It’s time to upgrade our 1996 guide writing standard.
The good old-fashioned ASCII text guide. I believe every gamer in the world, has at one point, looked one up to help them through the various road blocks they’ve come across in their gaming world.
Go to any of the major gaming sites right now: Gamespot, IGN, GameFAQs and you’ll realize that the majority of guides they have are still published as all text on notepad! Even games that are recently released still have text based guides published for them: Left 4 Dead, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5, just to name a few.
Come on people, it’s 2009. We’re gaming on PS3’s and 360’s, we’ve built space stations – in space, and according to Terminator Salvation we’re only 9 years away from John Connor battling the first T-800 model terminators. Yet, after all of this, we’re still publishing our game guides on Notepad!
Now before the text-based guide loyalist run rampant on me, I want to make completely clear that I appreciate all of the time and effort each guide writer puts into making a full blown text guide. I still find myself coming across quality text guides that help me unlock important achievements or educating me on how to play a specific class or character. It’s just that I feel that the time and effort going into the intricacies of creating ASCII art for a PS3 controller that shows me where the square button is in relation to the R2 button isn’t completely necessary. Let’s try to avoid time worrying about the obvious and spend more time improving the overall standard of a game guide.
Just in case you didn't know the location of the triangle and circle button
Pure text, all the ASCII art, having to cleverly encrypt our e-mail address in our guides to avoid “spambots” – It’s not entirely clear to me why we do this, why the guide writing culture is still stuck in 1996. Maybe it’s the lack of accessibility to add media such as in-game images and video to enhance our guides. Or perhaps it’s the nostalgic look and feel of having a guide in ASCII text. Whatever the reason, we should collectively make an effort to improve our text guides. One major improvement I’d like to see would be easier guide navigation. As a guide reader I’d prefer to see a nice table of contents with click-able links as opposed to taking several minutes doing a “crtl-f” through a 3MB text file. Another immediate improvement would be to make huge blocks of text more consumable for guide readers by throwing in the occasional bold or italics when applicable.
Back in 1996, having an ASCII text guide seemed like the most efficient and functional way to deliver guide content across the internet. During that time we had browser compatibility issues that did a poor job handling HTML and having a guide in text format was a fine solution. Fortunately for us, web technologies have improved to the point that people who know nothing about creating a web page can easily plop one up without having to dump out a single line of HTML code. As a person who relies on the contribution and hard-work of the guide writing community, I’d love to see us take improvements towards writing guides that incorporate a more aesthetically pleasing and functional style. We can collectively help each other get there, slowly but surely.
One of my favorite pieces of ASCII art. Snow Dragon depiction of the cashier behind the ticket prizes (Snow Dragon
