I really miss game manuals

Multimedia is the description given to a product of sound, visuals still and animated, text and so on.


Earler versions of software products leaned into being multimedia products as it was exciting to see how forms displayed by a computer monitor could appear more living to us.

However, games were more primitive back in the day, and a lot of activity happened in the mind to fill the gaps left by low bitrate audio or abstract visuals.

Some of that activity relied on confirmation bias. You are playing a game about submarines, so the form you see in front of you is a second world war era battleship. You were mentally primed to see that in the dynamic Rorschach test you're seeing on screen.

One of the components of this paritcular form of multimedia or software product for me then was the priming material that helped the mind along in understanding the world is was being presented with.

So how did we see the perfectly ordered, 3 or so frames of tiled sprites of SimCity 2000 as if it was bustling metropolis? How did we believe that its higher level simulation of population dynamics meant that all the little cars on screen are people going about their commute?

The manual for SimCity 2000 is a hype man for the game.

It's full of poems and stories about how cities work. When you associate it with what you see on screen, both taken together form the mental space you're working with, one that is bigger than either document on its own.

How is it so affecting seeing the planet in the 1999 game Homeworld represented by polygons you can count on your fingers, slapped on with a low res texture making it look like burnt toast, as a background to one of the earlier levels in the game?

The complete history of the Hiigaran civilisation is laid out in the game manual. If you've read it, you know what is on those sands and what a special time it was for them to make their first spacefaring steps.

No 90's or 00's flight sim had as deep flight dynamics as each game manual suggested. The simulation isn't there for that. But what was there was the suggestion, and that was enough to make a small part of you believe you were flying something like a real vehicle.

You can look at this cynically and say, actually the software was not very good and the manual compensated for that. But I don't. I think the software was actually perfect, and manuals are a better vehicle for certain types of information that are not pleasant to access during gameplay on a screen. We've lost the battle of manuals vs. tutorials and we've lost more than we realise for it.