The Co-Creative Evolution of Video Game Instructions

This book describes how video game manuals transformed from rudimentary instructions to multimodal tutorials, and finally to an entire industry of player-created instructional wikis and videos, using current theories of technical communication. It engages theories of tactical and strategic communication, design thinking, and co-creation to chart how video games progressed from simple paper manuals to an often lucrative player-created industry. Offering a historical overview, it investigates instructional content in video games of each decade, beginning in the 1960s, that are representative of the inexorable move toward co-creative practices in teaching players how to play video games.