Going back to the early nineties Genesis and SNES games had eight page manuals that you really didn't need.

But PC game manuals were monsterously large and I loved to sniff them!

I suppose my question is why you assume that eighteen year old male is the de-facto "casual gamer". I mean, you're right, he'd choose Dragon Age 2 over something like Bejeweled, but that doesn't mean he's still the most profitable or largest casual market, just that he's the one closest to your preconception of what the casual market is.
I kind of have to question the idea that old PC games were playable without reading the manual. I mean, I guess that applies to something like Doom or Commander Keen, but strategy games? RPGs? Simulations? Those were pretty damn impenetrable without written instructions.

Console games were another matter, but I'm working on the assumption that we're talking about the PC here, given this site's focus.

I would assume the majority of people that play games, on a regular basis, are males aged between twelve and forty.

And would then assume that only twenty percent of them have made it an obsessive hobby. Although ill-informed, I'm not saying that casual is 'bad' because 'not so casual' is unhealthy (of which group I fall under).

Females (not all, most), children and elderly play as well but not so often and I would lump them into the games that sites like Big Fish sells.

Which, quite frankly Big Fish sells good games but I would expect to find more males between 12 and forty lurking through Steam's catalogue than the Big Fish catalogue.

Well, I suppose that when I hear "casual gamer" I think of someone who plays games... casually. Someone who obsesses over Steam releases, buys two new releases at Gamestop each week, and spends four hours a day playing them doesn't strike me as particularly casual about their hobby.

But with that said, I still don't really agree that guys are playing games more than girls these days. They're just playing different games, ones with higher budgets (which isn't always a good thing... it's a lot harder to break even on Homefront than Angry Birds Seasons) and more publicity (which you'd expect given who primarily reports about gaming and where ad money comes from), but there's a reason every major publisher is scrambling to get into the casual market. I've seen women obsess over Peggle in ways that would make a CoD fanatic cringe.

It's like movies versus TV. Movies are sexier, more expensive and more publicized, but at the end of the day you'll still find just as many people (if not more) who watch sitcoms. It's easy to write off something like Two and a Half Men until you realize the obscene kind of money it pulls in and exactly HOW MANY people watch it. Just... not teenage males.

Only sort of, I don't consider the period he's talking about to be the "Golden Age" though it produced some great games. I think there was more amazing stuff on the C64 than you could find these days, at least given the penetration of such an expensive machine. Most of that was way before even NES days.

The golden days of gaming for the vast majority of people is when they were 13.

Yeah, I'm still not sure I agree with you. For one, most PC games back then had huge manuals. In fact, most of them pre-CDs REQUIRED you to look at something in the manual as a form of copy protection. A lot of PC games even came with a little "this is what the buttons on the keyboard do" insert that was seperate from the manual, I remember having X-Wing's propped up in front of my computer screen.

Console games didn't really require manuals, but then console games at the time usually didn't have much you needed to figure out other then move, jump, and attack. Nowadays they have move, strafe, jump, shoot, aim, target, duck, climb, switch weapons, cast a spell, throw a grenade, command an ally, throw a -different- grenade, talk, use, open the map, open the inventory, drive a vehicle, etc.

I wish more people understood this. It's the same with everything else. I've often heard other 20-somethings complain about how how kids cartoons are so much worse then they were in the 80's and 90's. However being the nerd that I am, I still check out Cartoon Network now and then and I can tell you that there are kids shows these days that are actually a lot more sophisticated then Thundercats/Transformers/etc. ever were.

Opinions opinions.

Must have been nice to have a lot of money. For those of us that didn't, we had to play those games without the advantages of a manual, and we did just fine. I remember memorizing the advancement requirements from civilization so that I didn't need the manual. And taking random stabs at the protection questions from other games as well.

Perhaps it's because of my intellect, but I rarely if ever found that game of that vintage was so complex as to require a lot of manual reading. In fact, even in cases where I did have a manual, I can't recall ever consulting it on a regular basis.

But, there was also a different culture, a lot of what's done in tutorials these days is mainly focused on the mentally feeble and goes into show people how to do things which when I first started gaming people were expected to pick up on their own. Just look at the C&C3:TW tutorial for a good example. With the possible exception of the jump jets, the rest of it is easily discoverable with a few clicks of the mouse.

These days are different, a lot of games are frustrating due to the pacing and the poor interface design choices and really if a game requires a tutorial and a manual, the designers ought to be asking themselves whether or not they have created an interface that adds to the gameplay experience or distracts. Players should not have to be thinking about the interface during most of the game.

But that's my view, feel free to disagree.
If you've designed the game well, you'd be surprised what players can figure out without a lot of handholding. I remember playing Civilzation without a manual, because I was pirating most of my games at that age, due to a lack of money and enforcement.

But, you can get some really deep and complex games which don't really require much if any explanation for you to play. The trick is that you have to create the paradigm in a straightforward way. One of the more interesting games in that respect was the Settlers II, you don't need a manual for that game, even though there is quite a bit of complexity. The complexities can be slowly introduced in the campaign mode, or for things like donkeys, give the player a couple of them and let them make the connection when it comes up.

Handholding for things like bejeweled is just utter bullshit.

It's also worth mentioning that a kid with nothing to do is a hell of a lot more likely to try and brute-force his way into learning a game's rules because he has nothing better to do. I know I did that quite a bit as well. But that's just a matter of kids having nothing better to do, not an actual laudable aspect of game design.

Honestly, I don't care for the first two Dragon Quests, and I grew up with them. The first is painful to play, and the whole "old speak" (Thou hast found copper sword!) gets REALLY annoying.

Dragon Quest III is still excellent, and Dragon Quest IV is the apex of the series. You can still sit down to play IV and it's a solid game. THen again, the Zenithian trilogy was better than the Edrick trilogy IMO.

I wasn't brute forcing it, Civilization, was based upon a sensible paradigm, and I can't for the life of me figure out exactly what was so complicated as to justify that tome they included.

The other thing is that unless a game is incredibly complex or there is no way of making it clear what to try, there should be no tutorial and no manual to distract the player. Manuals are there for those that are less serious, and tutorials for the same reason. A player shouldn't have to consult either one without a really good reason.

Some games legitimately require more controls and things which aren't intuitively obvious. I think AC2 was a brilliant compromise between complex mechanics and hand holding. They wove the tutorial in small chunks directly into the plot, and made it a part of the experience. It didn't break the immersion because it was effectively a part of the story, and they reserved it for things which one wouldn't be able to pick up on without a bit of help. And those mechanics themselves were not things which the designer could simplify without ruining the game.

My thing with manuals lately is that I'm mostly playing PC games and those manuals are all in PDF format...even if you've bought the hard copy.

I used to love curling up on the couch with blanket and coffee and read through a thick manual for a meaty game but I hate reading a PDF through Adobe Acrobat.

So I just take in what the tutorial throws at me and if I need to know more, I'll skim the PDF for specifics.

I don't mind a good manual, but I've always found in-game handholding to be insulting. There's way too much of it in games nowadays.