Nate Schmidt is a contributing editor for GamerswithGlasses.com, and holds a PhD in English from Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute. His work can also be found in The Rambling, Unwinnable Magazine, and in the Bloodborne anthology Blood Echoes, out later this year from Tune and Fairweather Press.

For about five years, I worked in the conservation department of a rare books library. The concept of shared intrinsic value–that each archival object has the same worth as anything else–was one of the key things I took away from this job. Whether the day’s project was an eighteenth-century treatise or an erotic paperback from the 1960s, everything on the conservation workbench received the same level of care and attention. There are sometimes going to be unusually fragile or rare items that will receive more elaborate conservational treatment than others, but generally speaking the conservation department is a good place for the underdogs of the archival world to get their due: ledgers, guidebooks, dictionaries, and the occasional chainsawed guitar. 

While I was working this job, I heard about the SNES Manual Archive, the crowdsourced project to digitize every SNES manual in existence. I immediately lost an afternoon to SNES manuals, and of course I found myself drawn down the internet rabbit hole into similar archives for the NES, the PlayStation 2, and the Sega Genesis, along with the huge collection of more obscure manuals hosted on replacementdocs.com. The concept of manual preservation seemed very much in tune with the spirit of the conservation workbench: preserving the manual may not be as exciting as preserving the game it comes with, but manuals have value that calls for us to rethink archival hierarchy. Indeed, as I will argue here, when we lose the manual, we lose the game—both literally and figuratively. Unlike old issues of Nintendo Power which have always had a paratextual relationship to the games they describe, old game manuals occupy the unenviable position of having become paratext by way of ludic bias, or the idea that the most important part of the game to preserve is the part that moves around on the screen. The barriers between text and paratext are permeable, and “paratext” is not a stable category; it defines, rather, a set of presuppositions. For something to be paratextual, it must have a clearly delineable relationship to the object at hand, but it must also be something that wouldn’t fundamentally alter the object if we were to lose it. Game manuals have fallen into a paratextual position in relation to old games because it has become commonplace to assume that you can play the game without the manual, but I also don’t believe that things should stay that way. To play and preserve old games without accounting for the manual is to fall into a definition of “the game” that is not capacious enough, while to explore the manual is to exchange archival hierarchy for game archaeology. Instead of assuming that “the game” is only the part that is made of digital pixels, game archaeology holds that every element of the ludic experience has a lot to teach us about what it means to be at play. 

Based on positive reporting from all kinds of outlets, from The Verge to Nintendo Life to NPR, I think it’s safe to say that people are generally glad that somebody out there is preserving the manuals for posterity. For example, NPR writes: “There is no beating the classics”; The Verge believes that: “This Vault of manuals is an amazing resource for fans of gaming history”; and Nintendo Life states: “We really miss physical game manuals”. However, I have seen relatively little coverage explaining in detail precisely why these projects are important. I would like to attempt some explication of this issue here.

I compulsively save the manuals for everything, from the toaster oven to the wi-fi router to Hasbro’s Frogger from 1997. Since so much of what I do throughout the day is motivated by anxiety and its mitigation, there is something soothing about the knowledge that the manual is always at arm’s reach, even when it is stuffed haphazardly in a drawer full of instructions for small appliances that I may or may not even own anymore. The manual’s presence is a comfort, a guide to accepting the ways that things fall apart all the time, a reminder that repair is possible. There may seem to be precious little linking the toaster oven manual to the video game manual, but the earliest game manuals actually had quite a bit in common with the booklet that comes with appliances. They served as guides for setting up and troubleshooting unwieldy and unfamiliar technology, which is the first step in the history of play that they reveal to us—at one time, being a gamer meant knowing as much about hardware as about software, and the different kinds of instructions that we see in early manuals illustrate this fact. The Magnavox Odyssey, an early home game console released in 1972, came with a set of transparent overlays that users were supposed to affix to the front of their television sets depending on which game they were playing, whether that was tennis, hockey, or “Haunted House.” It also came with a thirty-six-page manual which attempted to explain everything about the operation of the unit, including an entire page detailing how to hook up the unit depending on whether or not your television received VHF or UHF channels; the manual even prescribed some time spent practicing the controls without playing any game in particular before moving on to the main event. 

