Bye-bye instruction booklets
A year ago this very week I put up a post I called The campaign for instruction booklet-free video games in which I said that the little paper manuals that come with our games should be a thing of the past. They're a huge waste of paper. I'm no environmental scientist, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that eliminating the pamphlets-there are often more than one, especially in bilingual countries like ours-inside each of the hundreds of millions of boxed games sold around the world every year would save an awful lot of trees and eradicate the eco-unfriendly by-products associated with processing, binding, and printing.
Reader comments in response to this post were scrubbed as part of regular site maintenance, but I remember that I had nary a supporter. Whether they enjoyed reading story and character synopses or having a hardcopy reference for controls, it seemed no one was interested in seeing instruction booklets go the way of the dodo--which seemed strange to me, since many of us have already become used to going without manuals thanks to downloadable games.
And yet it is now starting to happen.
On Monday Ubisoft announced that beginning with this holiday's Shaun White Skateboarding the French publisher would no longer include paper instruction booklets with their PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC games. The company will instead supply "in-game digital manuals." It's part of a green initiative that also involves the use of more eco-friendly packaging materials. They plan to eventually roll out the digital manual program to all platforms.
According to the press release, Ubisoft's internal data suggests that producing one ton of paper used for game manuals uses an average of two tons of wood from 13 trees, consumes enough energy to heat and power a home for a year, emits greenhouse gases equivalent to over 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, and produces 15,000 gallons of wastewater. (Alas, it doesn't say how many booklets a ton of paper typically makes or how many tons of paper Ubisoft uses on average per game or per year.)
Curmudgeons will likely claim Ubisoft was motivated by cost savings, which was one of the reasons I listed in my original post as to why publishers should be motivated to make the switch. And, indeed, a Q&A sheet attached to the press release states frankly that the decision was at least partially informed by "the company's financial bottom line."
But so what? If what's good for business is also good for the environment, then great.
And to those who think they might lament the passage of these booklets' artful designs and information, imagine what might be possible with a digital manual. I'm thinking about interactivity, animations, term searches, and live help desks. It could be a wonderful evolution of the game manual.
Even if such extravagant digital guides are rare (and one imagines they would be, at least to start), they would likely be no less common than a quality print manual is today. There are exceptions, but most booklets that come across my desk have degraded into artless, black-and-white sheets of text filled with typos and grammatical errors.
If you really crave quality paper materials, you can always spend a few dollars more and purchase collector's editions, which one assumes will still be made available with glossy art booklets and other print products that have been put together with a little more love than your average manual.
Of course, it likely won't matter much whether one approves or disapproves of Ubisoft's bold decision. Now that one company has taken the plunge, it's just a matter of time before we see other major publishers follow suit.
And, as far as this game blogger is concerned, they can't dive into the world of paperless manuals quickly enough.
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