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On The Life Of A Game Guide Writer
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.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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...
My favorite by far was the from the veritable Fallout Series 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.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.