Needs Help: Guide Dang It

That's not the given case. In this case, the manual is giving the information needed to progress, so a guide is not needed.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Honestly, my biggest issue with Guide Dang It! is not the matter of subjective VS objective, but rather it is Walkthrough Mode: The Trope. It is very difficult to write examples of it without outright revealing the solution to certain obscure stuff that the games don't provide in the first place. I've read many examples, and most just boil down to "X is confusing and not hinted at, so it can only be done by doing Y on Z".

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Mar 12th 2021 at 7:37:28 AM

I would argue for the trope being... well, more or less what it is currently: anything that players have found themselves needing a guide (or other external help) for. Anything that's made someone say: "How was I expected to know that?!"

I don't think that I saw that one myself, so it's hard for me to answer. It would depend on things like whether there was more than just complaining, whether it would have worked with a lock instated, and so on.

On that I disagree: the fact that it's subjective doesn't mean that it'll necessarily produce complaining. Is there evidence that it's being used that way?

Again, I'm arguing from actual examples, like the Jesse Cox and Dodger one previously. From that, it's clear that a given puzzle can be clear to one person, and obscure to another. As a result,

I mean, that's fair—but I think that this is considerably more YMMV than that.

That really seems like a pointless restriction to me, however. I mean, it might prevent the trope from being YMMV... but why restrict the trope to prevent that?

I would say to just let it be YMMV and allow anything that requires a guide.

I see what you're saying, but even if we say that most players will understand the things depicted, they may not make the necessary leaps, or even realise that they're more than just decor.

On this we disagree: To my mind, if we're talking about something rooted in the difficulty of a thing, then we're talking about something subjective. What's difficult for one may be easy for another, and vice versa. Some people will make one set of logical leaps, others will make different ones. Being subjective, it's YMMV.

My Games & Writing

(Separate post for the sake of those reading the separate threads of this discussion.)

That is a problem.

What do others think of making this In-Universe Examples Only, then? That would obviate both the questions of subjectivity and of complaining, as well as removing the Walkthrough Mode issue.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 12th 2021 at 6:16:06 PM

My Games & Writing

Thread hopping here, but my understanding of the "objective" definition of Guide Dang It! was specifically that the game gives zero clues on how to accomplish an action, and any comprehensible hint, no matter how obscure or oblique, disqualifies it. The infamous barrel in Sonic 3 fits this definition; not a single thing in the game tells you to manipulate it with the D-Pad (though the developers are on record as having believed people would do so intuitively).

Perhaps that's too strict to be useful and changing it to a YMMV "the game doesn't explain this well enough" item would be an improvement, but that's my understanding of its current state.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Mar 12th 2021 at 10:34:55 AM

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

What exactly would GDI make subjective?

Literally the very next sentence...

I'm just.. a guy....

I'm still not following either. The next sentence reads:

For most games, the manual only tells you how to play the game, not how to beat it. (For that, see Guide Dang It!.)

"Most" doesn't mean "all" and the original Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire manual that came with the games very clearly explains what to do when you come across a bunch of dots on the screen and aren't sure how to proceed. It's easy enough to find online as well to verify: http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.7977.

With that said, if you're an 8-12 year old kid playing Pokemon, you probably did just look online to figure out exactly what to do, but regardless, all of the information needed to solve that set of puzzles was provided to you in the manual and the game after you decoded the Braille.

What you are suggesting does not line up with what the trope page currently supports - per the first bullet point, for example, someone can label Checkpoint Starvation as a Guide Dang It!, even if the game doesn't hide information from them.

My issue is that allowing the trope to be a YMMV both makes it meaninglessly broad and renders it a magnet for negativity - on top of depriving us of a trope for instances where the game actually does deprive you of critical information, instead of just having a difficult puzzle.

Things that would be allowed if you make the trope YMMV for anything someone went to a guide for:

• Any boss that has a weak point or is otherwise not just a walking damage sponge, because someone couldn't read the tells
• Any puzzle whatsoever, because someone couldn't solve it
• Anything involving enemy spawn rates or the like, because someone felt the game should've provided them exact percentages

As mentioned, not only is this such a broad concept, it also inherently involves negativity.

You mentioned that you would prefer In-Universe Examples Only - may you please elaborate on what you mean by that?

There was more than just complaining, but the actual legitimate cases of Fake Difficulty were drowned out by people complaining about anything they found annoying or difficult.

A few examples:

This one complains about a puzzle being too obscure for the user's liking.

• Level 27 in Chromatron was a massive Guide Dang It moment, as any level further that used the same trick. Not exactly unfair, but a way too obtuse puzzle: there is the object called quantum tangler, and if you change the color of the beam on one side, the other side also changes color — the opposite way. But no matter what you do, you cannot solve level 27 and a few others until you realise that reflecting a quantum-entangled beam BACK ONTO ITSELF causes very insane color changes. There's no indication in the game that you can do this, and the only similar thing was on level 17, where with a splitter it's pretty apparent.

This is little better than a ZCE, just saying that something was hard to figure out.

• Antichamber:
  • Some puzzles have very obscure solutions.
  • The various clickable images are usually prominently placed, so they're not hard to find. Figuring out where the ones you've missed are, however, is extremely difficult without a guide.

This particular example I just pulled because of how flagrantly negative it was.

• Pony Island:
  • The Settlers of Catan knockoff you can find lying around. Unless you've memorized the cost of all buildable resources, let alone how the game works in the first place, it's terribly difficult to play since the game doesn't tell you anything about it.

For the most part, people use it responsibly - because it's not YMMV, so there's a standard expected. Most of the examples involve hidden information, not just anything someone went to a guide for (in contrast to the actual description of the trope on its page.) You are proposing making the trope YMMV, which would mean that people are free to post anything they went to a guide for, as opposed to hidden information or the like.

You caught on to what I was saying elsewhere, so I'll elaborate there.

I think that's because your focus is on how people feel about something, and not what the creator is actually doing. Obviously Evil is about how the artist portrays a character or group; Guide Dang It! is about how a designer has something in the game without providing the information needed for it.

For the reasons I stated above - turning the trope into YMMV makes it needlessly broad and would just attract complaining.

If they don't make the necessary leaps, it's not Guide Dang It! just because the game doesn't keep feeding the player more and more information. The important part is that the game presents the information, and the player knows what they're looking at.

You're arguing that this is a trope about difficulty when it's a trope about presentation of information.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 12th 2021 at 3:11:13 PM

I'm just.. a guy....

For the trope to be more subjective the examples would have to be more along the lines of:

• Players spent hours trying to clear a checkpoint because one or multiple steps were a little vague. (variable player experience)
• Tricks and tactics in an encounter that are not explained directly but not hidden either. (Walkthrough Mode)
• Criticism of the game lacking intuitive markers in a confusing scenario, which has overlap with That One Level or That One Achievement.

Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!

Sure, that one bullet-point, and perhaps others, can be fixed. I would not oppose a cleanup of such elements.

To the first, I disagree: there's meaning in the player experience of being so stuck on something that one resorts to external information to pass it.

To the second, my understanding of the approach to things here is that we don't act to avert potential negativity, only respond to negativity that's actually there.

There's nothing wrong with spinning off a new trope for that—I've seen threads do similarly when dealing with multiple concepts in a given trope.

That was in response to the mention that the current examples are all in Walkthrough Mode, as I recall.

My understanding is that we don't allow examples written in this way, but I don't see another way of writing an example for this trope (without it becoming a zero-context example).

So, I floated the idea of going with In-Universe Examples Only as a potential solution, with the perk that it also obviates the question of subjectivity.

(I would, as in another thread recently, like a categorisation that also allows things like defied examples, etc. I'm not sure that we have a category like that right now, however.)

But a few examples isn't evidence of an overall pattern. A wick-check would be called for, to my understanding.

After all, if it's just a few examples, then we can just do a cleanup.

Yes? That does seem to me appropriate to this specific trope.

Hmm... Going back to re-read the page, I think that I now half-agree on these points.

Specifically, the page distinguishes itself from Moon Logic Puzzle by, as you point out, the question of whether the game provides sufficient information for the player to figure out the puzzle. If not, then it's Moon Logic; if so, then it's Guide.

(Although this is complicated in that Moon Logic Puzzle also seems to require the the logic involved be non-standard—like using a monkey as a monkey-wrench.)

However, I do still argue that what is sufficient for the player to make the required leaps across the missing information may vary from player to player, and thus that this is subjective. For some the gaps may seem insurmountable; for others, a leap of intuition or inference may solve the problem.

Put it this way: in general, a game won't provide every step to solving a puzzle or suchlike. At some point, the player will usually be required to infer, or guess, or intuit. The question, then, is that of whether the game has provided enough steps—and again, what is enough for one may not be for another.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 14th 2021 at 4:08:39 PM

My Games & Writing

> "My understanding is that we don't allow examples written in this way, but I don't see another way of writing an example for this trope (without it becoming a zero-context example)."

---

Yeah, that's my main concern here. There's no middle ground when it comes to writing valid examples for Guide Dang It!. If you try to provide context, you end up giving all the steps and even the solution to obtuse stuff, thus becoming Walkthrough Mode. If you try to limit yourself by only writing the base info but neglecting other context that proves why the example is a Guide Dang It scenario, it becomes a Zero-Context Example.

For anyone interested, I started doing a wick-check for my own curiosity and to look through other games besides ones I'm familiar with. There's definitely no middle ground between ZCE or Walkthrough Mode, which I think is fine but some examples seem like they could be edited down.

Far from done but you can find it here: Guide Dang It Wick Check

I contributed my share to the wick check page. Three examples from SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom.

Gone through about 74 or so wicks at Sandbox.Guide Dang It Wick Check. Tried to be as objective about this as I can though given I haven't played the majority of these games, I was probably looking at some of these solutions with the benefit of hindsight. I'm guessing a some clean-up and probably some edits on the main article for Guide Dang It! might help though.

, Thank you for doing that work! ^_^

For me the main question right now is this: What percentage of the entries employed Walkthrough Mode?

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 19th 2021 at 1:28:30 PM

My Games & Writing

Not including ZCE, there was roughly 47% of entries (39/81) that I considered to be Walkthrough Mode-laden, which honestly wasn't as bad as I was expecting but still sounds like a clean-up effort could take awhile.

So about half of the examples. What about the ZCEs?

26/107, roughly 24%. 12/26 (46%) of the ZCE occur outside the main article for a work, 6/26 (23%) occur on a related page of the work (YMMV, Characters, etc.)

Edited by YourIdeas on Mar 19th 2021 at 7:26:46 AM

Ok, so the ZCE problem really isn't as bad as the Walkthrough Mode problem. I think that should give us a better insight now.

Ah, I'm surprised that the ratio of Walkthrough Mode to non-Walkthrough-Mode entries is so low!

Well, in that case it might be more a matter of cleanup than of limiting examples. That's good to know. ^_^

It might also be worth adding a note to the description warning against Walkthrough Mode writing, as it does seem like there is some inclination towards it here.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 19th 2021 at 5:33:18 PM

My Games & Writing

I think the description for Guide Dang It! could be cleaned up to include a section cautioning to avoid getting into Walkthrough Mode but it could be tightened up in general imo. Someone else pointed out how the main article's examples aren't necessarily GDI and in the wick check, I came across a number of examples that could fall into other tropes related to difficulty or low-information that aren't necessarily GDIs on their own.

I can try to do some of the additions later today in the sandbox.

Edited by YourIdeas on Mar 19th 2021 at 9:19:43 AM

Sorry I haven't followed up since my last post; I just felt there was nothing more of significance I had to say without nitpicking at details. I don't want us to miss the forest for the trees, and I'd rather not get bogged down splitting hairs.

I am on board with a cleanup effort. I also think there should be some clearer objective standard besides "a player decided they needed a guide" - in addition to the reasons I've already mentioned, the concept of any individual player struggling in a video game isn't tropeworthy.

There might be some disagreement on where exactly the line is; I think we can work together to come to a consensus, however. Personally, if I had to choose between the two, I'd prefer we narrow the trope as opposed to broadening it, in a way that puts more focus on design decisions.

I'm just.. a guy....

I still disagree here: I don't see a lack of tropeworthiness in individual experiences of requiring outside help. More to the point, I'd argue that all such experiences are individual; as I see it there is no objective standard of what requires external aid, making this a subjective matter.

What to one person requires external aid might be clear to another, and vice versa.

As a result, I oppose the requirement of objective standards.

My Games & Writing

Since it seems like there's still disagreement on what this trope is trying to be, would it make sense to send this into TRS and first try to establish what Guide Dang It! should be before trying a clean-up effort or rewriting the description?