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What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

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Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#41

Post by amitport »

FractalParadigm wrote: post #15
wlesieutre wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they enjoy dissecting games as they play through, and the author is over here shouting no, you’re enjoying it wrong!

I would argue this the most likely case - I do similar with movies. It's usually not until the 2nd or even 3rd time through a movie I'll really pay attention and 'understand' the plot, I spend a lot of time focused on the background and technical aspects, trying to pick up on Easter eggs for instance, or marvelling at how well something was shot. You can ask me how I liked the movie, but it's highly unlikely I'll hav…

The mirror scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg

(Also, I completely agree with your view.)

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#42

Post by ascorbic »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #36

This is a weird piece. Writing generally pays poorly for most people and JK Rowling's first check was like $2000. Children's authors didn't get rich when she was writing the initial drafts of Harry Potter. It was her series that changed that fact and made it easier for other children's authors. Anyway, a lot of people do a thing to do the thing. Money isn't everything. It's weird this piece seems to be agog at the id…

You also can't compare the effort in writing a novel, which involves a huge amount of time planning the story and narrative structure, researching, editing dialogue, multiple re-writes and more, with writing a walkthorough which just involves describing what you see as you play the game.

The difficult bit of writing isn't the physical act of typing, it's all the time spent working out what to write. There's orders of magnitude less time needed for that in these.

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#43

Post by ezconnect »

zoomablemind wrote: post #7

[...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors “just enjoy the game;” instead they must “stop every 20 seconds to write something.” ...] Is this really the case? I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through…

I always look on how the game do the math, once I know how it computes probability I always lose interest on it. Discovering that through game play is entertaining for me.

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#44

Post by ascorbic »

Why does anyone write anything on the internet? Why am I writing this? People write for lots of reasons, and the motivation for writing walkthoughs and FAQs aren't any different to anything else: because people like expressing themselves, they like getting recognition (even if it's meaningless internet points), they're writing something to use themself, or they like the idea of helping out a project they support.

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#45

Post by DoreenMichele »

ascorbic wrote: post #42
DoreenMichele wrote: post #36

This is a weird piece. Writing generally pays poorly for most people and JK Rowling's first check was like $2000. Children's authors didn't get rich when she was writing the initial drafts of Harry Potter. It was her series that changed that fact and made it easier for other children's authors. Anyway, a lot of people do a thing to do the thing. Money isn't everything. It's weird this piece seems to be agog at the id…

You also can't compare the effort in writing a novel, which involves a huge amount of time planning the story and narrative structure, researching, editing dialogue, multiple re-writes and more, with writing a walkthorough which just involves describing what you see as you play the game. The difficult bit of writing isn't the physical act of typing, it's all the time spent working out what to write. There's orders of…

Yeah, JK Rowling has said that she wrote like twenty drafts of the first chapter of the first book and if you had read all twenty of them, you would basically know the entire story line. She has said the story came to her fully formed and then she spent ages trying to figure out the right way to tell it.

She used to walk her kid in a stroller until the kid fell asleep, then duck into an eatery of some sort owned by friends and write while the kid was sleeping. She would joke "When I'm famous, I will tell the world about your place!" and then did that after she actually got famous.

I think it took her like five years to get the first book written and published.

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#46

Post by adflux »

So this is not relevant at all but I thought I would share anyways. In high school I wrote a 30 page business plan on selling World of Warcraft guides. Keep in mind that WoW at its peak had more than 11 million players, all of which were paying around 14 dollars per month. Youtube, wow wiki and other sources of information weren't popular yet, so knowledge spread mostly from person through person. One of the many reasons people were already willing to pay substantial amounts for guides

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#47

Post by danbolt »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #23

How is this any different then old-school CRPG's and needing to make your own map using graph paper of dungeons? I remember NEEDING to do this in Pools of Radiance (IIRC), just to get around the dungeon, and make sure I found everything on the level. For those that don't remember the game, you moved one square at a time in a N,E,S,W direction. one move = one square on the graph paper. No helpful pointer arrows like o…

I’ve been playing the Nintendo Switch port of Phantasy Star lately, and there are some parts of the game where it’s not 100% intuitive where to go or what to do next (eg: hidden passages that look like walls in first-person view, asking an NPC the same question multiple times until they give a different response, etc.).

I really like the game’s charm and character, but there are elements that likely are more meant for a child playing over her summer vacation in the 1980s rather than an adult millennial in 2020. Being able to quickly look up the next step has been a huge boon to enjoying it for me. I’m thankful for those GameFAQs writers putting the time in!

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#48

Post by danbolt »

earthboundkid wrote: post #27

We’re told that we need capitalism because people are naturally lazy and won’t work unless compelled. But we see counter-evidence: people want glory (even lame nerd glory, like HN karma or writing a FAQ), and they’ll work for that, not just money.

I feel like the “managing burnout” articles and discussions here on HN add to that too. Even when given incentive via a salary it can be mentally or emotionally hard to stay motivated at one’s job. I appreciate that articles like this are helping us understand why people like to do things better.

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#49

Post by dgellow »

amitport wrote: post #41
FractalParadigm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue this the most likely case - I do similar with movies. It's usually not until the 2nd or even 3rd time through a movie I'll really pay attention and 'understand' the plot, I spend a lot of time focused on the background and technical aspects, trying to pick up on Easter eggs for instance, or marvelling at how well something was shot. You can ask me how I liked the movie, but it's highly unlikely I'll hav…

The mirror scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg (Also, I completely agree with your view.)

Wow, with the commentary it's also really cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxa3j8bK-c4

Re: What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs?

#50

Post by tialaramex »

wlesieutre wrote: post #9
zoomablemind wrote: post #7

[...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors “just enjoy the game;” instead they must “stop every 20 seconds to write something.” ...] Is this really the case? I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through…

Or they enjoy dissecting games as they play through, and the author is over here shouting no, you’re enjoying it wrong!

Ha. If they think that is enjoying the game wrong they're going to really struggle with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuZMvMtZCWU

PangeaPanga (a very good Mario player) made this Super Mario World hack named "Item Abuse 3" in 2015. The hack isn't human viable, it just contains so many frame perfect tricks that must be performed over and over or you die. Designing games, even very hard games is probably something the author can understand.

But this isn't about Panga's achievement, it's a TAS, a Tool Assisted Speedrun of Panga's hack. For Item Abuse 3 to make any sense Panga had to release a TAS of it anyway, as "Look this Mario hack is impossible" is not at all interesting, so the TAS is the only way to show that it's a complete technically beatable game that is also too hard to be possible.

But the TAS video I've linked above isn't Panga's proof of concept TAS, it's an independent effort. A whole group of people co-operatively came up with a way to beat this impossible SMW hack faster than Panga, spending hours on one trick, slowly making their way through the whole hack to shave off less than one minute.

Still that ought to be enough right? Nope. Here's XHF01X's even faster TAS of the same hack which entirely skips some of the already impossible stuff by doing even more impossible things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NWu_SqkkmA

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