Needs Help: Guide Dang It

I think that moving this thread seems like a pretty good idea: as noted above, it gives the discussion a body of context on hand to refer to.

OK, moved it to TRS and will lock the other thread. This was its OP:

Ah, excellent—thank you for so moving it! ^_^

So, the suggestion has been made and discussed that we merge this trope with Trial-and-Error Gameplay. I think that a crowner might be in order—but since we're in a new sub-forum, perhaps that should be set aside to allow new participants to the thread to weigh in.

For what it's worth, I'm in favour of the merge, I believe.

Specifically, I'd like to see the two merged under a new name and description: Something that focusses less on how the player reacts (trial-and-error, going to a guide, etc.) and more on the game not providing sufficient information.

It would still, to my mind, be YMMV: what constitutes "sufficient information" seems likely to vary (perhaps considerably) from one player to another—or even from one mood to another in a single player. There's a judgement call being made—"this game doesn't do enough".

^ Did you mean Try Everything?

I... didn't, no. For which part, specifically?

For some reason Trial-and-Error Gameplay is very specifically about dying and retrying until a solution is found. Can't see the appeal to merge this concept with the broader Guide Dang It!. Try Everything is an outcome of Guide Dang It! so it's closely related but still not close enough for a merge.

Edited by eroock on Apr 11th 2021 at 8:29:49 AM

It was discussed earlier in this thread but I do think that Trial-and-Error Gameplay and Guide Dang It! are distinct issues in a game that may overlap. To me, Trial-and-Error Gameplay is when a game gives you information about how to win by making you 'lose' multiple times until you find the correct solution. Losing can mean being killed, hitting a dead-end in a maze, having an NPC hate the gift you gave them, etc. Guide Dang It! is a complete lack of information with how to tackle a task so you don't really know if you're any closer to winning.

A modern example I can point to is one I put a GDI entry for recently in Demon's Souls. A unique remake-only armor set is behind a locked door but the requirements to unlock it are convoluted and aren't hinted at all in game. While you can make an argument that Trial-and-Error Gameplay is involved, I don't think normal trial-and-error will help a player coming in blind actually unlock the door. The people who originally discovered the method for doing so had to collaborate together and quite literally Try Everything, using a lot of their knowledge about what didn't exist in the original game to figure out how to open it.

That said, I don't think a merge of them really makes much sense.

Edited by YourIdeas on Apr 11th 2021 at 2:14:23 PM

Ah, I see—thank you for clarifying!

To be clear, in my second paragraph I was reporting on what had been suggested, so in that part at least I meant Trial-and-Error Gameplay, that having been the suggestion. (See the post just above mine.)

That said, you and Your Ideas do make good points.

Hmm... Try Everything lists itself as a sub-trope of Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Conversely, however, going by the description I'm not sure that it should be.

That aside, I still at least somewhat like the idea of merging this trope with... I suppose Try Everything? The reasoning is the same—removing focus from the player's response and placing it on the game providing information.

If we merged this with something else, I think Try Everything would make more sense than Trial-and-Error Gameplay. The former's description even says it can leave people shouting "Guide Dang It!".

What would a merge on Try Everything fix exactly? It has less wicks than GDI (122 vs 5387 as of writing this) and I don't think it'll shift focus away from player response towards information provided. A rename to something else like Hints Not Included would do a better job of accomplishing that though Guide Dang It! seems a bit too iconic of a name to change at this point.

There's a lot of different suggestions here, and I think that a crowner is in order here.

Proposed crowner options:

• Rename
• Merge with another trope (like Trial-and-Error Gameplay)
• Cleanup misuse (will require a description rewrite)
• Make YMMV
• Make a separate YMMV trope for the misuse (difficult sections of games that don't need a walkthrough)

If there's any I missed, please tell me.

I do want to see a crowner, but I would like to leave that crowner for a few days yet. This thread was only recently moved to this particular sub-forum, and I want to allow time for any to weigh in who might spot this thread here having missed it in its former home.

Yeah, actually, reading your argument and going back over some of the earlier argument, I think that I agree.

In that case, I'm inclined to support a rename and perhaps a re-write, along with being made YMMV.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 12th 2021 at 5:47:30 PM

I'd be fine with making it YMMV, but I'm less sure about renaming. I do think rewriting the description might help, and I think that the first bullet point in the description's bulleted list has to go, because Checkpoint Starvation is separate from Guide Dang It! (by which I mean if the game isn't giving you checkpoints to begin with, a guide won't help you find them).

Maybe I'm not fully thinking this through since I just got out of bed, but perhaps the relationship between Guide Dang It! and Try Everything is that the former covers players' reactions to the game and the latter covers what the game itself does to players. (I'll probably come back to this thread after I'm more awake.)

