The quest for a Wiki-less Game

Question

I often see that a community will make a wiki for games that have a large amount of elements, I am attempting to create an in-game application of a "wiki" keeping track of what has been found or done to remind you of something you may have forgotten without having a 'terraria problem' where you need it to do anything.

How can I encourage a wiki-less community that focuses on figuring things out themselves rather than having a wiki open at all points in time?

Understandably, this is a near-impossible task but I still want to try and figure out a way that makes it far more inefficient to look at a wiki than search for it in game. The reasoning for this is that the player experience is greatly hindered by searching up answers to problems found in a game.

Answer 1

Based on the main reasons I use game wikis, these would help solve the problems that players use wikis to solve:

(I'm not saying these things are "bad", necessarily... even if I am a wiki-prone player who'd prefer to have the game tell me things instead of needing to use a wiki. But you're asking how to make a "wiki-less game", so I'm answering that.)

To puzzle or not to puzzle

If you have puzzles of whatever variety in your game, it's practically guaranteed that some players will get stuck on those and look for a solution elsewhere (if possible).

People looking for a solution is just a consequence of having those puzzles in your game, and isn't necessarily a problem. Although it is worth considering how fundamental that puzzle is to the broader game - crowbarring some puzzle into a completely different game might not be the best idea.

To minimise wiki usage, you could offer a "hint" in game, perhaps with some cost. Perhaps there could be a setting to show hints or one to skip puzzles entirely. Players who can't or don't want to solve the puzzle would appreciate that, and it wouldn't affect players who enjoy solving the puzzle.

Of course many puzzles are randomly generated (and there are lots of valid reasons for that, like replayability), and a wiki might not be able to help players with that. But I wouldn't make a puzzle randomly generated just for this reason, because that's trying to solve a problem that isn't a problem.

Don't rely too much on learnt in-game knowledge or memory

(and) Avoid unclear descriptions of items/ability/effects

(especially in roguelikes)

Of course some things are more reasonable to tell a player and some things are more difficult to tell a player. For example, you don't know the attack pattern of every enemy. Or you don't know exactly how some skill will play or how some item will affect gameplay until you've actually used it. This is to be expected. Although some games show you a preview of a skill or weapon, or allow you to try it out before committing to it... which I find useful where appropriate, but that's unrelated to wikis.

Some roguelikes (for example) go beyond the above, and in their item choices (e.g. in shops), they don't give you any item description, either until you actually pick up the item for the first time, or they just never show item descriptions in item choices. Some go even further and never show descriptions period. Those are the games where I'm alt-tabbing to a wiki every few minutes.

If you play a game a lot, you know what most of the items do, so a lack of descriptions is essentially just punishing a lack of knowledge or poor memory, or it's just punishing you for being a new player who hasn't yet unlocked the description by getting the item. So I'm going to use a wiki because I don't like being punished for that.

On a similar note, games might have vague descriptions (e.g. increases your damage "a bit"), so I might head to a wiki to get some more specificity there (e.g. the actual percentage damage increase). It might have poorly explained (or unexplained) status effects. There might be poorly described stage options on a stage selector. Etc.

Don't give choices with unexpected or unclear outcomes

For games with dialogue options, I tend to have a wiki open all the time to check what effects every single one of those choices would have, because I don't want to end up with some inferior story or reward because I bet on the wrong dice roll. I'm probably not the "intended audience" for games where player choice is commonly intended to have far-reaching consequences, and it's probably expected that I'd use a wiki for such games.

Although it could help to give players some idea of what the consequences would be for any given choice. And if a game has a few select cases where there are far-reaching consequences, it might make sense to be a lot more specific about what would happen.

This also applies to choices that seem important to the player (regardless of whether they are important). I remember in Borderlands at one point a character asked if you like their moustache or something, and it said the choice would have permanent consequences. That made it seem important, and I looked it up on a wiki, even though the end result of the choice was just whether the character had a moustache in future scenes.

On the other side of that, some games blindside the player with a seemingly insignificant or unrelated choice that ends up having further-reaching consequences. You might be able to avoid them using a wiki before that by doing this, but you'd annoy them (especially if they can't load to a point before that at all or without losing a lot of progress), and they might get paranoid about the consequences of every single decision for the rest of the game, and possible for other games too.

Another example from Borderlands: most choices only affect the immediate quest rewards with no long-term consequences. In such cases, you could avoid wiki usage by just telling the player what you'd get for each option (a vague "this choice gets you a shotgun" may be enough for some, while others would head to a wiki if given anything short of "here are the exact stats of the shotgun you'd get").

Tell the players what to do and where to go

Sometimes players get stuck, e.g. because they can't find the path forward or because they have no idea what a quest expects them to do. So they check a wiki.

