Reading manuals
I'm not sure why, but I enjoy reading manuals. Not that I derive a proper sense of joy from doing it, it's more about... having proper information how the stuff you own works. It's like, bought a new microwave? Cool, let's read the instructions and see what it does, instead of just hooking it up and ignoring extra functions (my current one, for example, can grill food). New fridge? Let's open the manual and see how maintenance should be done. Stuff like that.
Now, obviously, media with a manual is on a whole other level. I have some big box games stored in Brazil that have manuals with hundreds of pages, a lot of them filled with lore. Stuff like the original Neverwinter Nights release, or Renegade (which is translated and dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese!), and so on. These were great, and it's kinda sad the whole gaming economy moved to digital goods because I miss the physicality of flipping pages while reading about a game. Also, games that had an official distribution in Brazil had manuals in Portuguese, even if the game itself wasn't translated, and that was awesome.
Maybe I'm getting old, I don't know. I wrote about how The Banished Vault has a physical manual for sale and, while I didn't play that game as much as I wanted to, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it while having paper in my hands. To be clear: all the manual's content is also available in-game, but to check a physical item for info feels better, somehow.
I guess the rise of in-game tutorials and the easiness of publishing digital-only games killed paper manuals, which makes sense (and maybe is better for the environment?). But, man, reading Renegade's backstory as if it was a book, or flipping through NwN pages to check some info while away from the computer, was great. The limited, physical re-runs some games get are not enough to fill this void.
The saddest part, to me, is that even if the game has a PDF as a stand-in for a manual, it's not the same. Currently, I'm slowly reading the Darklands manual before bed (seriously) kinda for fun, but also because I want to play it and reading the manual is always advisable — especially for old games. I can only imagine how great the experience of holding it in my hands would've been 30 years ago (even though I wouldn't understand anything because I was a child and didn't know English). Here's an excerpt that made me chuckle:
"Which never ends." That's some sort of kafkaesque hell or something.
Anyway, I always liked encyclopedias, so maybe this thing with manuals comes from that, I don't know. It's nice to have organized information about stuff you own.