Lunchtime Discussion: Manuals

The times they are a changing. The UK’s government is likely about to change after 13 years, vampires are now sparkly and the price of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream seems to be at an all time high. In gaming Ubisoft want to remove physical manuals, and I think I’ll probably miss them.

It seems odd that I’ll miss them, I rarely check them if I’m honest. Part of it’s just the smell that a freshly printed manual gives when you open a game up for the first time. I don’t really want to loose that smells, it’s part of the sensation that goes with getting a new game. However I think that the main reason is that I’m a very tactile person.

I may download a lot of songs from iTunes and listen to a lot on Spotify, but I still like buying CDs even if I only rip them to a PC straight away. I have hundreds of comics, most of which I could dispense with if I paid the subscription to Marvel’s online reader, but it’s just not the same reading them online. I still like reading newspapers and magazines, I can’t imagine replacing my physical books with an e-Reader. Just having the manual for a game falls into the same category, even if I don’t actually use it. Having it there to flick through if I need it has a somewhat comforting aspect, and if a manual is done well it genuinely can enhance a game.

Most games don’t even make an attempt to try and use manuals this way, but when they do it adds an extra dimension to the game’s world and story. Oddly I agree with David Jaffe on this concept, and that’s something I don’t say all that often. Creating a manual that adds to the game world isn’t an easy trick to pull it off, but if the developer/publisher manages to keep the whole manual within the world game their amusing at worst and a storytelling tool at best.

However Jaffe does suggest that if manuals do become digital, something that may seem inevitable with the growth of digital distribution, they could move to a system like magazines on the iPad, with multiple forms of interactive content all together in the manual. Yes physical manuals are great, but mixing audio and video elements in a fully interactive environment could be genuinely incredible. Just generating a virtual version of a physical manual isn’t the right way, this seems like a much better solution.

Will you miss manuals if everyone moves them to in-game digital copies, or will it make no difference to you? Do you ever actually use them, or do you figure it all out through tutorials? Would you love a fully interactive manual?

Thanks to cc_star for using his genius to suggest today’s topic and giving me the Jaffe sources. Got your own idea? Why not suggest it?