Game Brain: Read the manual… before it’s gone

By Brian Diefenbach
Western Herald

A little bird told me (not the Twitter bird. I’d shoot it with a BB gun if I could) that video game manuals are going the way of the dodo.

It’s no surprise, really. Everywhere you look, print publications are shutting down and consolidating. The time and expense that goes into designing, printing, binding, and packaging an instruction booklet with every game just isn’t worth it anymore.

The Internet is the biggest contributor to the decline of printing. With near widespread Internet access throughout the nation and the rest of the world, gamers have no need to thumb through a booklet to find out which button is “jump.”

One can find pretty much anything they want to know about a game on the Internet in seconds flat. Can I reconfigure my control scheme? What specs does my PC need to run it? Any cheat codes? Is there porn featuring the game characters (Internet Rule 34: if it exists, there’s porn of it)?

Many if not all video games have “How to Play” sections in their help and options menus. Between in-game features and the magic of the Internet, game manuals have become obsolete. The ones that still exist today are usually only a few pages, half of which are dedicated to credits and legal notices (no seizures for me, thanks).

If you’re feeling nostalgic for the hefty game manuals of yore, there’s plenty to sate you on the Internet. A Google search for “video game manuals” brings up Web sites dedicated to preserving print manuals.

If you embrace the digital revolution, you can just read your PlayStation 3 installation instructions online. Why risk a paper cut and tiny print when you can copy/paste and save?

The space normally reserved for game manuals in today’s video game packaging is being taken up by advertising inserts. A few promotions are useful (like free Xbox Live trials), but mostly they’re just packaged junk mail.

One could argue that the shift away from paper manuals to electronic versions is green, eco-friendly, sustainable, or any other hippie buzzword you can think of.

Sure, you don’t have to make the paper, ink, and coatings for the manual. You also don’t have to ship palettes of them across the country, burning fuel and leaving a hefty “carbon footprint.”

However, think about the all the juice it takes to keep your computer running and supply you with fresh-squeezed Internet every day. I submit that the digitization of what was once print isn’t necessarily a victory for Mother Nature. Rather, it’s what some lunkhead CEO would call a “paradigm shift.”

Speaking of the green movement, video game packaging has been slimming down lately. You may have noticed some newer game cases with less material on the inside (i.e. there’s holes in it). I’ll admit that reducing the bulk of material used to make a game case is a step in the right direction. But if you really want to be green, games would come in brown board boxes.

Do you really think all that plastic and green dye that makes up your Xbox 360 game case is eco-friendly? Only if there’s a species of microbe that thrives on that stuff, which there just might be. I propose a survey of the grout in Western Michigan University’s dorm bathrooms before we rule out the possibility.

I’ve always had a soft spot for game box art and manuals. They used to be artistic and actually expand on the presentation of the game. Now, they’re built solely for durability, marketing, and security. Even games themselves are starting to go package-less with digital downloads.

A lot of gamers argue that they will always prefer to have a game case and disc in their hand over a nebulous cluster of files that make up a digital download. Maybe hard copies will never entirely disappear; they’ll just have to scoot over for newer technologies.

Like this column here. You, holding a newspaper column in your hands, are a minority among today’s media consumers. Sure, every column is posted online for reading 24/7, 365 no matter where you are. But doesn’t that cheapen it a little?

One person with a computer, Internet connection, and some software can create and present whatever they want for the whole world to see.

To be an old-school writer, you need credentials, an editor, and an organization to publish your work. That didn’t always mean high-quality work, but at least it stood for something.

Nowadays, with everyone able to consume and create at the push of a button, it’s an arduous task to get anyone to even notice the work put into a printed piece.

It’s a harsh new world for printers and publishers to adapt to, one in which there’s no manual for success… in print or otherwise.
Brian Diefenbach, a copy editor and columnist for the Western Herald, is a senior majoring in graphics and printing science. For more Game Brain, visit WesternHerald.com

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Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 3 2010. Filed under A & E, Weekend Scene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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