Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Any graduate student in linguistic or literary studies looking for a neglected corner of prosaic endeavour on which to work could do worse than embark on an analysis of the humble manual. A washingmachine manual; a hi-fi manual; a videogame manual. The primary purpose of a manual, of course, is to convey practical information, but the best of them do far more than that.
The higher purpose of any manual, really, is to employ literary and visual devices to thrill the user before they even experience the product. This is true whether it’s a manual for a Sony MiniDisc recorder, a hi-tech coffee machine, or a videogame. You can ignore it and dive right in, but aficionados prefer to delay the gratification, and experience an extra kind of gratification in doing so. The booklet nestled in the jewel case of Metal Gear Solid, for example, is a triumph of this art, blending cinematically angled screenshots with more abstract diagrams and gorgeous hand-drawn concept art, with written advice on what to do in situations you probably hadn’t experienced before in a videogame. (“When Using a Cardboard Box” and, frighteningly, “Torture Event”.) It even explains the use of the tech goodies you might find (PSG1 rifle, Digital Camera, etc), so increasing the player’s appetite to find them.
It is regrettable, then, that manuals went out of fashion in favour of ubiquitous tutorial levels, because these two modes of pedagogy do not work in the same way. The wellwritten manual gives the player a splendid overview; the tutorial parcels out information piecemeal and meanly. With a manual you are a general gazing at a map of the theatre of war; in a tutorial you are just one blinkered grunt treading warily through the jungle.
Luckily, the Guardian reported recently, there is something of a revival of proper manuals in videogames, citing Microprose’s HighFleet: Deus In Nobis (92 pages of beautifully aged discussions of tactics and strategy) and the beautiful chapbook that is the manual for Bithell Games’ The Banished
Vault, featuring gorgeously eldritch ink artwork, which can be bought separately as a real paper book. Another purpose for the manual, then, is as an elaborate sales appetiser for the main event: Bithell reported that ten per cent of those buying the manual went on to buy the game itself.
Excellent work, there, particularly since modern manuals, when they even exist, are so rarely printed on paper. You can buy a thousand-quid synthesiser or guitar processor, as your correspondent has done all too often, and receive only a single-leaf ‘quickstart’ guide before being directed to download a godforsaken PDF to get the information you actually need. This is especially galling since manuals are called manuals because they are, etymologically, physical books of a size that can be easily carried in one hand. (Literally ‘hand-books’.)
Things were, of course, better in the old days. Software Projects’ Jet Set Willy (1984) came with a mad copy-protection system devoted to looking up colours in a grid. (Thanks, ‘Padlock Systems’!) Melbourne House’s text adventure The Hobbit (1982) was packaged with a manual that was literally a copy of The Hobbit by Tolkien.
The best manuals are those that not only explain how to operate the particular unit of capitalist manufacturing you have acquired, but teach you about an entire world. The ZX Spectrum came with a comprehensive study course for its dialect of BASIC, fronted with inspirational sci-fi art by the master John Harris. And while the manuals for Japanese synthesiser giant Roland are notoriously incomprehensible, somehow sucking more knowledge out of the reader’s head than they put in, those for vintage synths such as the Moogs and the Prophets were famous for explaining to generations of musicians how subtractive synthesis actually worked (before they just went ahead and used the presets on their hit songs anyway).
Our notional literary researcher will, to be sure, wind up mentioning the greatest manual of all: the one that isn’t actually a manual, while pretending to be an impossible manual of everything. The French novelist Georges Perec, a genius who once wrote a book without any occurrence of the letter ‘e’, also wrote La Vie: Mode D’emploi, or Life: A User’s Manual (1978), in which the lives of the inhabitants of a single Parisian apartment building form a beautifully interlocking puzzle. Is this novel really a manual for living? In the sense that it alters the reader’s perspective on human existence, yes, it is.
With a manual you are a general gazing at a map of the theatre of war; in a tutorial you are just a blinkered grunt