if you don't traverse every square inch of every virtual city dozens and dozens of times.
After talking with editors drunk on exhaustion and full of vitriol for a game I loved because I only had to play through it once and could stop halfway through hitting that elusive 100% completion rating, I decided against writing strategy guides professionally. What if I ended up having to write a guide for a game I hated or, worse, felt ambivalent toward? "Hey, welcome aboard the team, Craddock! Here's the latest Madden game. Go write stats for all the athletes." No thank you.
Still, my curiosity over what it would be like to put together a strategy guide lingered. I had no desire to write a guide for an RPG. Those games are notoriously lengthy, requiring 50+ hours to complete if you want to do and see everything. And I usually do. But Adult David doesn't have Kid David's carefree weekends and vacation terms to do nothing but sit around and play video games. If Adult David were to write a strategy guide, he would do it for a game that could be completed in 6-8 hours, 10 hours max, and for a game he found fun enough to play through more than once.
Enter Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional Games' survival horror opus released in 2010. Newer survival horror games have been bastardized in an attempt to broaden the audience and reach Call of Duty-like sales numbers. As a result, formerly decision-based survival horror franchises like Resident Evil play more like shoot-everything-that-moves action games instead of tense horror experiences where every healing item consumed, every bullet fired, dramatically affects your odds of survival.
With Amnesia, Frictional stripped out all the action to create a frail and vulnerable character incapable of lifting a finger or anything else against the walking nightmares pursuing him. Every encounter in Amnesia is significant because you are utterly helpless to defend yourself. When you see an enemy, your options are to hide in the dark, which ebbs at your sanity meter and converts you into a gibbering wreck tormented by visions and only able to crawl around on the floor. Or stay out in the light where the monster can see you and fall after one hit, maybe two.
Amnesia also contains lots of puzzles that involve gathering items from around the environment and combining them in specific ways, such as mixing together ingredients for acid to melt through a locked door. Knowing that some players only consulted guides when they needed to conquer a specific challenge while others would want to follow the roadmap from the beginning of the game to the end, I decided to write a guide broken into numbered steps. Players could either follow the steps that led them to the victory screen at the end of the long, harrowing adventure, or look up a specific question in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the guide, jump right to the step where they could find their answer, solve it, and continue playing the game under their own power.
To write my guide, I played through Amnesia twice. Once just to play through it and soak up the terror (and it is terrifying), and then a second time, going through slowly and writing down each step to progress through areas and solve puzzles. I did not, however, toss in mentions of when and where monsters appeared. Using a guide to get past a tricky puzzle is one thing. After tension comes the payoff, the "jump out of your chair" fright fest when a monster finally rears its deformed, misshapen head after long stretches of expecting him (it) to pop out from around every corner. Revealing the when and where of monster ambuscades would be like taking a pin and popping the balloon of tension before it was full and tied off.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in September '10. It's now three years later and I still haven't posted the guide to GameFAQS. It won't end up as elaborate a production as the dozens of guide that occupy my bookshelves, but it is a guide, and I had fun writing it, and I do hope to submit it one day. At the very least, I had a blast writing it, and doing so gave me the opportunity to experience a fraction of what my former colleagues went through day in and day out.