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?