IN MODERN-DAY gaming, designers are generally extremely good teachers of new mechanics. 

While there are always outliers such as Dwarf Fortress (tagline: Losing is fun!) which revel in outrageously steep learning curves, mainstream companies usually work very hard to make new systems intuitive.

Largely gone are the early days of greyscale printed manuals, casually tossed on the floor by children and adults alike who just started pressing things to see what happened. 

Instead, most titles have for years featured step-by-step tutorials geared to teach complex maneuvers as you play, on the grounds that punters must get hooked before they delete the whole shebang in a fit of pique. 

For regular gamers it’s easy to forget all this as you hit the “skip” option — controls are fairly standardised now and you will already have it burned into your muscle memory that right stick means look around, A means jump, or on PC that W moves your character forward/up. 

But anyone else will be left flailing around like a distressed seal until they’re walked through it — as was demonstrated by broadcaster Jon Snow as he tried and failed to play a game for children on Channel 4 News last year.

Growing uptake can thus only happen if the price of entry isn’t too high both financially and in terms of mental taxation. 

Which makes recent trends in the (primarily PC) indie gaming community to abandon this thinking all the more irksome.

A little while ago I was trying to play Planetary Annihilation. 

Released in a “mostly” built state for Kickstarter backers, it was ambitious, unwieldy and unfamiliar, and it had no obvious instructions, instead linking through to You Tube videos of people playing it. 

In terms of teaching me how to play this turned out to be disastrous, as I had no progression of core mechanics to guide me, and watching people narrate their multiplayer experiences wasn’t solving my issues.

What concerns me is that while this was a particularly egregious example, it seemingly connects to a quietly lazy developer mantra that “the community” can pick up core tasks, slicing a chunk off budgets which would have otherwise gone towards explaining matters and dumping the work on unpaid enthusiasts. 

In the indie scene, which acts as something of a test bed for many ideas which will later make it into major releases, some developers are relying on fans to document their games for them via You Tube Let’s Plays (where gamers record and comment as they go) and game wikis (user-edited information hubs).

While wikis have been popular since Wikipedia (World of Warcraft’s WOWpedia for example), their use in everyday gaming has been accelerated by the spectacularly successful Minecraft model. 

Before the millions began to flow in 2009 a fan set up a forum and wiki system which dispensed with developer-led instructions, instead getting enthusiasts to chart the exponentially increasing ways of manipulating its blocky system through trial and error.

If the wiki could be considered a manual of sorts, it is now over 3,000 pages long, while the forum’s millions of users act as both a fast problem-solving machine and a community space where its thousands of mods (player-coded modifications to the core game) are made, checked, updated, integrated and rated.

This approach has coincided with massive growth in online video streaming of amateur tutorials and Let’s Plays, primarily via You Tube and latterly through livestreaming service Twitch, in which personality broadcasters such as the Yogscast are bigger names for young people than Ant and Dec.

The phenomenon has taken many games commentators by surprise, as it seemingly subverts the very premise of gaming that you are personally in control. But it serves two functions — one being to entertain through the vicarious experience of inclusive, entertaining playthroughs of games you won’t necessarily play personally, the other being as a demonstration piece. 

With a phenomenon like Minecraft this works well. The combination of mass-produced information, personal service and demonstration-by-doing means that even though early versions had no instructions it was possible to become somewhat capable in a matter of hours.

Such approaches however rely on both a critical mass and quality of participants, which is never guaranteed, alongside a basic understanding of the system, as specialist wikis often assume a great deal of existing knowledge. 

It’s no good telling Jon Snow to “look at the wiki and ask in the forums,” because he has no previous experience to build on. He knows nothing.

This is corner-cutting by developers, based on an optimistic viewpoint both of what seasoned gamers will volunteer for and what newbies will put up with. 

Industry workers and consumers derive little benefit from this form of bleeding-edge capitalism, where hard and necessary work to support a product is not only not paid for, it’s actively sold as a community-building project that we should be grateful to have.