You walk in your favorite videogame store and pick up an unfamiliar game box. You flip through the instruction booklet and are met with swanky character designs, deep lore, complex strategies, and an expansive world map where you can already see yourself getting lost. You can even picture what it would be like to play the game and your fingers are twitching to hold the controller, but then... you didn't get it because you were late to meet a friend or didn't have enough money on you, and then you forgot about the game until, decades later, you may have thought to yourself: "wow, that seemed pretty cool. Maybe I should give it a try?"
If this has happened to you, do NOT try to find a working game ROM and emulate it on your laptop, because that piece of digital software will never be as fun, immersive, and good as that single glimpse that you built in your mind's eye at the store that one day. And nothing else will ever replicate it.
Introducing: the first annual Game Manual Jam! Hosted by boshi's place in collaboration with txtbooks and organized by hatimb00, mariopartygod, and spacelionz, as part of NYU's Game Design Days!
1. The Jam
2. The IRL Event
3. Rules
4. Why Game Manuals?
5. F.A.Q.
6. Inspirations
7. Resources
The goal is to make a speculative game manual, aka an instruction manual based on a game that doesn't exist.
In addition to this itch game jam, we will host an in-person event at boshi's place, our physical space in New York for exhibiting games, staging performances, and facilitating workshops and, you guessed it, game jams!
During the event, the attendees will co-create through creative prompts one single booklet, or what we like to call our "holy grail manual".
The event will take place midway through the online jam on Saturday November 22nd at 11 AM, and it will be an opportunity for participants to meet each other, get inspired for the rest of the jam, and play around :). More info on the event coming soon.
The in-person workshop is part of Game Design Days, which are supported by NYU Game Center and Empire State Development.
> No generative AI.
> No making a videogame.
> Be respectful & have fun.
Once upon a time, manuals were for many gamers the first time the player experienced a game before even booting the console. They filled in the spaces left in the game's story due to our more primitive graphics and memory space. There was less emphasis on making every step of the game super obvious, tutorialized and crystal-clear because the player could always go back to the manual. They held cool tidbits about the game's world, useful tips, and even insightful interviews from the developers. They contained super obscure lore that made you go "wait... the princess and the wizard did what??". They occasionally straight-up lied about the game's content. They were real objects that you could touch with your actual hands and keep in your shelf. They were really cool to look at. When you think about it, a game manual is actually way better than a game because it provides all this and more and takes way less time to create, so you do have to wonder, why did they stop making them and why do we even bother with developing the games when we could just cut out the superfluous and switch to just making manuals forever?
That is the ideal vision for this jam's outcome. If that seems too far-fetched, then we wish to, at least, celebrate game manuals for the unique cultural product that they are, and usher in a new age in which every new game post-November-2025 comes out with a manual.
> Can I make a game based on a game that already exists?
: You can do whatever you want forever~!
> What format should my game submission be?
: It could be a pdf file, an html page, or really anything else you come up with.
> Why do you spell it videogame?
: Videogames are their own form of cultural product linked but ultimately separate from both video and games. But this doesn't really matter because this jam is about the manuals!!!
> Are there prizes?
: Yes, if you think of "having lots of fun", "trying something new", "connecting with your fellow makers", and "having an invaluable and unreplicable life experience that you will cherish forever" as prizes.
You can find some cool game manuals from sources including Internet Archive, Vimm's Lair, the Video Games Museum, and the Games Database.
Here's a few that we think are neat:
- We Love Katamari
- b.l.u.e.: Legend of Water
- Sonic Adventure 2
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
- E.T.
- D2's Strategy Guide
- Shenmue's Strategy Guide
- Space Channel 5's Guide Book
In addition to traditional game manuals, we also feel inspired by GameFaqs walkthroughs, post-modernist takes like Lilith Zone's DUNGEON LOVERS DX, and getting tips from your middle school's classmate about how to catch Pikablu.
Here's some stuff you could include in a manual:
- Controls
- Strategies
- Table of contents
- World Map
- Main Characters
- Developers Interview
- Intro
- Page numbers
- Borders
- Tips
- Tidbits
- Smidgens
- Dog-ears
- How to win the game
- How to lose the game
- Screenshots
- A love letter
- Tie-in comics
- A short story
- A poem
- An origami
- A dress-up doll
- A (not video!!) game
- A spread with just a really big title
- A spread with just a teeny-tiny title
- Pictures of development
- A credits page
- How to insert the game into your console and boot it
- Fluxus scores
- Ads
- [...]
These are a list of possible tool you could use to create your manual:
- alienmelon's Electric Zine Maker and Jeremy Oduber's EZMreader
- Scribus
- LibreOffice
- MS Paint
- Gimp
- HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Pen, pencil, paint, pastels & paper
- Blood, sweat and tears
- Other game manuals
- Your imagination...
Do NOT use:
- Unity
- Unreal
- GameMaker
But really we can't stop you from doing anything so..
