10 years ago I was a huge fan of GameFAQs, which, for any major game, had at least one and often several highly detailed documents describing a game, not just a walkthrough but a set of tables where you would find items.
Back then I was playing Hyperdimension Neptunia and almost tried “applying AI” in the old sense to the problem of “What do I have to do to craft item X?”. Those games all had good FAQs and extracting a knowledge graph and feeding it into some engine that could resolve dependencies wouldn’t have been too hard.
Today I am playing Atelier Sophie which has the same mechanic but is very cozy and doesn’t pose complex dependency problems and the FAQs for this game are atrocious, consisting of a walkthrough that way too prescriptive. If you ask some question like “Where do I get a Night Crystal?” on Google this is likely to turn up a question/answer pair on a forum which isn’t quite as good as having the structured FAQ.
YouTube walkthroughs really seemed to kill text walkthroughs, sometimes these are better (like when there is a jump in a dungeon that doesn’t look like you could make it but you can) but sometime they are much worse (there are 75 hour long videos in a walkthrough, you have to find that it is in video #33 and that you have to seek to 20:55.)
Maybe the proliferation of trash sites will motivate the creation of high quality FAQs but you’d better believe that the creator of these FAQs will be horribly afraid of being ripped off.
Back then I was playing Hyperdimension Neptunia and almost tried “applying AI” in the old sense to the problem of “What do I have to do to craft item X?”. Those games all had good FAQs and extracting a knowledge graph and feeding it into some engine that could resolve dependencies wouldn’t have been too hard.
Today I am playing Atelier Sophie which has the same mechanic but is very cozy and doesn’t pose complex dependency problems and the FAQs for this game are atrocious, consisting of a walkthrough that way too prescriptive. If you ask some question like “Where do I get a Night Crystal?” on Google this is likely to turn up a question/answer pair on a forum which isn’t quite as good as having the structured FAQ.
YouTube walkthroughs really seemed to kill text walkthroughs, sometimes these are better (like when there is a jump in a dungeon that doesn’t look like you could make it but you can) but sometime they are much worse (there are 75 hour long videos in a walkthrough, you have to find that it is in video #33 and that you have to seek to 20:55.)
Maybe the proliferation of trash sites will motivate the creation of high quality FAQs but you’d better believe that the creator of these FAQs will be horribly afraid of being ripped off.