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 12th 2021 at 12:23:29 PM

Honestly, I'm not dead-set on renaming. I'm in favour of it, but I won't defend it with great ardour. If others prefer that the current name stay, then that's fair!

I do very much agree regarding the bullet-point in question! (And I may be mistaken, but I suspect that some of the other points might want for removal, too.)

Come to that, does the bullet-list add much? I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to just drop it from the description...

Regarding this trope and Try Everything, I would argue that as they stand they're both player reactions to the game not providing enough information: In this trope, the player goes to an external source; in that trope, the player doesn't give up, and attempts every interaction that occurs to them.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 13th 2021 at 6:15:31 PM

I heavily disagree merging with Trial-and-Error Gameplay. There are several instances of Guide Dang It! that would not fit there. Of all the options considered, I am most open to moving it to YMMV as there's a subjective component to it. Someone's ridiculously difficult puzzle is another's easily breezed through one.

The big example of one that wouldn't fit to me is a puzzle from Tales of Destiny (actually, there are several in that game that fit, but this one example specifically is a big one) where there's a word puzzle that is mistranslated and thus all hints the game provides to solve it are incorrect. The intention wasn't supposed to be Trial-and-Error Gameplay, you quite literally need a guide to figure out what you're supposed to do.

There is probably misuse too that needs to be moved to That One Level or That One Sidequest.

Edited by PhiSat on Apr 13th 2021 at 1:06:43 PM

There are enough examples of Guide Dang It! that you can point to and definitely say that an external source is required so I think a split to have Guide Dang It! be the objective trope version and a new subjective YMMV version of it would make the most sense. I think there would at least be a distinction from That One Sidequest because Guide Dang It! tends to span into other topics besides side quests like unexplained game mechanics.

Hmm... I don't know the puzzle in question, but your description does prompt me to realise that, while it's perhaps theoretically possible the solve even such an example by trying everything, in some cases the number of combinations might render that generally infeasible.

(Although might that specific case not more likely be a case of Unwinnable by Mistake?)

Hmm... I'm not sure that the more-extreme cases, in which it's almost entirely infeasible to derive an answer from the clues provided by the game, are really worth splitting off. I'm inclined to consider the YMMV case as the general case, and the others simply as "exaggerated" examples.

Now that I think of it, the bulleted list might fit better on Analysis.Guide Dang It with some tweaks to flesh it out more, and of course after the unfitting parts (like the save point bullet point) are removed.

That's not a bad idea, I think.

The "exaggerated" examples would make up a very large chunk of the examples. At that rate, they wouldn't be exaggerated. Besides that, YMMV tropes can't be played with. That would include exaggeration.

Making the trope YMMV, as I've mentioned earlier, makes it a complaint and negativity magnet, while the concept itself is not very tropeworthy (a player chooses to use a guide to get help with something). For reasons I've mentioned previously, we should clean up the trope and make its definition more strict.

If we were to make the trope YMMV, we would have to address those issues: what is tropeworthy about a player feeling they need a guide? How do you make the trope not so overly broad as to be meaningless? And how do you avoid the page becoming a magnet for negativity from anyone who's frustrated with a game?

Edited by AGuy on Apr 16th 2021 at 9:37:02 AM

Think we're good to start a crowner then with these options from earlier?

• Rename
• Merge with another trope (like Trial-and-Error Gameplay)
• Cleanup misuse (will require a description rewrite)
• Make YMMV
• Make a separate YMMV trope for the misuse (difficult sections of games that don't need a walkthrough)

Those options sound good (though I don't know if cleaning up misuse needs to be on the crowner, since that can be done without TRS), and I can't think of any others.

Sounds good to me!

What constitutes "a very large chunk" in this case?

As to exaggeration, I see no reason that YMMV entries might not vary in degree. It's not a case of the trope being "played with", it's just variation in the things being considered.

Consider two hypothetical AntiClimaxBosses: The first is pretty easy, and, occurring in a game in which combat generally takes ten turns or more, can be defeated in only five turns. The second can be defeated in only one turn, or two if the player is using a sub-optimal build.

One of those is rather more anti-climactic than the other.

However, you are perhaps right that they wouldn't technically be considered "ExaggeratedTropes", and so linking to that page was in error.

The point being that I see cases in which no information is given at all to be just a case of The Same, but More.

I still disagree that making this YMMV will make it necessarily a negativity magnet, and in any case, my impression is that we don't generally make such decisions based on what might happen.

I also disagree that the trope would be "so broad as to be meaningless". However, I've given my arguments on that matter already, so I won't repeat them now.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 18th 2021 at 12:44:52 PM

It's kinda already a negativity magnet, isn't it? Making it YMMV won't change that.

How has negativity been addressed in other pages?