Needs Help: Guide Dang It

I originally started a discussion in Trope Talk to see if Guide Dang It! was more YMMV these days but after discussion and a wick-check, I think it needs some help to determine what the best course of action is. Everyone seems to agree on what the definition is, “an in-game element is never hinted at by the game itself, requiring the player to Try Everything or look up an external source, such as a walkthrough, in order to figure out how to proceed”, so I don’t think that’s a problem but the trope tends to attract several issues.

• Walkthrough Mode: People like to type out every detail regarding something they consider a Guide Dang It!. This is unavoidable to some degree as sometimes, to fully understand why something is GDI, you need context, but providing too little leads into...
• ZCE: The opposite of Walkthrough Mode, where someone fails to provide much details for a given example so readers that haven’t played a game before, or if they have, have never encountered the particular GDI element, have no clue what is being referred to. My personal favorite of these come in the flavor of “Want to find X? Good luck doing so without a guide” since they pretty much invite you to do just that if you want to learn more.
• Incorrect examples: The trope invites incorrect examples where the game does provide hints for solving something. Some people may find a hint that others easily miss, one person will willingly Talk to Everyone three times while another skips all minor NPCs, etc.
• Overlap with other tropes: GDI is often a catch-all for other more focused video game difficulty and information tropes, non-YMMV and YMMV alike. An entry will likely fall under one of these categories but isn’t a GDI in itself. Some of the more common ones I’ve seen include Trial-and-Error Gameplay, Read the Freaking Manual and That One Sidequest.

I performed a Wick Check over at Guide Dang It Wick Check and got the following results.

Wick Count: 5345 Wick Check: 74

• Total Examples/Bullet Points: 112
• Correct: 39.3% 44/112
  • Correct, no issues: 14.3% 16/112
  • Correct but needs cleanup: 25.0% 28/112
• Incorrect/Misuse: 28.6% 32/112
• Unsure: 8.0% 9/112
• Walkthrough Mode: 34.6% 37/107
• ZCE: 23.2% 26/112

In the discussion, some suggestions included a clean-up, changing the GDI to YMMV, splitting off a more YMMV variant of GDI for the entries where a walkthrough isn’t required but some players ended up using one, and possibly merging GDI with another related trope like Trial-and-Error Gameplay. After doing the wick-check, I’m leaning in the clean-up camp with a tighter description for GDI but there was enough debate that I wanted to open this up to see where everything thinks it should go.

Edited by YourIdeas on Apr 5th 2021 at 10:22:20 AM

Declining in favour of this thread.