While thick, printed slabs of information used to come with every game disc, manuals are no longer automatic. Is the game manual dying… or should it have never been born?

I was playing an action game the other day - a game I'd started, put back on the shelf, then picked up the single-player campaign again some months later - and realized I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't remember some of the moves and attacks I'd learned five months ago, and I couldn't progress without them. Rather than start the game over from scratch, I opened the case and pulled out what should have been a Beefy Tome of Worthwhile Information(tm) (i.e., the in-box game manual), but turned out to be a Scrap of Paper Written for Idiots.
 Modern game manuals offer little more than a list of menu options and the HUD diagram, which clinically informs you that your health bar shows your health and the number under the word "Score" is your score. Some games, like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo: Reach, really put effort into their booklets, but unless it's a detailed strategy game like Civilization Revolution or Culdcept Saga, you'll most likely get eight monochrome pages of legalese. What happened? Maybe they were too expensive to make, maybe companies feel they aren't important, but the unspoken mandate is clear: Nothing to see here. Go play, already. It's a little sad. Reading the instructions used to be a way to arm yourself before going into battle, as well as providing another window into the game's world. Part of the deluxe experience is now missing, much like music nerds miss the colorful gatefold sleeves of vinyl LPs in the age of digital music.

Portal is possibly the best example of manual-free instruction. You don’t need a booklet when GLaDOS shows you the way.

Maybe it's naive to think that a paper booklet can offer anything to enrich a game bursting with surround sound and dynamic tessellation in 1080p, but...well, I kind of miss having my hand held. Manuals don't assume I know how to play the game; they affirm that it's okay to ask questions, and the reward for asking is knowledge. How else will I learn?

Well...you'll learn by doing. Take classic arcade gaming, for instance. (Surprise!) Pong offered a single line of instruction: "Avoid missing ball for high score." And if you didn't go "Oh, I get it" just by watching as someone played Pac-Man, Namco knew they'd lost your quarter. And now, we've come full circle. Games built for Kinect (and Move and Wii) don't really benefit from manuals; they're designed for you to drop your inhibitions and Jump In(tm). Seriously - you probably read the instructions on how to connect your Kinect, but did you need a booklet to learn how to play Dance Central? Gaming shouldn't be like assembling a bicycle: this is a leisure activity that makes you laugh, relax, and forget your drab, wretched life.

So, maybe the lack of manual is actually... progress? The best games have always told me what I need to know as I go, whether they explicitly offered a tutorial level or not. Portal did it brilliantly, and every Live Arcade game must be designed without the safety net of printed instructions. If you're organically giving the player the info they need right before they need it, that's good game design. Plus, taking your hands off the controller to read a book is an awkward buzzkill. The 48-page Street Fighter IV manual offers move lists for each character (as well as five pages of ads), but those move lists are in the game, too - just press pause. Why kill a tree when you have space on the disc?

The lack of manuals means we're moving forward with knowledge from the past. Gaming is advanced enough to explain itself with itself - without some archaic translator. But old coin-ops already proved that: the play's the thing, the medium is the message, and games don't need any context besides the ones they themselves provide. I'm starting to think that the death of the manual is in fact a glorious sign of gaming's evolution.

Once the features editor for the website you're reading, Dan Amrich is now the blogger/podcaster/social media goofball for Activision and the editor of oneofswords.com. He still has lots of opinions.