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Games Entertainment

On The Life Of A Game Guide Writer 40

Posted by simoniker from the ay-ay-captain dept.
marcot writes "The Canadian National Post has a story on the life of a videogame guidebook writer. I can't work out if it's a dream job or torture." Michael Lummis, the writer in question, "has done about a dozen books for [BradyGames] in the last 18 months", but says that contact with the game's developers "...is finite. They're working 18-hour [days] just like we are." We've previously discussed the pluses and minuses of paper-based 'official' game guides.
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On The Life Of A Game Guide Writer More

On The Life Of A Game Guide Writer

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  • Game Guides (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @06:04PM (#9001649) Homepage Journal
    We've previously discussed the pluses and minuses of paper-based 'official' game guides.

    The problem with "official" game guides is that the game publisher usually uses them as an excuse not to include a manual with the game.
    • ..and that if there really is a problem with the game, it's not intentional nor official, so gamefaqs is the better solution. .. and really, don't except to make an easy living making something people shouldn't really need to pay for.

      • Re:Game Guides (Score:5, Informative)

        by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @06:28PM (#9001923) Journal
        Beyond paying for what you can get for free, GameFAQs (despite having a pretty high crap:gold ratio itself) also has better quality guides.

        There used to be a game retailer in my area that would give you the guide for free if the game cost something like $50 or more, so I ended up with a number of them (before they went out of business). Every single one of them is arife with blatant mistakes: Wrong solutions to puzzels, bad data in tables (wrong HP counts for example), stupidly bad strategies (the one that came with Starcraft suggeted Zerglings as a counter to Carriers), or negligent errors (repeated misspellings of a charactter's name, mixing up location names, and so on).

        The free guides on a site like GameFAQs have the same problems, but they have two advantages:
        1. There's usually more than one guide, so if one doesn't work, try another - one's just as free as the next.
        2. They can be easily revised with corrected data, data that wasn't known when the guide was first written, or improved strategies. Once a book is printed and sold, you're mistakes are pretty much written in stone.

        • Re:Game Guides (Score:5, Funny)

          by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @06:31PM (#9001959)
          zerglings are a great counter to mass carriers. If he had a bunch of carriers, he has most of his unit mass invested in them. It means his base is probably undefended. Counter attack and destroy all his expansions, while using your hydras and a defiler to destroy the carriers.

          • Re:Game Guides (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @06:39PM (#9002035) Journal
            True, but here's the quote from the guide:

            "Carriers are the Protoss's ultimate offensive unit (edited for length) the fact that their attack is distributed from eight different sources, they are inneffective against heavily armored units like zerglings. Also, their poor armor makes them susceptible to many of the same units."

            Maybe had they said Battlecruiser here, they'd be on the right track - a cruiser's armor and offensive power are death to a carrier. However, zerglings are neither well-armored nor prepared to take advantage of Carrier's weak defense. Scourge are the best way to take down a Carrier, due both to their poor defense and their slow retargeting.
            • Zergling... heavy armor? What the fuck was he smoking?

              Scourge work and are great on a price comparison for a carrier, but you need to be careful and hit the carrier, not the little flying things (can't think of their name- interceptors?) I'd still take a defiler and some hydras. Dark cloud and the carrier is useless, and hydra's do great damage against large units. If you have a 2nd defiler or the extra mana, hit it with plague too, and its dead meat. The defiler was really the most under utilized unit

        • Re:Game Guides (Score:5, Interesting)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @07:16PM (#9002389) Homepage Journal
          of course they are, since they're WRITTEN BEFORE THE GAME IS FINISHED. how could they be accurate? which was kinda my point of when I said that such guides can't counter the real need that the gamefaqs and forums fill that spawns from blatant errors in the game.

          they're fucking ripoffs and on the borderline of being scams. so really,if you work 18 hours a day writing them maybe you should think of an another job? because most of the games that you those guides are for can be played through in 18 hours once you have the real game without any guides at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of the games they're writing guides for(that don't really need any guides) can be played through in under 12h, which would leave 6hours left to write the guide(you could have been snapping screenshots on the way).

          granted, it must be much harder to write guides like the halflife2 guide on amazon, since with them you have to improvise a lot more and not just write under every screenshot how to solve the puzzle that doesn't make sense.

        • "you're mistakes are pretty much written in stone."

          On slashdot, your mistakes are, too.
        • I agree. Their guides are inaccurate. I remember full on writing like a full third of a guide for a game I was QA-ing (The monster stats, weapons stats, item stats, etc.) and while they put their names up there as authors, I got a "thanks to QA."

          Every other guide they did for us besides that was full of errors, which our department would point out, and they wouldn't fix.

          Working an 18-hour day is kind of useless if you aren't bothering to do any work.

  • Their lives are totally sweet! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @06:18PM (#9001816)
    I know a dude who totally does this gig. He is porking chicks like left and right, which is bragable. One time he was just writing up a guide and this dude was walking by playing a guitar, which was really annoying. So, he like flips out and totally kills the dude like in one blow. It was totally awesome. After that he did like 8 chicks at once.

    When I get older I'm going to do the same thing. Word is bond.

  • Obligatory PA Link (Score:5, Funny)

    by |/|/||| ( 179020 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @07:04PM (#9002296)

    Contrary to popular belief, GameFAQs just can't do everything [penny-arcade.com] that a printed strategy guide can do.

