The students for my Game Culture course are required to write a game journal each week, exploring and documenting the experience of playing their assigned game over the semester (an assignment I stole from Laurie). As motivation to get myself to play a game occasionally, I decided to play along, and keep a game journal too. The rub of it is that I tend to be a bit impatient for RPGs. When I sit down to play, I usually have an hour or so, and I generally don't like roaming around trying to figure out what to do. So I cheat.

I don't download cheat codes. I use walkthroughs. If I'm feeling stuck (or just bored), I'll pop open a walkthrough and see what I've missed. My interest here lies in the funny space walkthroughs occupy. If there are multitudinous pleasures in gaming, one must be the puzzle-solving pleasure--one I readily yield for the narrative-in-motion pleasure. But when I do, I feel guilty.

Perhaps I've internalized the processes of game playing. Manovich suggests that the goal of any computer game (or other games for that matter) is to learn the algorithm. By learning to navigate Pac-Man around his little maze, I can win the game. Similarly, learning to manage my radiation-prone avatar in Fallout becomes the goal of the game. The narrative becomes secondary. So perhaps I feel guilty about the walkthrough because I know the algorithm is the goal, and I've executed an end-run on it in exchange for cheap story.