Is the Pen as Mighty as theJoystick?
Written on 3:05 PM by waratxe
Is the Pen as Mighty as theJoystick?
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: March 5, 2006
WHEN the package showed up last November at his house outside of Portland, Ore., David Hodgson initially felt a wave of great excitement. But that promptly gave way to foreboding.
Alan Weiner for The New York Times
David Hodgson has written 55 strategy books for video games. "It's like writing a travel guide to a place that doesn't exist," he said of his work.
Forum: Gaming
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Larry W. Smith for The New York Times
Beverly McClain bought about a dozen strategy guides last year, more than the number of novels she bought.
As soon as he opened the bundle, he realized that a clock had started ticking on a new assignment: he had four months to write a manual on how to extort, kill and otherwise take over a New York mob family. The task was particularly harrowing, in part because he wanted to make sure that his prose was well organized and clear.
Inside the package was an early copy of the much-anticipated Godfather video game that its maker, Electronic Arts, is scheduled to release later this month. Mr. Hodgson's job was to understand every facet of the game and to write a book advising players about how to win it.
For players of Godfather, which is based on Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's movies, the goal is to rise from small-time hustler to boss of the Corleone crime family or, ultimately, all of the area's crime families. Doing so requires players to complete 17 missions, to attempt 20 assassinations and to bribe and extort dozens of merchants.
The game, like a growing number of others these days, takes place in a world where the players can move freely; it does not have the prescribed limits of, say, Pac-Man. And that creates special challenges for the author of a strategy guide.
"The first thing I thought was, 'I need a map,' " said Mr. Hodgson, 33, who spent the first part of his time getting to know New York and New Jersey, where the game is set. With help from the company, he also familiarized himself with a range of weapons, the best ways to blow up buildings and how to extort various characters. There are 50 to 60 ways to murder people in the game — from running them over with cars to garroting — and many ways to shake down a merchant.
After logging long hours trying various tactics, Mr. Hodgson said he asked the company whether he had explored them all, and which ones would help players rack up the highest scores.
Mr. Hodgson's name may not ring a bell, perhaps not even with most of his readers. But he is a best-selling author, one of a platoon of 25 or so professional authors turning out books — strategy guides for video games — that can sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
The guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, an intricate and violent action game, has sold 748,000 copies, an unusually high number, since it came out in 2004. Mr. Hodgson estimates that the 55 strategy guides he has written have sold a total of one million copies.
(By comparison, former President Bill Clinton's autobiography, "My Life," which came out in 2004, has sold 1.27 million copies, according to Nielsen BookScan; the hardcover edition of "My Life" was on the New York Times best-seller list for 28 weeks.)
Video games are not usually associated with reading, so the strategy guides' popularity is something of an oddity, marrying the fast-paced, fast-twitch world of computer and television console games with the tactile and ruminative experience of text-centric manuals.
In general, strategy guides are thick full-color books that tell players how best to solve puzzles, find and use weapons, discover hidden bounty and navigate complex and expansive virtual worlds — worlds that the writers are paid to deconstruct.
"It's like writing a travel guide to a place that doesn't exist," Mr. Hodgson said. "Whereas Frommer's guides tell you what hotel to stay in, I tell you which hotel not to stay in because you're going to get dragged down by a gangster."
BY most measures, strategy guides are not a huge business. They generated about $90 million in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm; the figure dropped to $67 million in 2005, but that decline was expected as a cyclical moment, paralleling a transition in the industry to a new generation of advanced game consoles. If history is any guide, industry executives expect the transition to lead eventually to increased sales of games and strategy manuals.
The challenge for the industry's two biggest publishers — Prima Games, a division of Random House, and BradyGames, a subsidiary of Pearson — is how to capitalize on computer technology without being undone by it. In a world of virtual play, they want to prove that a physical book is the best, most effective sidekick.
To do so, these companies are fending off challenges from Internet publishers, both shoestring amateurs and well-financed professionals, that produce online guides. Ziff Davis, the publisher of PC Magazine and other consumer technology publications, plans to start a free game-focused Web site in March; among other things, it will offer video of people playing games, to show players how to solve challenges.
Among the books that are published by BradyGames are guides for navigating through the video games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and World of WarCraft.
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"There's a lot of free content on the Web, and we've been battling it for years," Steve Escalante, director of marketing for BradyGames, said in an interview.
