Needs Help: Guide Dang It

I think there's room to split this into an objective "this game literally doesn't provide you the information" or "this is the only time the game does something different and doesn't make you aware of this arbitrary distinction anywhere" and a YMMV "the obscurity or abstraction of the clue makes it essentially impossible without outside help for many players, even if others pick up on it right away" without the latter necessarily being overly negative.

This does seem like another case where the name isn't helping, too. I've never really minded this one, but I can see why the name implies a more YMMV bent than actually intended.

The description could use some clean up as well. I'm really not sure what that first bullet point is even supposed to be implying. Situations in which death isn't supposed to be as punishing but the closer save point isn't obvious? That isn't really about needing outside information, and anyway I don't think that's common enough to warrant a major bullet point. The inventory one also seems a bit weird. I can imagine this being more relevant to the trope idea in games like Resident Evil where you have a very limited inventory and Key Items don't get a special place, but the much more common problem of Inventory Management Puzzle is just an annoyance, not a problem that needs outside help to solve. I would cut it down to just these as universal enough and clear enough to illustrate the concept of the trope:

• Talk to Everyone and Try Everything three times or you will miss crucial stuff.
• Cryptic puzzles that betray what you've learned to expect, like resetting the game to move on when normal logic would dictate that doing so means losing all your progress.
• Instead of doing things within the actual game, the player has to mess around with the game interface itself.

I think an important element revolves around "betraying what you've learned to expect" and I think that can still apply to an objective version of the trope. In most games, NP Cs only have one thing to say at a time. You wouldn't expect it's useful to talk to them again. In some games, the NP Cs only have one thing to say, but talking to them multiple times still arbitrarily leads to a new result.

There is a lot of overlap though, not just with the objective or subjective versions, but other things like Moon Logic Puzzle. The first discussion probably should be deciding what this trope should be.

I'm not so sure about the Walkthrough Mode discussion. If the problem is that there is discussion in the examples, that's just an issue with a Conversation in the Main Page and should be cleaned up as normal. If the problem is that the nature of the trope requires more detail in order to give context, then I don't think that's a problem at all. It's okay for different tropes to have different standards.

Edited by Jokubas on Mar 19th 2021 at 7:30:44 AM

I think there has to partially be some Walkthrough Mode for Guide Dang It! to be anything more than ZCE, but some people can be quite passionate about listing every conceivable step of a puzzle that it may as well be a tutorial on Gamefaqs.

A lot of examples I came across read like this, where there's excessive detail regarding what is probably one possible strategy for clearing a puzzle, even if it's not technically a discussion.

• Another gauntlet in Chapter II has a large arena with a central circle and two smaller circles to up on two cliffs on opposite sides. Two players need to stand on the smaller circles to keep the central circle activated, while the other two players need to kill enemies within the central circle to fill a meter that will unlock the final gate. There is a problem: The players fighting in the central circle slowly gain Corruption, and if it someone gets up to 10 Corruption, the entire stage fails, and the only way to clear Corruption is to go up to the side circles on the side and purge. Essentially, two people will be in the central circle fighting to raise the meter, while the other two will be on the sides keeping the central circle activated, and fighting a bunch of Elite Mooks singlehandedly, then once the two central fighters reach 7 or 8 Corruption, they go up and swap places, the fresh players go down and fight while the first group stands on the smaller circles and purge.

Whether the example is correct or not (I really don't think it is, but I have it listed in unsure), it could've probably been reduced to something like the following while still getting the point across.

• Another gauntlet in Chapter II has a large arena with a central circle and two smaller circles up on two cliffs on opposite sides. The solution is unintuitive and requires a lot of micro-management among four players who need to switch positions constantly in order to manage Corruption levels that build up from standing on the central circle.

Games are variable experiences. A player deciding to use a guide to see which starter in Pokémon Red and Blue is the best isn't any more a trope about that particular work than a player deciding to hack the game to give themselves infinite money. That's a player's personal decision on how to address something in the game, outside of the actual bounds of the game.

Is a trope: A game facilitates outside modification.

Not a Trope: Someone broke into a game's source code and hacked it because it's too hard.

In concrete, unambiguous terms, what, in your opinion, makes what you are suggesting - a player looks up a guide for a game - a trope?

Edited by AGuy on Mar 19th 2021 at 2:49:23 PM

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

I'll confess that I'm not confident of the relative functions of Trope Talk and the Trope Repair Shop in this. Is a "Repair" thread called for in order to make such decisions? Is this not a place in which we can debate and vote on what the trope should be? I'm genuinely not sure. ^^;

I would argue that almost no game will provide all information—at some point inference is called for. The question, to my mind, is that of what constitutes "enough" information.

For example, look at Return Of The Obra Dinn. That's a game that explicitly expects the player to make informed guesses based on incomplete information. And yet I've seen it solved without a guide (as far as I'm aware, at least).

Hmm... That feels like a different trope to me.

Consider a hypothetical game that never provides enough information: every puzzle that makes up the game has huge gaps that send players running to a guide. Would that not fall under this trope, even though it's the norm for the game?

This I very much agree with! There's work to be done there, I think—very much including those bullet-points!

I'll confess that I don't see that in this trope. Again, consider the hypothetical example above of a game that never provides enough information—would that not fall under this trope, even though that lack of information might become expected?

(In fact, it would possibly be covered by the "Trickster Game" trope that I've been working on.)

It's more specific than that: It's the player finding that, for them, the game doesn't provide enough information in order to move forward, and that as a result external aid is called for.

How is it any more tropeworthy if it's many players or one player?

Let me put it this way:

Consider an arbitrary other YMMV trope—let's say Accidental Aesop. That could be read as "any instance in which one person saw an aesop in something that wasn't intended to have one". Does the fact that it describes individual experiences of something make it not a trope?

Similarly here, the trope is that the game doesn't provide enough information for the player to move forward. Does the fact that "enough information" may vary from player to player make it not a trope?

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 20th 2021 at 9:53:04 PM

My Games & Writing

That's not how you defined it earlier: you said earlier that

As for Accidental Aesop: Accidental Aesop is about an interpretation of what the author did; it is not, however, about something the audience did in response to what the author did. In addition, Accidental Aesop is much more narrow than your proposal for Guide Dang It!.

Take a guide for Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon, for example: https://www.ign.com/faqs/2012/mega-man-battle-network-4-double-pack-walkthrough-529060

Pretty much every detail involving the game is in such a guide, and a player can look up a guide for anything in said guide. A player can choose to look up absolutely any information regarding a game, for whatever reason. The fact that a player needed some information in a guide is not, by itself, a trope, any more than a reader feeling they need to look up a story's synopsis online is a trope because they weren't fully tracking the story.

Tropes are about things the work does, not about things people do.

• Is a trope: A game calls a player out for cheating.
• Is a trope: The computer cheats.
• Is a trope: The game has built-in cheats for the player.
• Not a Trope: A player cheats.

• Is a trope: A section of the game has a very palpable increase in difficulty compared to previous sections. This one is even subjective, but is about something the game does, so it's a trope.
• Not a Trope: A player felt that they needed to use cheats to overcome a game's difficulty.

• Is a trope: A game is flagrantly unforgiving in its difficulty.
• Is a trope: A game's "difficulty" is derived from things that aren't related to a player's skill.
• Not a Trope: A game is difficult.

• Is a trope: A game is outright impossible to beat at a certain point.
• Not a Trope: A player gets stuck because the game is difficult.

If you want to define Guide Dang It! as a trope per your own interpretation, you will have to define it as something the game does, as opposed to how a player responds to something done in the game. And if you want to make it about the game's denial of information critical to progress, it's hard to argue that a game denies said information when most players are able to beat said game without using a guide.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 20th 2021 at 4:55:14 AM

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

I'm mostly just bringing it up because deciding if it should be YMMV or not or branching off a more YMMV aspect of GDI goes beyond updating the description and doing a clean-up.

If you're making large changes, you need TRS. Trope Talk is just for discussing the tropes, not changing them.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Okay, fair enough!

True. But recall, in a previous post your words prompted me to review the trope-description, and thus change my position a little.

See the last section in this post for reference.

An interpretation is a reaction; the fact that it's not a physical action is irrelevant.

But that's largely besides the point: my point is that pretty much all YMMV tropes are about the responses of people, potentially on an individual basis. If that's a problem here, why is it not a problem elsewhere?

I still disagree with my interpretation of this trope being over-broad.

Er, no: YMMV tropes are very much about what people do in response to works.

Again, I disagree: YMMV tropes by their nature are about how the audience responds to the work.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 21st 2021 at 3:54:11 PM

My Games & Writing

Yeah, okay, this argument has become less about whether GDI is YMMV or not and more about the validity of the phrase "YMMV trope".

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

Don't want this to die out, but it seems like we aren't really getting anywhere with the YMMV discussion so I'm thinking about dropping that.

In terms of what to do about this since it seems like misuse isn't a major problem but Walkthrough Mode is, would tightening up the description to more explicitly state "if the game offers any hints, no matter how obscure, it's not a Guide Dang It!, also keep Walkthrough Mode to a minimum" and starting a short-term cleanup project be the way to go?

Edited by YourIdeas on Mar 23rd 2021 at 8:48:56 AM

I would ask that we give it at least a little more energy, if I may: I really think that the trope is better-described as YMMV.

How many games offer ho hints at all? Is that a significant portion?

That said, the suggestion has been made of the possibility of splitting between an objective trope in which the game gives literally no information that a thing is possible—not even the barest of data—and a subjective trope in which the game may give information, but possibly not enough.

I'm not entirely convinced of the idea, but I wouldn't object to it, I think.

Something like "Hidden Game Content" (or something snappier) and the current "Guide" trope-names, perhaps?

Something like this sounds like a good idea to me! Perhaps along with a recommendation that editors try to discuss the given example in overview, rather than covering each individual step.

My Games & Writing

Honestly, quite a few. A lot of examples are from older games where certain mechanics just aren't explained very well or the intent was for the developers to want you to actually purchase a guide. I'd say a lot of more recent games I've played fall more into Last Lousy Point territory though, or the game just throws a complete curveball at you that betrays what the rest of the game taught you, leading into a Try Everything or Talk to Everyone three times scenario.

I once again offer the Sonic 3 barrel as a reference for "game offering literally no hints" — nothing anywhere in the game or manual spells out that the correct method of manipulating barrels is the D-pad.

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

It does match my experience that both Guide Dang It! and Nintendo Hard are often misused for "I personally had some difficulties playing this game", and this should probably be taken to TRS.

Looking over the description of Guide Dang It!, I note that a lot of it is simply other tropes but in a complainy way. Like, literally the first point is "Battles are tough but save points are terribly placed", and that's the trope Checkpoint Starvation (and has little to do with guidebooks).

We'd have to do some wick checking to be sure, but it sounds reasonable to merge Guide Dang It! ("subjective: I couldn't figure out this game") into Trial-and-Error Gameplay ("objective: the game gives insufficient information so you need to do trial and error").

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

Okay, fair enough.

(Although I imagine that at least some of these fall into "The Computer Is a Lying Bastard" (which is currently a sub-trope of this trope).)

Hmm... That's an interesting idea.

(Although I'm not sure that that trope isn't subjective, too: after all, how does one objectively determine what is "sufficient" information; what's enough for one player might be too little for another.)

I'm not sure that it quite fits with "trial and error", however: that involves, well, trying things and seeing, rather than going to an external source.

However, perhaps a merged trope with a new description might work, dropping the focus on the question of how the player deals with the lack of information (trial-and-error or going to an external source) and focussing primarily instead on the game not providing information.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 24th 2021 at 5:33:02 PM

My Games & Writing

We've had the suggestion of merging this trope into Trial-and-Error Gameplay—shall we have a single-proposition crowner for that?

My Games & Writing

Er, you need TRS for that sort of thing.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Ah, sorry! I fear that that's my inexperience with this process showing: I've taken part in a number of threads, but not—that I recall—in the transition or much in the distinction between Trope Talk and Trope Repair Shop. ^^;

I may start a thread for this over there in due course (perhaps tomorrow), then! (Presuming that no-one else does so before me!)

Thank you for correcting me. ^_^

My Games & Writing

No worries. Be sure to link the wick check page over there when you make a TRS thread, because those are required now to show evidence of misuse.

Indeed, I have that in mind, and thank you for so prompting me! ^_^

My Games & Writing

Actually, I think someone already made a thread for this one.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Oh, hey, how did I miss that? ^^;

(I may have skimmed over it due to it being still locked—I often don't look at those, since they're not yet available for response.)

Well, that's one less for me to start, then!

Thank you for letting me know! ^_^

My Games & Writing

Bumping this because the TRS thread is still locked after six days, which is a sign that it may not have been approved or met the requirements. Usually, the mods would open these after just one day after sufficient evidence of misuse per wick checks have been shown.

Actually, we aren't quite that quick at opening TRS threads. There have been complaints that too many new threads draw attention away from the unfinished ones.

Also, I kind of wonder if moving this thread to TRS instead of making a new one is better play. If we can justify a TRS thread at all we can also justify a thread move, and that way we port all the previous context over.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that a TRS thread for GDI would be opened up right away, it seems like TRS has its hands full with a lot of other things in progress I imagine this one would be a large project which is why I was hesitant to toss it into cleanup without some kind of plan. Wanted to get it into a backlog somewhere.