  • I don't think writing a Guide would be much fun (Score:5, Insightful)

    by incubusnb ( 621572 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @07:09PM (#9002332) Homepage Journal
    you stop playing the game for fun, and start playing the game to find out how it ticks and where all the stuff is. you spend more time writing notes and drawing maps than you do playing the game. then you get to spend multiple hours putting a book together based on your notes, and then you run into the problem of one or two of your notes being wrong so you go back through the game again to make sure your notes are right.

    that in itself isn't the biggest problem, its when the Boss says "your gonna write a Guide for Game X" but Game X sucks and is probably the worst game ever made... nonetheless, you still have to go though it and figure everything out even though you wouldn't have given it the time of day anywhere else.

    this is why sites like GameFAQs are so great, because the people who write the Guides actually Like tha Game enough to put in their own time and Effort, it may not be the Best Quality Guides, but the people that write them are doing it because they enjoy it.

    • I've written several (particularly a static quest guide for a small MMORPG I play). It's actually quite fun, provided you love the game, and enjoy writing. If you're not obsessed with the game, though, it can be hard to push yourself to work on the guide.
    • Some people are really into dissecting games, however. Agree with the point on having to play Game X, even though Game X sucks. :)
    • It depends. I imagine that someone slaving away at a bad game on a tight deadline with little help from developers wouldn't have much fun.

      But I've been fortunate in that sense; I've always been able to pick which guides to do, and it's always been fun. Often downright joyful, in fact. You never get closer to a game than when you write a guide.

      (Then again, I'm not making a living doing guides; if I had to knock out 12 books in 18 months, as the feliow in the article did, I suspect I'd like it less.)

      P

  • Next time you see someone working an 18 hour day,
    remember to kick them in the crotch. I would suggest
    killing them, but they'll be dead soon enough that
    it's not worth the hard time.

  • Don't buy an MMO guide unless... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fiz Ocelot ( 642698 ) <baelzharon.gmail@com> on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @07:24PM (#9002431)
    It's strictly for a good laugh. The guide is written before the game is done, so it's generally very innacurate. Such as when I looked at a guide for SWG a while ago. It was so far off on so many things it was just hilarious.

    Also buying a guide for an mmo does not make you look like the smartest person in the store. It's like saying,"Hey, I have access to tons of up-to-date information, but I'll use this instead!" ;)

    • Most print game guides are made before the game comes out (which explains such hilarious mistakes as bosses having 1 hp instead of 250000 or entire levels being left out).

      MMO games are even worse, because the games are usually actively developed well after they're released, and anything and everything in them is subject to change with any given update.
    • Agreed. I *reluctantly* bought the strat guide to Shadowbane shortly after it released. I knew that a lot of the info was incorrect (and yet, not all that much worse than their website), but it was vitally important for my guild to have the build costs and maintenance costs of the various buildings, so we could get our city going, and the info was not (reliably) available on the net yet.

      Two weeks later, Wolfpack changed all those costs. (And didn't bother to say more than that they "lowered" them.) Effecti

  • Talent (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @07:30PM (#9002480)
    "It's nice to work at something you know you have talent in and have the freedom to put a lot of yourself into. That's a great job possibility no matter what talents you have. Just to get to work in something you like."

    Talent? More like being in the right place, at the right time, and saying/writing the right thing. Look at some of the FAQs/Strategy Guides/Lists at GameFAQs. Some of them are over 100 pages long, others have multiple parts. This guy writes a 380 page FAQ and gets paid for it. Not to mention the fact that pictures take up a good chunk of room...

    Considering theres still no 'standard' to anything gaming yet (we don't even have a consistant set of rules regarding spawn killing) getting a job as a strategy guide writer is not something you can apply for just by sending in a resume. Nor can you point to some work online since they probably wouldn't trust your word. Nor can you say you deserve the job just because you beat X games in Y time, etc...

    • Yeah, why don't we take a quick look at some of the FAQs on GameFAQs? Most of them are absolutely fucking terrible. Only the games with a huge fan base have good FAQs, and even then you end up looking through at least four or five FAQs before you find all the information you really want.

      Now granted, it's free. So I'm really not bitching. But the quality of work going into the official FAQs is generally much higher from stem to stern; editing, language, etc. On the other hand, the guides are often incorrec

    • Considering theres still no 'standard' to anything gaming yet (we don't even have a consistant set of rules regarding spawn killing)

      I don't see how you could possibly me more wrong. #1 There are plenty of standards in gaming, at least console gaming. But based on your *ahem* blunt opinions I'm going to guess you are a PC gamer so what do you care. #2 Its a goddamn good thing there aren't standards such as rules regarding spawn killing. This is called design and what works for one game might not work

  • Favorite game guides? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linzeal ( 197905 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @08:59PM (#9003171) Journal
    My favorite by far was the from the veritable Fallout Series [amazon.com] of games that stylyzed itself as a post-nuclear apocolypse survival manual. With the omnipresent cartoonish vault 13 guy in all sorts of situations from radiation poisoning to drug abuse.
  • give me a walkthrough.

  • Actually (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday April 29, 2004 @01:19PM (#9008927) Journal

    Actually, they're starting to figure it out.

    Brady's 'Signature Series' tries to make the strat guide as much an artbook as anything else; also put some info onto big posters and what not.

    I picked up the strat guides for FFX/FFX-2 because they're beautiful books (good paperstock and everything) which, for example, even my wife likes to just pick up and flip through.

    Or the strat guides for Master of Magic or MOO 1 or Civ 1; works of genius. The guide for Civ3 or Moo3, however; useless. As with Internet guides, it's hit and miss.

  • Some guides are worth it not necessarily for having the information a player needs (which can usually be found in FAQs or other online resources) but for the sheer fun of reading them. Morrowind GOTY's strategy is both _really_ useful and frickin' hilarious. It's fun to read. I finished the book before I had even hit level 3, just reading it for fun.

    Just like regular publishing, if game guides want to keep up with demand and reach their markets, they have to do more than just diagram quests -- they have

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