Walkthroughs, also known as FAQs or strategy guides, are player-authored documents that provide step-by-step instructions on how to play and what to do in order to finish a given video game. Exegetical in their length and detail, walkthroughs require hours of exacting labor to complete. Yet authors are rarely compensated for work that markedly differs from other kinds of fan creativity. To understand their motivations, I interviewed six veteran GameFAQs authors, then inductively analyzed the transcripts. Open coding surfaced five themes attributable to each participant. Together, these themes constitute a shifting mix of motivations, including altruism, community belonging, self-expression, and recognition -primarily in the form of feedback and appreciation but also from compensation. These findings increase our understanding of the motivations that drive fan labor, even as they complicate assumptions about its exploitation.
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Introduction
Literature review Methods Discussion ConclusionsIntroduction "If you're trying to find a reason why we waste so much time doing this, I was going to have to give you the bad news that we still don't know ourselves." -Participant 5.Walkthroughs, also known as FAQs or strategy guides [1], are exhaustive documents that provide step-by-step instructions on how to play and what to do in order to solve puzzles, find hidden items, overcome formidable foes, and generally progress through a given video game. Initially written by professionals and sold at retail, walkthroughs emerged in tandem with the golden age of gaming, helping players top the leaderboards of their favorite games. In 1982, readers could browse The Player's Strategy Guide to Atari VCS Home Video Games, learn how to Break a Million at Pac-Man, and survive an Invasion of the Space Invaders, a book distinguished not for its advice, but rather for its author, an up-and-coming Martin Amis. Today, official (i.e., licensed, authorized) guides are still produced by the likes of Piggyback and Future Press, but the task of helping players has largely fallen to gaming Web sites, of which GameFAQs is the largest source of fan-authored walkthroughs.Since 1995, when it began as the Video Game FAQ Archive, GameFAQs has collected and published reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs from more than 100,000 contributors (GameFAQs, 2017a). Over the years, GameFAQs has changed hands -its current parent is CBS Interactive -but its mechanics are mostly unaltered. Fans voluntarily submit content for which they retain ownership but little else [2]. Most are unpaid.Some of their submissions are short, as taxing to write as a long e-mail message. For example, Chris McCullough's "Death Punch Guide" for Mortal Kombat II is about 400 words long. But other walkthroughs are longer by orders of magnitude, approaching encyclopedic complexity as their authors expound on every piece, part, and pixel of a given video game. Consider Alex Eagleson's Star Ocean 3 walkthrough. In Microsoft Word, the guide's nineteen chapters run to an astonishing 383 page...