No Escape

Guides belong in the critical canon.

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by

Kaile Hultner
in ,

Despite their importance and utility, video game guides don’t get the critical respect they deserve. An argument, and an interview.

The very first game guide I ever remember using was the Pokémon Crystal guide put out by Prima Games (and which now goes for $100 a copy on eBay). I no longer have this, but I distinctly remember spending as much time poring over it as I did actually playing the integral Game Boy Color title.

I remember being fascinated by Crystal‘s overriding conceit compared to Gold and Silver, and the Prima Games guide had so many extra little details that my tiny ten-year-old brain had no chance of retaining on my own. With that guide, I made my first attempt at fully completing a video game, and to this day Crystal remains one of the very few Pokémon games I’ve actually bothered to finish.

In the intervening years and with various games, I’ve returned to guides only sporadically. If I’m playing a video game and get stuck somewhere, I will google for the solution, and inevitably land on the segment of a guide that gives me the answer. In doing so, I’m able to progress, and all is right in the world again. It’s rare that I use a guide for a game all the way through unless I’m trying to be a completionist, which itself is exceedingly rare, but this has the effect of making guides as a whole largely ephemeral to me. I know a few guides writers, but unlike other categories of journalist and critic in games, I seldom read their work – and arguably, they are doing the most important work in the industry. It sucks! I believe games guides should be valued for their contributions to the critical discussion just as highly as commentaries and reporting are. Part of valuing that work more highly involves understanding it better, so I asked Fanbyte guide writer Collin MacGregor to give us the rundown.

NO ESCAPE: I wanted to start with a pretty basic question: what do you find appealing about game guides and the writing of them?

Collin MacGregor: I suppose what drew me to guide writing is my love of seeing people grow as players. I used to watch that Cheat! show back when G4 was a thing on TV and was fascinated with the idea of someone’s entire job was uncovering a game’s secrets. It’s difficult to fully express, but I take a lot of joy from helping someone advance their mechanical skills or just clear a part they’ve been stuck on.

NE: I’ve been reading a lot of modern guides and what strikes me is that the language is often both very technical and lightly tinged with the personal – they’re written in much the same way as a how-to document on, say, resetting your phone, might be written, but also there are these little flourishes where the writer’s perspective shines through. Is that something you find important to include in your guide writing? Or is the focus more on simply being as broadly accessible as possible?

CM: It’s difficult, right? Like, my job at its core is to convey information with clarity and precision. I am ultimately trying to help someone and I don’t want to waste someone’s time as they read through a wave of jokes just to get to the meat of the guide.

I think it’s a tricky balance to strike, one I still struggle with. I do my best to inject my own personality and thoughts. But when you are doing a 12+ guides for an unreleased game you tend to just want to get through them some days. Then there are others where I just fuck about and write a joke guide for Super Mario RPG two decades later

Personally, I feel every guide can strike a balance between the personal and informative. It just takes a lot of time to hone your own format and voice.

NE: I’m currently using your Atlas Skews guide to catch up on the weekly D2 nonsense and the big thing I’m always curious about: how do guide writers manage to find all of the secrets in a game like Destiny, where the secrets are intentionally difficult? Who guides the guide makers, you might say?

Put another way, what is your process for writing guides broadly?

CM: It really depends on the guide and my time with it. If I have a game before the general public it’s a lot of scouring every surface and area in the map. Like for Resident Evil Village, I must have spent an additional dozen hours looking for every one of those god forsaken treasures on my own. It’s a long but important process. I usually just watch TV or a movie on another monitor to keep my sanity haha.

For a game like Destiny it’s a little different. Outside of my own searching, if I really find myself stuck I will use other sources like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. There are millions of people of these games and sometimes they simply see what I don’t. I’m not perfect when it comes to locating everything like collectibles. But I’m pretty diligent about crediting people if I do end up using them to help. I always feel you should lift those up who were the first to find “X.”

NE: It’s interesting that you mention giving credit to folks who found the things you may have missed, and that you not only utilize these nonstandard guide tools but also give credit to them when possible. In your view, is there tension between “official” guide writing and nonstandard stuff like walkthroughs, let’s plays, Twitter or Reddit threads, and so on?

CM: I mean the numbers don’t lie. As much as people like video walkthroughs or non-traditional methods there are some who prefer to just read a quick guide about it.

I’m not terribly worried about non traditional guide methods. This may make me a bit different than my peers but I’m not really worried about [guide writing] “dying” because it’s simply not true. Like, last week I [got] 20k views in a day on a Destiny guide. There’s always an audience and I don’t really see myself as competing because video and print are just different mediums.

NE: Do you think guide writing has a place in any kind of video game critical canon and what do you think critics can do to better integrate guides into the work they do?

CM: I’m not entirely sure if guides and critical writing can be melded more efficiently in terms of what sites themselves can do. It can be pretty tricky because they are worlds apart in terms of style and content.

That being said, I think it’s less on writers to integrate guides themselves into their writing [and instead] change perceptions on the guide writing as a whole. A lot of the problems stem from games media, especially legacy games media’s, perception that guides are the low man on the totem pole.

A lot of people still see guides as lesser or, at the very least, not as important outside of the financial value they bring. I feel it’s on everyone, guide writers and games media itself to be vocal about the importance of the people who “work behind the curtain” so others can write those important, investigative and emotional pieces.

NE: (I lied this is my actual last question: who are some other excellent guide writers you follow?)

CM: Sure. Some of the guide writers Im especially fond of are: