Why game manuals suck (and should be outlawed)

A few weeks ago, Ubisoft announced that it had decided to ditch video game manuals in all of its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 titles. The company said that its decision was based on the desire to be more environmentally responsible. In fact, it expects to save more than 2,300 trees by eliminating six million manuals in its 2010 fiscal year alone. In their place, Ubisoft plans to offer "digitized" versions of manuals that, according to the company, will offer "more robust content." Just what kind of "robust content" it has planned for future iterations of its many titles remains to be seen. But its decision highlights an ongoing debate in the industry: are video game manuals really necessary in this generation?[image credit yoppy on Flickr]

Nintendo certainly thinks so. The game company said in a recent interview with Eurogamer that it has "no plans to move away from including [paper] instruction manuals with [its] packaged software." Other major game developers and first-parties haven't said either way if they plan to do away with paper game manuals, but considering they're still being bundled in titles, it's clear that most companies are content with doing things the way they always have.

That's a mistake.

The environmental element

There are some real problems with video game manuals. First off, they are environmentally irresponsible. No, I won't get on a political kick, but it's worth nothing that Ubisoft alone can save 2,300 trees by not offering paper manuals in games. If Electronic Arts, Activision-Blizzard, and Nintendo, three of the world's top developers, followed suit, the impact the gaming industry would have on the environment could be greatly decreased. It might not be the top reason why gamers want to do away with manuals, but it should contribute to this discussion.

Where's the quality?

Beyond that, I've found that most game manuals suck. Do me a favor and pick up your copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Now open the box and take out the manual. Leaf through it for a few seconds. Notice anything special? Yeah, it's useless. The same can be said for manuals in Nintendo titles, Capcom games, and many more. Gone are the days when manuals are an extension of a video game's appeal. Today, they're just a few pages long and offer useless information. Plus, most of them have a "Notes" page that years ago came in handy for remembering codes and other tidbits. Nowadays, it's a relic of the past.

That's not all. Game manuals today are filled with useless warnings and generic information that we've seen time and again. Yes, we know that games can cause seizures in some people and we are familiar with what the official Xbox 360 controller looks like. After getting past those useless pages, manuals provide basic information on a game, include some text about Xbox Live or other online services that are supported with the game, and that's it. All the information contained in there (and much more) is already available in-game.

The increasingly complex video game

Years ago, paper manuals made sense because of the relative simplicity of games. Developers couldn't (and in some cases, wouldn't) waste time creating long opening sequences that got players into a game. And since controllers were simpler and options were practically non-existent, putting button layouts in a game manual made sense.

For the most part, gamers accepted that. Rather than immediately boot a game up when we got home, we first sat on the couch, consulting the manual to ensure we understood the game before we played it. There was an order of things to playing games back then and many of us didn't diverge from that order.

But all that has changed. Today, the complexity of games (and their menus) has made manuals obsolete. Just about any game will allow users to change the control scheme to their liking, making a standard button layout in a manual all but useless. And since most games have an opening sequence, writing the story background in a manual doesn't make much sense nowadays.

Future opportunities

Of course, there's more to my desire to see paper game manuals eliminated than their uselessness. As Ubisoft pointed out, offering an in-game, "digitized" version of a game manual allows developers to be more creative in how they produce them. Plus, they can add some of the background information that has been lost in today's manuals. A digitized game manual also allows it to be interactive, changing as users pick their desire button layout. And all that fails to mention that at any point, players can pause the game, go to the in-game manual, and look up what they need to know.

Next-generation game manuals are right around the corner and I'm unwilling to hold them back. The future is in digitized versions of content. Magazines and newspapers have realized that. Why haven't game companies?

Enough is enough. Let's do away with paper game manuals.