Slashdot Mirror
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.