“If You Are Receiving VHF Television…”, from Odyssey Installation and Game Rules by Magnavox, from replacementdocs.com

Early Nintendo Entertainment System manuals still maintained vestiges of what we might call the “tech specs” tradition in manual writing. While a person purchasing the Donkey Kong NES port in 1986 would presumably already own the big manual that came with the console (which was then called the “control deck,” a rich semantic distinction), the first page of the game manual is mostly about how to care for the cartridge, and the next page is all about identifying the controller buttons. However, Nintendo also made a big step forward here: the writers included a section called, in all caps, OBJECT OF THE GAME/GAME DESCRIPTION, which summarized the game in three sentences: “Can you save Pauline from the clutches of Donkey Kong? Help Mario scale the construction site to rescue his girlfriend, Pauline. Dodge the fireballs and barrels that Donkey Kong hurls down the ramps and ladders to thwart your efforts.” The following page features a diagram of the controller and an explanation of the controls: “A Button: He Jumps. B Button: Not Used.” Many of the early console manuals included a very short description of the exact operations the player was meant to execute in order to effectively complete the game, which exemplifies a highly goal-oriented style of play that differs significantly from today’s emphasis on player agency, variable outcomes, and open worlds. Generally speaking, the mechanics, not the narrative, were the parts of the game that were most likely to be imbued with novelty. 

Figure 2: “Object of the Game,” from Donkey Kong, NES manual by Nintendo, from archive.org.

Over time, manuals came to emphasize game lore and narrative over simple summaries of mechanics, especially in SquareSoft games like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series. These narrative manuals came to prominence near the end of the NES era, and while they would increase in complexity as hardware improvements allowed for wider-ranging stories in ever-growing worlds, they defined the conventions of most game manuals for decades: start with the lore, then give an overview of the controls, then explain the specific mechanics of the game, leaving the player room to take notes at the end. The font and art style within the manual now generally reflects the aesthetic character of the game, and may even serve to complement the visual limitations of the hardware. Take, for example, the Kirby’s Adventure manual (1993). By this point, most technical information has been provided in a tiny unobtrusive font, or relegated to the back. For those who first got into gaming in either the SNES/Sega Genesis or N64/Dreamcast/PS1 eras, this set of conventions probably defines what “the manual” means.

Figure 3: “Light years away…”, from Kirby’s Adventure, NES Manual by Nintendo, from  archive.org.

These manuals essentially supplement the limitations of the game by providing narrative background and aesthetics that were more complex than the hardware could handle. Today, a game with unusually complex lore might see the release of an expensive and art-heavy guidebook, like the multivolume Elden Ring Strategy Guide, but there is also a widespread expectation that a game should speak for itself, giving the player all necessary information on the screen. The narrative manual speaks to a time when gaming was by definition an intertextual experience that covered multiple media, when print and digital media were symbionts like the algae and the fungi of a lichen—they had distinct roles in the overall play experience, but one was not complete without the other. The most dramatic and exciting example of this is the giant player’s guide that shipped with Earthbound, which caused the game to be packaged in a larger-than-average box. This gorgeous icon of game history is a fantastical collage of game footage, mock newspaper headlines, stock photographs, and unique 3-D renderings of character, enemy, and NPC sprites. I do not know if I have seen any other document that so uniquely captures the fact that a game separated from the manual is only half of itself.  

Figure 4: “Twoson Tribune,” from Earthbound, SNES Manual by Nintendo, archived by the SNES Manual Archive Project at archive.org.

It’s possible—in fact, it’s easy—to download and read the manual for any game on the Switch’s online library before diving in, but, speaking for myself, I never actually did this before I started exploring all the richness the manual has to offer. Just like book conservation anticipates the need to take something off the shelf and gently hold it open, an archive doesn’t exist just so we have somewhere to put all our old stuff—an archive exists to be used. I want to invite you, not to learn the secret handshake of some purist retro game in-club, but to join me on an archaeological adventure, and I really do mean “archaeology.” As Andrew Reinhard writes, “All video games are archaeological artifacts…. A more contemporary approach to artifacts sees them as independent of age, of no particular time, part of a past that persists in the present, mundane in their creation and use, physical or virtual, or special not only in their manufacture (either by people or machines) but also in their relationship to a greater context of personal ownership and interaction with people and with other things, part of a chain of their histories of use.” As links in that chain of histories of use, I would argue that people who have a stake in the meaning and history of video games have the opportunity, and the joy, of using resources like online manual archives to resist the decontextualization of old games. By becoming player-archaeologists, we can join the folk archivists of gaming history in reuniting the thing we call “the game” with that which appears to be its paratext, but which is in fact the other half of a dense intertextual relationship. Neither one is complete without the other.  

References

Reinhard, Andrew. Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games. New York: Berghahn, 2018.