Anyone born in the late '70s or early '80s in New Zealand would have many entertainment-related challenges to contend with.
High on the list was the requirement to educate your parents about the absolute life-threatening lack of a VCR, computer, and calculator-watch so necessary in order to establish yourself as alpha within your peer group.
Sure, you might have had a tyre swing, but if it was raining after school all the cool kids made a bee-line to the nearest C64 faster than you could say say "I pity the fool who has a tyre swing and no C64" (a phrase seldom used anyway, seeing as we weren't allowed to stay up late to watch The A-Team, and our parents refused to fork out for a VCR until the local video store started stocking Attenborough documentaries).
Along with the C64 came tapes, disks, joysticks, soda-stream and more importantly, imagination.
The real problem wasn't a lack of games back then. More often than not, games produced in the mid '80s were made by a handful of people - sometimes only one or two - on non-existent budgets, using nothing more than a few ideas, pop-culture references, and 8-bit simplicity. This simplicity and low cost enabled quantity on a scale not likely to be repeated ever again.
We were never short of games - the difficulty then was piracy, but not in the same way it is today.
Everyone knew that you weren't allowed to copy tapes and disks; even at the age of ten it was obvious that these items were supposed to be paid for. I'm sure we would have done, if our weekly pocket-money didn't consist of a dollar which was quickly squandered on Garbage Pail Kids and a can of Coke, or (come November) illegally obtained "Po Ha" crackers quickly released back into nature as inventively as possible. Faced with collective access to perhaps hundreds of games from a variety of friends, and a scant appreciation for economics, "duping" tapes and disks was the norm.
In doing so, we missed out on some creative box artwork that typically bared absolutely no resemblance to the pixellated game within, and crucially, any kind of instruction manual.
If you were lucky, you'd have at least one screen that informed you as to which keys performed which tasks, or a hugely optimistic statement along the lines of "use your joystick for control", but seldom would you ever actually understand the arcane aspects of a game unless you sunk hours into it.
There were no on-disk guides or hints; more than likely due to a disk space limit, the absence of a GUI in which to display them, and the lack of enthusiasm for developers to devalue their boxed product.
In addition, the internet hadn't been invented yet, robbing Adobe of the chance to monopolise the irritating PDF format so frequently employed in electronic manuals, and removing our ability to actually compare our gaming experience with anyone outside of our suburb. Given hours of free time, stacks of games and an ample supply of watered-down sugar water poorly masquerading as retail coke, we did what anyone would do - we guessed how to play the game.
I recall the sheer excitement upon discovering that the Amiga 500's numerical keys controlled the turbo boost in Indianapolis, and that the Talismans in Moonstone actually had a purpose other than to look pretty in your inventory.
Likewise, the revelation that two mice could be used to play an extremely underhand version of Lemmings in which the object was to destroy your multiplayer foe as much as it was to rescue the furry idiots.
Did you know you could instantly build a tile improvement in Civilization by deselecting the settler and re-requesting the improvement? We knew it, because we played it that often that it was all but impossible to not discover it.
Something changed with the widespread integration of the internet however, as well as the ever-increasing complexity of modern game design. We're no longer at the mercy of time and our creativity to discover how to best play games.
Every corner of the net has guides, walk-throughs, even videos showing exactly how to play titles with the absolute highest level of perfection possible. We never had a complete instruction manual for Elite, or a guidebook for Shadow of the Beast II (seriously, did anyone finish that game?) and yet today, it's all available within seconds online.
It's actually pretty depressing researching old games you used to sink hours into and could never figure out in order to see where you were going wrong.
Had we been provided with a tutorial for Police Quest back in the day however, would we have taken the time to learn exactly what Miranda Rights are? or would we have simply proceeded with the game after unquestioningly typing in the necessary commands? We might not have always understood the best way to play the game, but we sure had a heap of fun learning the various permutations.
Playing through the otherwise excellent Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light recently, it struck me that this is a perfect example of a game that shouldn't have a tutorial. Rather, the initial progression should be structured in such a way to encourage the player how to learn the controls without endless pop-ups telling you which buttons do what, and basically how to solve all but the hardest of puzzles within the first ten minutes. Faced with the insistence of the tutorial, nobody is really encouraged to use their own imagination and develop skills with which to better understand the game in the first place.
It's often been said that the early side-scrolling games epitomised the best in learn-by-experience gameplay. Where challenges were constructed in such a manner to encourage the user to try a new method of solving them without simply telling them how to do it, then ramping the difficulty level in order to sit back and taunt them for failure.
There will always be exceptions to the rule. Some games are simply so complicated that they'd be all but impossible to play without some level of instruction from the creators. But do we really need to be told how to change our weapon using the scroll wheel when it's been the default method for the past decade? Do we need pop-up bubbles telling us to move three paces to the left and talk to the extremely obvious glowing NPC about a quest we've just been given?
Some developers are starting to come around - Limbo has received widespread praise for the way in which it provides a simple, uncluttered interface and the absence of pointless pop-ups. And yes, it's rather difficult and unforgiving, but what's wrong with that? In the '80s and '90s, difficult and unforgiving were the only two options you got, and it certainly didn't do any harm to the average skill level of the player-base back then. More importantly however, I don't recall those games being any less fun than modern games; quite the opposite in many cases.
It's time for a return to game design that teaches by trial and error, rather than by outright instruction. Intelligently designed levels and mechanics that speak for themselves. Scrap the obvious tutorials, and let us learn a bit about your game by experimenting and making our own mistakes.
It is, after all, how real life works.
