Going Beyond the Monitor
The last few weeks, I have been spending some quality time re-browsing some old, classic RPGs. Call it research. One of the things I've been looking over has been the game manuals.

Remember those? Okay, some of you may not.

The manual for Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is 128 pages long. By comparison, the entire Player's Handbook for 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was also ... 128 pages long. Now, the former had slightly larger type and was only half-sized, but still...!

Checking out this manual, and the one for Might & Magic: World of Xeen, I was struck by the thought that they'd only have to add a section for dice-rolling and you'd practically have a playable pen & paper RPG with these manuals alone. They even included a section for new gamers explaining "what is a role-playing game?" Clearly, they were trying to emulate the pen & paper experience for computer gamers as much as possible.

Since I am doing this as research for that little gaming project of mine, I'm finding the books even more interesting now than when I originally played those games. They were thorough, informative, and filled with "fluff" that was of interest to maybe only 10% of the players. In the case of the Wizardry 7 manual, it was apparently a big part of the job of Brenda Braithwaite, formerly Brenda Garno. The hefty game manual had quality born of some sincere attention paid to it as part of the gaming experience. .

The "offline" paper manual has all but disappeared in recent years, aside from flimsy jewel-case inserts that warn of epileptic seizure risks, provide installation instructions, and try to upsell you on more products. With digital distribution becoming ever more popular, I don't expect to see them return. Besides, having the instructions there, in the game, is usually more useful. The paper manuals were there because it was too unwieldy to put all that text on the two 1.44 meg floppy disks, and to serve as a horrible copy-protection mechanism, to instruct the user on how to play the game, and to entertain the players and help draw them into the game's setting.

It's that last part that I miss.

Now, I'll admit - even back in the day, I didn't read through most paper documentation fully. I'd browse through the docs while waiting for the game to install, for looking up questions in the middle of the game, and for those times when I had to pause in my gaming for an extended bathroom break. But I actually read through the very good ones just for their own entertainment value. Browsing through the Wizardry 7 manual - which has gathered dust for something like sixteen years - I'm discovering a few things I didn't know when I was actually playing the game. Maybe that's why I never finished it! My bad.

But there were quite a few that were genuine pleasures to read. They were entertaining in their own right, and reading the documentation actually contributed to the enjoyment of the game. Reading the manual (often while waiting for the game to install) exposed you to promises of the amazing adventure the game had to offer. They helped provide context for the game, immersing you in the fiction or setting in a way that the underpowered computers of the day could not. And the best ones extended the experience of the game beyond the computer in a way that modern games can not.

Origin had some of the best documentation for their games back in the 80's and early 90's. They tried to turn their "accessories" into things that would go beyond merely informing and assisting the player. Their game manuals posed as official documents from the game world. They were entertaining, informative, and extended the fiction of the game beyond the confines of the computer. The Wing Commander manual posed as an issue of the ship's official magazine, and the game included technical spec sheets on each of the fighters (lamentably, those specs were also used as copy protection...) The poor graphics of the older Ultima games were compensated for in the documentation with Denis Loubet's excellent sketches and evocative cover art. Much of the detail that was lost in those early games due to technical restrictions was poured instead poured into the booklets that shipped with the games. The Ultima games also included other accessories - like cloth maps, moonstones, ankhs, and other little touches to try and make the game come more alive in the minds and hearts of players.

One of the best game manuals of all time came with Their Finest Hour - The Battle of Britain by Larry "X-Wing" Holland for Lucasfilm (later "LucasArts"). The book is still wonderful long after the game has been wiped from my hard drive. Besides instructions for playing the game, it also includes detailed information on the aircraft of the era, combat tactics, and the history of the Battle of Britain, and it has a number of stories and vignettes from the battle told by actual participants on both sides of the conflict.

I don't know if we'll see the like of these manuals again. Most of the required function of game manuals has been fortunately pulled into the game itself, in the form of user-friendlier context-sensitive help and tutorials. I'd still much rather jump right into the game than spend twenty minutes getting "prepped" by reading a book. But that little extension of the game outside the confines of your monitor or TV set that the better documentation provided - that was pretty dang awesome.

Can we still have that? Maybe. While it loses its bathroom-and-bedroom reading potential, there are some games which have adopted the Web as the place to make the game come alive with supplemental materials. Depths of Peril, in particular, has provided short stories, news, instructions, and a small "monster manual" on its official website. While many of these elements can be (and are) incorporated into the game itself, when you are playing a game, your brain goes into a different mode that - at least for me - isn't quite so conducive to reading (unless I'm playing a text adventure).

Are there other ways of capturing this aspect of the silver age of gaming, short of actually printing out 128-page manuals and sending them to players in the era of digital distribution?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:58 AM (Permalink)