Well, this hasn't exactly got our day off to the best of starts.
If you've been around games for as long as we have (which is a pretty long time now), you'll probably remember the day when games were free of their restrictive DVD shaped packaging, and instead came in huge cardboard boxes - which, although they took up a lot more shelf space, allowed games companies a lot more freedom with what they bundled with the game than the rubbish packaging does now. Plus, they looked cool.
For years, we've been yearning for a return to the days of old - and could often be seen gazing dreamily towards the horizon, reminscing about Operation Overlord, The Battle of Britain, MechWarrior 2 - all games with huge, ring bound manuals - tomes of gaming knowledge, that you could read wherever you wanted. But now, our hopes of a renaissance have been all but trashed, as Ubisoft have announced they're doing away with manuals all together.
The Falcon 4.0 manual. Page upon page of detailed technical information about the plane you were flying; flight manoeuvres, and the theatre of war. RIP.
For certain games back in the day, the manuals used to do more than just explain how to play the game. They'd detail the universe it took place in, the characters you might come across - or, in the case of flight simulators, go into excrutiating detail about the theatres of war, and the actual physics of flying a plane. The manuals were a crucial part of the package - whether they served as a perfect introduction to the game, that you'd eagerly read on the way home from the shops, or actually allowed you to get your plane off the ground without causing it to spontaneously combust, as in Falcon 4.0. And even more importantly, when you bought a game, you weren't just buying the disk - you got something real, tangible, and useful for your money.
However, over the past few years, the manuals have dwindled from over a hundred pages in length, to about six, and today, in so-called "green" move, Ubisoft have put the final nail in the coffin, by announcing that it will no longer be including paper manuals with its games, starting with Shaun White's Skateboarding this Autumn. Instead, for people who pick up Shaun White's Skateboarding on the Xbox 360, you'll be greeted by a very light box, and a digital manual on the disk. The manual, the press release states, will "offer the player easier and more intuitive access to game information" - as opening a paper manual apparently isn't intuitive enough.
Portrayed as an "environmental initiative" that "will provide multiple benefits for the player and the environment", the press release is stuffed to bursting point with information about how many trees need to be destroyed (13, if you're interested) to make one tonne of manuals (or 43,400 manuals, if you do the maths), but it also raises a few questions.
Firstly, quite how asking players to turn on their TVs, and games consoles (which both consume a lot of electricity), in order to read what used to be available at any point, without any cost to the environment seems a bit odd. How it's more "environmentally friendly" for people to sit in front of a TV, with a console on, to read a manual that used to only consume the energy it took to light the room is beyond us.
Even if we ignore the fact that some of the science behind the global warming theory is a bit ropey at times, it still seems a bit of an odd idea for a "green" initiative.
Noted scientist and environmentalist Shaun White - of Shaun White's Snowboarding, and now Shaun White's Skateboarding fame - had the following to say:
"I'm excited for my new skateboarding game to come out and stoked that it will be the very first Ubisoft game to be part of their green packaging initiatives"
Make of that what you will. Anything that has the word "initiatives" in it should be taken with a pinch of salt large enough to dehydrate an elephant.
Of course, the news will come as a disappointment to many non-hardcore gamers, who don't have time to memorise the controls for a game - none more so than our very own Sarah, who insists on having the manual in front of her, open on the controls diagram, whenever she's playing a game that has more than two buttons. When she does that, it's easy for her to glance down and double check which button does what - rather than be forced to pause the game, and navigate the menus to find what she's looking for. Not to mention the fact that it'll be nigh on impossible to access an in game manual when you're in a multiplayer game anyway - many games online, you can't pause, and if you do, you'll probably lose, or be killed anyway.
Of course - this may well be the reason why the scheme hasn't yet been rolled out to the Wii or DS. By taking away manuals on the 360 first, Ubisoft's presuming it will only affect the "hardcore", who memorise the controls for each and every game within a few seconds of picking it up, and need no instruction of what to do. Seemingly acknowledging that the rest of us could use a manual, at least the Wii and DS will remain a safe haven - for the next few months.
Either way, what started out as a normal news story has turned into a bit of a rant, so we apologise for that. Now that Ubisoft are saving money by not including a manual with the game, it would be nice to see a reduction in the price to reflect that - but that seems about as likely as an EU referendum.
It would certainly be interesting to see just how much power an average player would consume reading through the manual on a TV, compared to the energy used making a paper manual, though. Maybe when Shaun White's Skateboarding comes out, we'll run a scientific test. We're sorting out our lab coats now.
