I woke up today thinking about the use of external aids in completing video games, and I wonder if we can fit that into our ongoing discourse about games, so allow me to throw a few random ideas at you.
My feelings toward player’s guides and the like are mixed. While I feel that they “ruin” the experience of a game’s central plot for me, I have no problem using them to find and obtain nonessential extras. The game I have in mind is Fallout 3; I completed the ten or so hours of my 60-hour file devoted to advancing the main plot without any external guidance, but I’ve made extensive use of The Vault in finding unique weapons and bobbleheads and such. Now, insofar as player agency results in the forward movement of the story, all 60 hours constitute the game’s plot, or at least the game experience’s plot; why do I approach one-sixth of that plot with a different attitude toward external aid than I do the remaining five-sixths? I don’t really know, but I doubt it’s indicative of some core difference between “main plot” and “side plot” in games.
Let me ask this: how might we best characterize external aid, anyway?
Is it a kind of criticism? After all, it details one possible playthrough of a game — ostensibly, one possible reading of a text. And I think that, like criticism, it’s certainly entertainment in itself. When I was younger, I used to read those Prima player’s guides for fun. I bought guides for games I didn’t own. I remember devoting hours to reading through The Mynock’s Guide to Final Fantasy III (back when FF6 was still called Final Fantasy III here…God I’m old) despite my near-encyclopedic knowledge of that game, and for no reason other than that I wanted to see how someone else experienced the game. It’s not that I felt I had something to gain, intellectually, from diverse readings, as I do now; I simply enjoyed it.
Can we say that my use of external aid to complete optional content in Fallout 3, the pausing and minimizing of the game and the perusal of websites throughout, helped define my gameplay? That it’s part of the human narrative of my playing, which the game narrative itself may well simply be a part of as well? I don’t hear such a thing often said of literature and the criticism thereof — that is, I’m not sure how many people would tell you that my reading experience of Ulysses continues to this very moment because I keep reading criticism of it and tying it into other narratives. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here; a more analogous situation would be reading Ulysses for the first time with a copy of Ulysses Annotated on hand. To what extent is Joyce (not Joyce the man, but Joyce the author-consciousness) responsible for that reading experience? To what extent are Don Gifford and Robert Seidman responsible? How much responsibility rests upon the sources they consulted when writing Ulysses Annotated? And can we answer these questions by way of addressing analogous questions in the largely unstudied realm of video games?
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
Baka-Raptor
/ 28 December 2008I have a problem with external aids when they they’re the only way of finding out about something in the game. Think Zodiac Spear from FFXII. There was absolutely no way to know that opening a random treasure chest would prevent you from obtaining it. At least give us some obscure hint that’s nearly impossible to decipher without a guide.
Pontifus
/ 28 December 2008Yeah, Squenix is bad about that. But, somehow, I don’t doubt that there’s some Japanese gamer out there who could conceivably figure it out without aid, after thousands of hours of gameplay.
Also — look everyone! Nested comments!
Cuchlann
/ 28 December 2008I like your analogy of annotation, but I think it’s not quite the way I would put it. I have an idea, but I want, instead, to work toward it methodically, and see if it holds up to what little critical skill I can apply to it.
Gaming is an act, roughly analogous to reading. As I’ve sort-of posited elsewhere, it can be considered more involved, at least because the gamer has to turn his or her energies outward as much as inward. So one must have a skillset to play a game. There are different kinds. Simply knowing where the buttons are is one skillset: my father quite willingly plays simple games with me, but telling him which button does what on an NES game is a pain, because he keeps forgetting which one (OF TWO!) buttons makes Luigi jump. Knowing how puzzles work is another, and the strategies of skill management (in an rpg, for example) is another. Players learn these to various degrees. They also matter to the game in various degrees. I know, from looking back at my own personal experiences, that I will take a very long time in a room of Prince of Persia before I break down and look something up, but an rpg will hold me for less time before I “cheat.” That’s because, in my mind, solving the “puzzle” which is a room in PoP is the game, while a puzzle in a Final Fantasy game is, yes, part of the game, but in a way a kind of delaying tactic to extend the gameplay. Also, as Baka-Raptor says, there are games now that add parts which require a guide of some kind.
I think your habit, which you reference concerning Fallout 3, isn’t that confusing. You’re keeping story spoilers away while taking advantage of the help you can receive with things that won’t spoil the narrative. I take a slightly different route: if I need help with a plot problem, I just find a spoiler-free guide (which is still a compromise, but I’m with Tycho of Penny Arcade here — if I can’t play the game it’s not fun any more, so I’ll look up anything I can’t solve in a reasonable amount of time).
I, too, used to read guides about games I didn’t have. I never bought full guides, but I read several gaming magazines every month. I still remember poring over the Final Fantasy VII guide in EGM, with its fold-out map and random artwork. Of course, eventually I did play that game, but not until years afterward.
