Tag: walkthroughs

#oneaday Day 408: Don't spoil yourself

One thing that I've become quite frustrated with in the last 10 years or so is the prevalence of "guide content" on video game websites. Guides and walkthroughs have always been a thing, of course, and I completely understand why sites feel the need to get guides up day-one when a big new video game comes out: they are freshly-squeezed, ready-mixed SEO juice just waiting to be taken advantage of, and if you're a site that makes the majority of its money from ad impressions, you would probably be foolish not to take advantage of the immediate thirst for knowledge that comes with the release of a new game.

Now, I won't be hypocritical and say I've never looked at a guide for a game. Some games, one feels, were designed in such a way that looking at a guide — particularly the Official Strategy Guide, back when those were still a thing — is near-essential if you want to see everything that the game has to offer. Take something like Final Fantasy VII's chocobo breeding, for example; while you probably could work all that out yourself, it would take a very long time to do so, and it would be hard not to end up resenting the time you'd spent on failed experiments.

But I feel like the deliberate, immediate posting of Guide Content the second a new game releases is destroying the sense of wonderment and discovery we should have with a brand new game. Hell, game developers themselves are absolutely spoiling their own games — one can't help but feel that Pauline's reveal in Donkey Kong Bananza would be a thousand times more impactful if we hadn't had it completely spoiled weeks in advance by Nintendo's own trailers — but all Guide Content does, for me, is instil a sense of FOMO, and that one should be playing the game as "efficiently" as possible. Consume content until next product, then get excited for new product, or whatever the quote was.

I've been deliberately trying to avoid looking at guides for Donkey Kong Bananza while I'm playing it, and I'm having a good time doing so. Of course, the game featuring a "checklist" of all the things you have and haven't found also instils that same sense of FOMO, even though you absolutely do not need to "find everything" in order to 1) have a good time with or 2) beat Donkey Kong Bananza. As such, I've found it very hard to resist just sneaking a peek at a guide or two just to fill in the few frustrating spaces I have left in my list. But that stops here and now! I'm going to get through the rest of the game at my own pace, and then use the game's own built-in features — you can buy maps with the in-game gold to show you where the collectibles are, but you still have to determine how to get there yourself — to finish the game to my own satisfaction.

Games shouldn't feel like work, and the risk you run when having a guide by your side at all times is turning them into a chore. Games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Zelda and suchlike are made to be enjoyed, savoured, experienced at the player's own pace; you absolutely lose something if all you do is immediately look up where everything is.

I will add at this point that none of this is to take away from the sterling work good guide creators do. IGN's guides are particularly impressive, featuring interactive maps and checklists so those who do want to play the game in that way can not only read the guide, but also mark off their progress. I just wish there weren't so many of them, and that looking up information for a game around launch didn't immediately bombard you with the temptation to spoil the shit out of it for yourself.

I guess it's all about self-control. GameFAQs has been a thing almost as long as the Internet has, after all; all that's happened now is that commercial sites are using guides to juice their own SEO. Which makes commercial sense, but also, speaking as someone who was laid off from a publication and immediately plonked on "Guide Content" duty to keep him out of trouble during his notice period, is immensely demoralising and frustrating to see.

There are amazing writers out there crying out for opportunities to do good criticism and analysis. And yet it feels like nine opportunities out of every ten posted online in the games biz these days are to be a "guides editor" — a job that, in most cases, is underpaid, utterly thankless and easy to blame if the site's traffic figures aren't where they should be.

Anyway, back to Donkey Kong Bananza. Without a guide.

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2242: Another Frustrating Way Clickbait Ruins the Internet

0242_001

Earlier today, I was browsing around the Internet looking for some tips and tricks on how to better play Dungeon Travelers 2. I tried GameFAQs, and the content there was disappointingly light, though there is a good character guide at least. Then I resorted to Google, and I was reminded of something that's been bugging me for a while.

Here's my Google results for "dungeon travelers 2 walkthrough":

Dungeon Googlers 2.png

"Oh," I thought, skipping past the GameFAQs entry because I'd already checked it out. "There's some more walkthroughs out there. IGN have got one, huh? Well, that should be decent enough."

As anyone who has ever attempted to look at one of IGN's walkthroughs — or indeed one on the "GameWise" site above it — will know… no. This is emphatically not the case. Here is IGN's walkthrough for Dungeon Travelers 2:

IGN DT2.png

That's right! There's absolutely fuck all there besides the most basic database information for the game itself. And if you thought GameWise might be any better, being higher ranked on Google? Nope.

GameWise DT2.png

GameWise takes considerably more words to say that it doesn't have any content for the guide, and outright lies to the reader by saying its "team of contributors will help you work through the game via a step-by-step tutorial" and that it will "take you all the way through the game to 100% completion including unlockable quests and items". It's boilerplate text, of course, but it's complete bollocks and, more to the point, it's evidence of a particularly dishonest practice that goes on alarmingly frequently these days: sites that put up "landing pages" for things that people might be searching for, then don't populate them with content right away (or sometimes, as we can see here, at all) so that they can get some of that sweet, sweet ad revenue by someone who doesn't know any better clicking on them without having to put any actual work in.

This is actively making the Internet less useful, particularly as both IGN and GameWise have clearly made the effort to get themselves highly ranked on Google as a "trustworthy" source. And indeed both of these sites may well have helpful walkthroughs and guides for more mainstream, popular games, and in that instance, them showing up on Google is absolutely fine. But to list a "false positive" result like this is extremely dishonest and incredibly frustrating for the reader.

I'm reminded of the evolution of my time at USgamer. When the site launched, each of us on the team were specifically given pretty much free reign to cover what we wanted in our own personal style: the thinking was very much along the lines of 1up.com back in the glory days, when there would be distinct "personalities", each with their own specialisms, building up their own communities of readers. It was great; it was fun to write, and the community appreciated this honest style of writing.

Unfortunately, it didn't satisfy the suits as it wasn't raking in enough ad revenue. So out went the freedom and in came a more strict regime. Whereas once I took the approach that I had once taken so successfully on GamePro — look out for things that looked interesting that other sites hadn't covered in detail, then cover them in detail — I was reduced to having to seek approval for every news story I posted, and this led USgamer's news section to start looking more and more like every other gaming news site out there, covering the same old stories in the same old way.

This only got worse once I got laid off and was working out my notice; the site started to post guide content for recently released games, partly through the site's partnership with Prima Games, whose website was also part of the Gamer Network umbrella. I had to split guides into parts so they could be published across several days and rake in more clicks than they would have done if posted all in one lump; worse, I didn't have the creativity to write my own stuff, since all the content was already done and I was pretty much reduced to being a data entry person, editing and tidying up the raw copy so it looked good on the site. And, of course, even worse than that, the hours that I was tied up pissing around with these stupid guides were hours that I couldn't spend writing more interesting things or telling people about games they might not have heard of before. (I am 100% sure that this was deliberate.)

Guide content has its place, but it should be on a dedicated site that specialises in it — such as GameFAQs — not used as insultingly transparent bait to get people to visit your site and cross your fingers that they might read something else you've written while they're there. (They won't.) And it absolutely, definitely should not be used in the way IGN and GameWise use it, which is to hook people in without actually providing any content at all.

It's not just guide content, of course — IGN in particular has been caught playing the SEO game with articles about games and tricking Google into thinking they are "reviews" when they're nothing of the sort — but guide content represents by far the most egregious examples of this bullshit going on.

If you are engaging in this, you are making the Internet a less useful place to find information. Stop being a cunt and write something helpful to go with your beautifully optimised search engine bullshit, or don't list the page at all.