Who is buying strategy guides?

Whether published by Brady Games, Prima, or another company, strategy guides are always enticing.  The covers mimic the games they offer strategies for and flipping through the colorful illustrations and pages incite the imagination for what's to come in a particular gaming title.  It's hard to walk past the guide stand in a store without looking over and contemplating giving one a try or even just buying it because it looks cool.  As a kid, I always wanted the strategy guides to the games I owned but thanks to their hefty pricetags on-top of an already pricey game my parents probably bent over backward for to afford, the answer was almost always "no".

"Sorry, guys.  Mom said no.  Maybe if $9.95 wasn't the same as $200 in 1992 we could have a future together."

Why are all the characters on the cover straining so hard? Perhaps it's best we don't know.

Now that I'm an able gamer who rarely becomes stumped during a game as I did as a child, I am still somewhat drawn to strategy guides.  I even have the steady income to afford a few but I still always pass.

The only extra thing it would offer is the fulfillment of completing a game 100% if that was my goal.  Typically, my goal is to beat the main quest or storyline and whatever I happen to do along the way is just part of the fun.  I don't feel the need to completely explore the game and find all it's secrets and complete all it's quests to feel that I have mastered it.  Simply chewing on the amount of fun I want at the pace I want justifies leaving out a few things unnecessary to the plot.  Speaking of exploration, by strictly following a strategy guide walk-through, exploration becomes search and seizure.

There's really only three ways to utilize strategy guides, right?  You can actively go through the guide as you play through the first time using all the hints in the guide and subsequently ruining all sense of personal accomplishment you would have had doing it all on your own.  Secondly, you can actively go through the guide after you've already beaten the game to find things you've missed.  Rarely, after putting 10,20,30, or 40 hours into a game and beating it am I willing to entertain the prospect of going back and doing it over again, much less more thoroughly.  I doubt I would even consider it years later after the game has had time to fade in my mind.  Thirdly, you can use the guide only if you become stumped but then you've spent a good amount of money on a book that basically replaces a free Google search.

So why are strategy guides so popular?  Well I guess some players really DO want to master the games without putting forth the cerebral effort to do it themselves.  Aside from that, before the internet was widespread the guides were very helpful for very difficult games.  The original Tomb Raider comes to mind.  I played this game when I was young, 11 or 12, and had much trouble with the puzzles and just the general difficulty of the game.  I had borrowed a tattered Tomb Raider strategy guide from a cousin and was able to get myself through more difficult parts of the levels.  My parents couldn't afford strategy guides, much less internet for me to browse for answers.  That's to say the answers were even online then, who knows?  But now with widespread internet, the guides are still all over shelves.   So again, why are they so popular?

Strategy guides weren't new to the Playstation or N64 generation either; They go much further back.  Jeff Rovin's "How to Win at Nintendo Games" books were super popular in the late eighties and early 90's.  I was able to find three of the books at a used book store recently and thumbed through them.  The games back then didn't lend themselves to needing a lengthy amount of strategy so each game highlighted in the books only gets a few pages.  If you're into the classics, these books are actually fairly helpful.  Many NES games were extremely cryptic and though the NES itself only had a 4 button controller plus D-pad, many of the games still proved unfathomably difficult.  The little tips and tricks found in those books and other magazines from back in the day were a big help for some gamers.  I remember using Game Genie's and cheat codes to advance levels on classic games.  Games today have gotten away from the clear dissected level format but there still are some cheats available if that's what you're into.

Today's games don't really need the kind of instruction NES games did.  Tutorials, in-game help menus, and autosave points do such a good job to guide players through games and save their progress, that today's games can be seen as too easy.  I'm happy with the default difficulty levels of most games but a few console generations ago, difficulty heavily depended on the game.  Today, not all players are as patient as they once were and if having to search more than five minutes for a clue becomes a hassle then the game gets neglected or a Google search is on the way. Noobs.

Who is buying strategy guides today and why?  It's a decently sized market, someone has to be buying them up and for good reason. 

For what it's worth, they make great collectors items.  I've snagged a few used ones and as a nostalgia junky, I love them.  As a gamer I can do without them.  What about you?

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