I think my original conclusion still holds up. Basically, I’m not the greatest gamer in the world (living with my roommate has illustrated that quite well — at least I can beat him at Soul Calibur. Sigh. Of course, my girlfriend beats me at that…). I may not be able to get to the end of a game without help of some sort. I’m okay with getting that help. My comparison is this: I prefer to read a book, for the first time, without annotations. They distract from the story. If it’s for a class and I don’t have time to do it twice, and a good annotated edition crops up, I’ll read it, sure. But Sherlock Holmes is a good example: I’m extraordinarily glad, in retrospect, that I first read the stories without guides of any sort, but now I’m getting more out of the stories with the annotated edition I bought earlier this year. I want to get as much of the experience as possible for myself, but I will glean extra out of the text with outside help. This applies to books and video games.
The difference has to do with what I mentioned earlier, that games require skillsets. I may not be able to fully master a skillset, so the help I glean from outside sources could lead to actually finishing the game, whereas I can finish a book no matter what, being a fluent English speaker/reader. Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t try to finish a Japanese novel without a dictionary to hand (yes, I have “read” an entire Japanese novel — the first Marimite novel is available online in Japanese, with a translation).
Pontifus
/ 28 December 2008Yeah, I can see that. You don’t absolutely need Ulysses Annotated to get through Ulysses; anyone can read the text from beginning to end (I also absolutely shun annotations and criticism until after I’ve read through something once, when I have the luxury to). A player’s guide might be more crucial than a critical text of a novel, and your explanation here supports my suspicions of that; with that in mind, my big question is, how much responsibility for the playing experience should we attribute to a guide? This is probably something I’ll revisit in future blog posts, since I haven’t even decided yet how much it really matters.
On an unrelated note…
I think I want to slowly ease myself into doing things like this, actually. Is there a dictionary you’d recommend?
Cuchlann
/ 28 December 2008Also, where are you exactly? I’ve been trying to catch you on AIM.
jp
/ 30 December 2008The gaming atmosphere I’m in right now is this: I get any external aid I can get and difficulty stems from competition.
I have no shame looking up how to defeat certain bosses in single player games. In my mind, external aid is a form of strength. If you just try to play a game of Starcraft for the first time now that it’s been out for a decade, you’ll get your ass handed to you faster than you can say “hallelujah”. It is an imperative that you look up strategies online and look at pro matches.
I’m good enough in most genres of games I play and most of the time, when I can’t progress, it’s because the game has some flaw or because the enemies are so cheap that I don’t want to waste my time taking them seriously. Take for example the frog boss in Devil May Cry 4. I’m a DMC veteran but that frog gave me hard time because there could be no logical strategy for a giant Frog that shoots ice out of the top of its head. Just some constant trial and error that ends in some counter-intuitive solution or sometime just pure luck.
The worst offenders are RPGs where you need to trigger an event with some obtuse action. When I don’t know where to proceed, I just go straight to the guides.
When it comes to the analogy with books, I don’t think it needs to be made. The way I conceive it, external aid doesn’t come in the same way and is not of the same nature. I become full of dissonant thoughts when I try to work it out :D
To answer your point, we should attribute importance to guides insofar as they contribute to our playing experience. To me, external aid does not undermine my feeling of accomplishment that much, so it’s OK. But to someone else, it might be a different story. It’s also a sort of unsolvable problem because it’s hard to predict when your problems are simply due to a flaw in the game or if it’s a legitimate difficulty.
Pontifus
/ 30 December 2008You say that “we should attribute importance to guides insofar as they contribute to our playing experience,” and I agree, but my question is, precisely, in what manner and to what degree do guides contribute to what I see as the narrative artistic experience of video games? Can we really call the use of a guide “playing?” Sure, they have an impact on play, but is flipping through a guidebook or browsing a wiki play in itself?
Also, how would you define a “flaw” in a game? Upon reading your post, it occurred to me that an objective definition may not exist. That is, most people would probably tell you that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES is awful, but, given that there are video walkthroughs of it on YouTube, there are clearly people willing to play through it. To what degree is a flaw a flaw when it doesn’t really stop a certain set of gamers from playing a game?
In any case, thanks for sharing your approach to guides; I don’t think many of us here are very competitive gamers, me definitely included, so it’s an angle that probably needs more representation in the vicinity of my posts.
Owen S
/ 13 January 2009How do visual novels factor in to this post, if any? I say this because of how you’re supposed to read and choose at the same time, thus qualifying it in the vaguest sense as a ‘game’; then there’s the usage of a provided flowchart in, say, Fate/stay night that makes this tricky to address; on one hand, there’s the vague perception that you’re supposed to play it as is sans any help, yet at the same time know that it’s there if you need any.
Of course, as the English translation of F/sn comes with the flowchart present in the directory, I’m assuming that the original untranslated version already had such a thing in place.
Towards that end, how much more different is playing/reading a visual novel with a guide on hand? Not a lot, I’d reckon. There’s definitely a significant time discount when you consider the lack of Bad Ends/Dead Ends in and of themselves, but for the most part I was alt-tabbing out to see which choice I’d have to choose next before alt-tabbing back in.
Part of my curiosity on this stems from whether or not someone would have a greater sense of accomplishment and/or attachment to Shirou were they going from choice to choice like he would, instead of using cheats, as it were.