Diegetic Manual (Concept)

Diegetic Manual

CONCEPT

Some manuals are styled and written as though they are real documents from the game world.

Overview

Instruction manuals are typically written in a way that acknowledges that the video game is a fictional work realized by the player's computer. However, some developers want the player's experience of the world to begin as early as possible, and to that end, they create documents which explain the game's mechanics and features from a game character's perspective. Sometimes this takes the form of an instruction book from the world, other times a character's diary. Some manuals are also not written entirely diegetically or non-diegetically, but include elements such as backgrounds that suggest they originate from in the in-game universe or might contain notes or letters from the game world, alongside technical text. For example, the manuals for GoldenEye 007 (Game) and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion openly address their video games as video games, but GoldenEye's instruction booklet includes a letter to James Bond (Character) and the Elder Scrolls's booklet uses a border and background to appear like a manuscript from its land of Cyrodiil (Location).

Examples

The original Fallout (Game) provides one of the most famous examples of the trope, styling its manual as a "Vault (Concept)-Dweller's Survival Guide".
Many games in the Grand Theft Auto (Franchise) series present their manuals as guide books for the city they are set in. Similarly, much of the Earthbound manual is skinned as a tourist's guide to the world of Onett (Location).
The Halo 2 (Game) manual is fictionalized as a United Nations Space Command (Concept) briefing on the Human-Covenant War.
Impossible Mission (Game)'s manual uses the pretense of a top secret document in the history of spy dramas.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus's manual treats itself as a book owned by Cooper himself and contains conversations between Sly and his sidekick Bentley (Character).
In the StarTropics (Game) manual, the protagonist, Michael Jones, and other characters from the game, directly address the reader as though talking to them in-person.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (Game) is played both through interaction with the video game and the manual for it. The players must co-operate to disarm a bomb with the manual acting as a bomb-disarmament guide.
Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow Versions were shipped with manuals whose cover and page backgrounds are that of a bound "Trainer's Guide".
Like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Zachtronics's SHENZHEN I/O requires the player to repeatedly interact with its manual during play. This manual takes on the appearance and didactic text of datasheets for various computer components that the player must implement in their in-game circuits. One of these sheets is even written in Chinese script, the native written language of the game's setting.
Another video game from Zachtronics, TIS-100, has a manual that includes a note about events prior to the game and acts as a diegetic tutorial for programming the fictional TIS-100 computer in the game.

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