While shady publishers have been letting AI 'write' video game articles while pretending to be human, it’s also become a problem increasingly affecting video game guidebooks. As this blog on FRVR details, listings for AI-generated guidebooks are cluttering up Amazon, hoping to take advantage of people's need for answers when it comes to the tougher parts of their favourite games.
Jackson Ryan
Stepping into a market where many games don't have official physical guidebooks anymore, these slopperbacks (you can buy physical copies of many of them!) are riddled with mistakes and generalisations. Take Resident Evil Requiem, for example. As author Lewis White highlights, one book's full title is:
RESIDENT EVIL REQUIEM OFFICIAL COMPLETE GAME GUIDE: Definitive 100% Walkthrough, Every Chapter, Lore Files, Hidden Secrets, Boss Tactics, Weapons, ... Strategies from Rookie to Hardcore Mastery
Snappy! The contents of that book are a combination of errors, direct plagiarism (of this Into Indie Games guide) and AI-generated cover art, but the funniest part of all is that the book suddenly stops not at the game's ending, but at the point that online walkthroughs of the game (that AI was stealing from) had originally been embargoed up to.
While most of these books appear to have never been purchased, making this more of a "flooding the space" problem than something loads of people are being tricked into buying, there was one book whose physical copy had been bought twice, and reviews were about what you'd expect:
In addition to getting everything wrong about games that have been released, Amazon searches are also increasingly showing guidebooks for games that aren't even out yet, from Capcom's Pragmata to, predictably, Grand Theft Auto VI:
It's bad out there! And these are just for adult games! As the FRVR story mentions, it's even worse when it comes to Pokopia, a game with a huge audience of kids, because that means there'll be parents out there who may not be familiar with this wasteland blindly clicking on anything that purports to be an "official" guide, of which there are currently three, none of which are actually official.
If you're looking for guides that you know were written by human beings, our friends at Rogue have a whole set of RE:Requiem ones up right now!