In competing with these free rivals, BradyGames, based in Indianapolis, and Prima, in Roseville, Calif., have the advantage of extensive cooperation from game makers, which provide full schematic diagrams, for example, for the games and images. In exchange, they pay a lump sum and a percentage of sales.
It seems to be working. Mr. Escalante said that despite the free online competition, "we continue to grow."
For those who use the guides, the efforts of Mr. Hodgson and other authors are worth more than the $15 to $20 they typically spend on the books. Indeed, while Mr. Hodgson has never met a woman named Chloe Brown, an avid video game player in Toronto, he has helped her keep her frustration in check.
"I once threw my controller into the wall and broke it" while playing an adventure game called Jade Empire, said Ms. Brown, 21. She was stuck at a certain point, she explained, and became frustrated because she couldn't figure out how to advance; after breaking her controller, she bought the game guide by Mr. Hodgson.
Generally, Ms. Brown and others who buy guides said they need help to cope with the growing complexity of games. In the days of simpler games, "you opened the door, smacked someone on the back of the head and walked out of the room," Ms. Brown said. "Now you have to peek into the doorway, creep into the room, create a disturbance, subdue someone: Are you going to kill them? Will you use a silencer? Or will you just knock them out?"
If you make the wrong move, she added, "you can go through the same process 5, 10 or 25 times before you realize 'this is what I'm supposed to do.' "
The guides give explicit counsel. One page in the manual for Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, an adventure and shooting game set in World War II, even advises players to beware of French soldiers collaborating with the Nazis. "Follow Bloomfield up the stairs to the entrance of the hangar," it reads. "Shoot out the windows and use the windows as cover to fire down at the French. Watch out for the guys on the catwalk directly across from you; they can see and fire at you."
It adds, helpfully: "Be careful not to accidentally shoot your teammates."
Some players disdain the guides, which they say are less about strategy than taking shortcuts.
"They're good for people who don't like challenges," said Ibe Ozobia Jr., 32, of Las Vegas. "You don't have to think through the game. You can just look for the answers on the shelf."
Others, however, swear by them. Beverly McClain, 60, a retired clerical worker in Wichita, Kan., said: "Many gamers insist that the only way to play a game is to figure it all out for yourself. I say, buffalo chips."
Ms. McClain says she plays video games about five hours a night. As her taste in entertainment shifted from reading books to playing the games, she said, her purchases at bookstores also changed. She said she brought home about a dozen strategy guides last year, more than the number of novels she bought.
Ms. McClain tried to use free information provided online, she said, but it required her to print out dozens of pages of instructions, or to switch her computer screen back and forth between the game and the hints.
AS games have become more complex, guidebooks have grown longer. Debra Kempker, the president of Prima Games, said the average size of a guide for a console-based game is 176 pages, up from 128 pages in 2002.
The growing complexity means that Mr. Hodgson and other authors often cannot deconstruct the games without assistance. Mr. Hodgson says he typically receives ample help from the game designers for the eight guidebooks he is under contract to write each year for Prima Games — but not always. In 2003 and 2004, he said, designers at Atari were too busy to give him much help in writing a guidebook for its "Driv3r" game.
Despite such occasional problems, he says he considers his job a dream. While growing up in Manchester, England, where his father taught geography at a university and his mother taught German and French, he planned to become a history teacher. But he became interested in games — he found that his interest in detail and research was served by unlocking their virtual worlds.
In 1997, Mr. Hodgson wrote his first guide, for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Last year, he wrote guides for, among others, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II, Medal of Honor: European Assault, Half Life 2, Jade Empire, Burnout: Revenge, and Perfect Dark Zero.
He declined to say how much he is paid for each guide, but publishers say they generally pay authors $3,000 to $12,000 a book. For the Godfather guide, he wrote 175,000 words — the equivalent of nearly two novels — and said he talked daily to a designer who was laying out images from the game, tip boxes and other elements.
By the time he finishes a project, Mr. Hodgson said, he is sometimes so sick of the game that he hopes to never see it again, much less play it.
But he said he mostly loves the work, and even likes the relative anonymity of his authorship. Sometimes, it can be amusing. At the annual E3 trade show — the year's biggest gathering of video game companies — Mr. Hodgson's publisher placed him at a booth to sign copies of the strategy guides he had written.
"The most amusing thing is, some people will ask for a copy of the book and ask me not to sign it," Mr. Hodgson said, laughing. He doesn't fault them. "I'm not a proper author," he said. "I'm the redheaded stepchild of authors."
