Walkthroughs and Wikis: The Many Faces of Game Strategy Guides

Editor’s note: As a former strategy guide author, I figured free online walkthroughs (and later, wikis) would’ve killed print strategy books long ago. They haven’t, although it may still be a matter of time. Brian takes a look at various game strategy resources, and, as usual, adds his own excellent photography to his post. -Demian 

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Paperback books full of all-text TIPS! and TRICKS!, game booklets with a friend’s older brother’s method for beating Star Tropics scribbled on the ‘notes’ page, that Battletoads map from Nintendo Power — these were the strategy guides of my youth. The discussion in Mobcast episode 36 and a serendipitous find at a local Half Price Books got me thinking about different kinds of strategy guides, and how they do what they do.

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The Star Wars: TIE Fighter strategy guide definitely isn’t a conventional guide. It doesn’t tell you what to do, for starters — it presents the mission strategies as past-tense, first-person “After-Action Report” narratives by Maarek Stele, Imperial pilot (“more of The Stele Chronicles, the exciting novella included with the game,” according to the back of the book). And it’s got a handy, 200-page appendix of mission data, organized in tables for your perusal.

While the order of the missions can’t change, the missions themselves can play out in many different ways. Since the game is more on the simulation end of things, this glut of data might actually be useful to someone planning their own strategies. Would it have been useful to me when I was playing TIE Fighter? I can’t say. Probably not.

TIE Fighter takes you from point A to point B to point C, where each point has a lot of variety, but the path between them is fixed. Traditional strategy guides work fine in cases like this, but for games such as Dragon Age: Origins or Fallout 3 with an unfixed order of events, wikis do a better job.

If strategy guides are ultimately reference texts, wikis are reference texts exploded: their hypertext, searchable nature allows you to jump to the info you need as you need it.

(Side note to BioWare and Bethesda: If you’re going to collect copious backstory text into an in-game “codex” or whatever, take a cue from wikis and make them more accessible. Links between entries, searches — it’s interactive entertainment, so why not make reading the text more interactive?)

Partly because of their crowd-sourced nature, wikis are great for deep, non-linear games with large fanbases. One thing wikis sacrifice, though, is the “expert gamer” authority implicit in other kinds of game guides.

Or that authority could be explicit, as in the case of video walkthroughs and speed-run videos (which act as de facto walkthroughs) posted to sites like YouTube. These give viewers the audiovisual experience of a game minus the interactivity, and can be the absolutely best way to convey certain kinds of strategy information, but it’s also more difficult to find exactly what you want.

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Video walkthroughs can also discourage second playthroughs and multiple endings — why play Bioshock a second time, sacrificing all the Little Sisters, when you can just watch the alternate ending online?

And then, of course, we still have traditional strategy guides from companies like Prima and Brady. These books enjoy a brief advantage over Internet strategy sources — they’re on sale when the game debuts, and free online wikis and GameFaqs walkthroughs take a little while to catch up. Official guides often leverage their access as well, adding concept art, behind-the-scenes information, interviews, and company histories (as the Mirror’s Edge strategy guide does), until they become part art book, part guide. 

Data tables, illustrated instructions, graphs, maps, and videos are all ways to convey strategy information, and are also, in a sense, different media adaptations of a game’s content, and different ways for gamers to experiences the games. It could be really interesting to do case study comparisons of particular games and the variety of strategy sources for those game, to see what their respective strengths and weaknesses are. Volunteers?

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