Game Guides: How The Art of Cheating Has Disappeared

My office is filled with books and on the bottom shelf is a treasure trove of old game guides. I’ll never need to know how to win at Gangsters again, but it’s there, ready for an emergency.

Nostalgia – it’s the only reason to keep them. They’re worth pennies, if that. But they remind me of a better time: the days when you could look up a problem in any video game without hearing the phrase “like and subscribe”.

I have a set of old printouts too. We didn’t have a printer, so a friend’s dad found us a guide to Discworld and – bless them – sorted it out for us. I have guides to Sonic Adventure filed away in a mess of other Dreamcast crap I’ll sort out one day. Although, more likely, my grandkids can do it when I’m dead.

The point being that 20 years ago, gaming solutions had a weight to them.

Game Guides – Collections for Dinosaurs

It’s definitely an age thing. If a normal person wants to find something else, they go to YouTube, watch a 20 second video, get on with their day. I don’t have that power.

I’ll do anything I can to avoid going to YouTube. I don’t want someone with better hair than me helping me out with something I’m too lazy to work out on my own. Give me the good old Gamefaqs nerds, at the very least. Guides on how to find everything in Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Yup, I followed a Gamefaqs guide.

And it’s not just game guides, it’s everything. The internet is a treasure trove of brilliant how-tos, and it would be so easy to click a video. But why, when you can spend 10 minutes scrolling through a guide you ultimately discover is incorrect anyway. Happens all too often, actually.

Want to know how to fix your car? Who is that guy in that thing? All those questions are easily answered with two seconds of Googling. In fact, any question is available with two seconds of Googling. Ranging from the mundane to the life-saving, and only a click away.

That can apply to any part of our life. In case of gaming, gambling or any from of entertainment.  Just imagine You are started you usual weekend game of poker and had a good run now thinking how to withdraw money from Ladbrokes? Of the first site you might think it is straight forward, but id does require to do few steps to follow in order to get money transferred especially if You doing it first time.  Like with everything around You need to learn how to do it and quite often using simple internet guide can speed up that process.

YouTube, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as easy to use. You have to watch endless adverts to get to the clip you want, then spend time actually finding the information. A moment’s search becomes a ten minute palaver.

It’s not that I hate YouTube. It’s more just that I don’t like YouTube culture. The comments are toxic. The YouTubers are toxic. Even the adverts are toxic. Know what isn’t toxic? My Unofficial Guide to Final Fantasy VIII.

Bookkeeping

I know, I know. It doesn’t make sense. I know I sound like the old lady who still travels 30 miles for that shop she likes instead of just ordering it online. Those people annoy me too – except when they’re me.

It’s the low production values of YouTube gaming guides that frustrate me: the ridiculous narration, the “like and subscribe”. The fact that it takes you two minutes of moving the video along for them to get to the damn point.

And this isn’t even a criticism of them. It’s a me problem – and I know it’s not a problem I’m alone in.

There are still proper physical game guides being published today, so someone must be buying them. Websites still put up written guides every single day, and someone must be reading them.

Crazy people like me are everywhere, and I’m glad I’m not alone.