The Utility of Video Game ‘How To’ Guides
Although most don’t realize it in today’s generation of teenagers and 20 something’s, video games have been around as a commercial entertainment medium since 1971. With the exception of the industry collapse in 1983, the industry has experienced sustained growth for the last 20 plus years expanding to the multi-billion dollar industry that it is today. In this timeframe, not only has the gaming industry boomed but also the sub-market of the creation of ‘how-to’ guides, tips, tricks, 먹튀검증토토사이트, etc. has as well.
As the industry matured in the 1990s, so did the serious game players need for increasingly complex challenges and with that information to combat those challenges. This led to the birth of both ‘how to’ guides for various games across gaming platforms and computers to ‘cheats, tricks, and hacks’ to allow a player to circumvent hours of play to reach a more advanced level in most games. With online gaming also came various other means of ‘cheating’ or ‘tricking’ the game such as spoofing, hacking game servers to gain additional capabilities, etc, that the creators of the games did not intend on being a means to gain an advantage in the play of the game.
As the market has significantly expanded, a direct supporting industry has been the publishing of guides covering everything from secret codes to obtain advanced skill sets in the game, to infinite life to texts similar to those one would buy at a Lowe’s or Home Depot store to build a fence or a deck. Basically a step by step instruction guide on how one should play the game to advance to the ultimate or final level of the game. The video game purist would argue that ‘real players’ would not use these guides since the enjoyment one should have by playing video games should come from the experience of play with no help. As the video game sub-culture has emerged, however, this thought process is more of a minority as most mature gamers today have grown up with tips, tricks, cheat codes, etc as an accepted fact of gameplay. Typically the players that are both good enough and have the time to devote to serious play who reach elite status, publish a how-to guide citing past tournament and other game achievements as a pedigree for attempting to get the user to buy their product. This is typified by two of the better ‘how to’ guides for one of the most popular online video games, World of Warcraft, which has a large number of guides on the market, with two of the more popular ones being Warcraft Supreme and Warcraft Millionaire.
There is truth in advertising for most video games, how-to guides. They typically deliver on their promise of improved play, in a short amount of time, and if competition exists as with the World of Warcraft guides, at a cheap price. Similar to other industries, the video game ‘how to’ guide market will be a viable one for as long as the video game market remains viable.