To solve this problem: Make sure that the way forward is always clear (or maybe have some hint or direction marker show up on command or if players take too long). Make sure quests properly describe how to complete them. Sometimes the quest giver tells you what to do, but that's not reflected in the quest journal - don't do that.

Maybe you want a game that's more focused on exploration, in which case you might not want to "hold the player's hand" in the ways described above. But then you might expect players to head to a wiki (which isn't necessarily a problem).

Have (proper) in-game help

If your game has some "help" section, a "codex" or something of that sort, that could help avoid a lot of wiki usage.

Although it also has to work well enough that players prefer using it to using a wiki. That might end up being more work that it's worth.

This could also be better integrated into the game than a wiki, which is a huge potential benefit. Yes, you don't have to alt-tab, which is something, but you can potentially also have clickable links on item or skill descriptions that take players to the in-game help. Although I'd caution against putting everything there as a replacement to having proper descriptions in the default UI (but having it as an addition is fine). If there's a skill that "curses" an enemy, for example, the levels of increasing quality-of-life would be: 1) not telling the player what "curse" does, 2) telling the player what "curse" does somewhere else, 3) linking to that description from the item, and 4) just having that description on shown by default, or as hover-text, on the skill itself.

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Players using a wiki is not the problem, it's the symptom (if that)

Note that I didn't say solve the "problem of players using wikis" at the start, because players using wikis is not necessarily a problem in itself. But they do wikis to solve problems that you could help them solve in-game, like those described above.

They might also use wikis to just get more information or trivia about the game and the game world, which might be something you can't or don't want to necessarily solve in-game. Although having a "lore" menu in the game could address some of that.

If you want players to "figure things out themselves", you might have a fundamental conflict with the typical wiki-prone player. In that case, I might suggest that you just don't concern yourself with the possibility that players might use wikis. Players who want to figure things out themselves will do so. Players who don't will use a wiki. If that's what they want to do and what is the most fun for them, there's no reason to design your game in a way to specifically try to stop them from having fun (and you have every reason to not focus on designing your game like that).

There is also a positive element to wikis in that it furthers community-building, which could help the popularity and impact of your game. ... although intentionally making the gaming experience worse so people use wikis will most likely hurt the game more than it helps, because the game needs to be enough fun for people to form a community around it.

Answer 2

There are great answers here already, so I want to add another perspective:

Players making a wiki for your game does not mean your game is unplayable without a wiki.

I think wikis also exist as an expression of love for a game. After all, there is a Dora the Explorer Wiki with ...*checks again*...4240 goddamn pages. I doubt these are needed to watch Dora, though.

Answer 3

Don't tell the player how to play your game

The reasoning for this is that the player experience is greatly hindered by searching up answers to problems found in a game.

Who are you to tell the player that their way of playing your game is wrong? It might be hindering for you, but maybe other players enjoy scanning a wikipage, making a wikipage, or excel documents.

Fun™ is inherently subjective and game developers often make the mistake of trying to force fun into their game while ending up taking it out of.

Give warnings and hints

That being said, warn players if they make irreversible decisions and possibly hint about the outcome.

When playing Witcher 2 I was a bit annoyed that sometimes quests would fail when I would complete another quest, because a certain character would leave. I ended up reading online how to do certain quests in order so I wouldn't miss anything. The best way is to design quest lines where this doesn't happen. Second best way is to give the user a fair warning that other (open) quests can't be done once this quest has been completed.

Have a pleasant UI

Make your UI nice for the eyes and intuitive to use. If it's cluttered and/or unintuitive (looking at you, europa universalis) players will get their information elsewhere.

Encourage, don't punish

Don't add arbitrary punishments like timers to levels that will make the player fail (xcom2). Instead, provide bonuses if a player finishes faster. Players tend to look up solutions when they get stuck (can't beat the level in 12 turns). Getting a bonus might be an incentive to keep trying, although arguably some will also look at a solution.

Answer 4

Fundamentally the problem you have is:

“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”

The original article that quote is taken from is worth reading: https://www.designer-notes.com/game-developer-column-17-water-finds-a-crack/

The core of the point is that you need to understand the motivation for why the player is using the wiki. Some players will never use the wiki - they want to figure everything out for themselves. Some will likely use the wiki regardless of what you do.

The interesting problem is the player who might go either way. In that case you need to understand what was the trigger for the average player to open the wiki?

Ask yourself is there some mechanic you can add that stops that trigger from occurring?

• Is it rewarding to discover stuff yourself - meaning is there a sense of achievement?
• Can you provide other rewards/bonuses while the player is trying to figure something out - so they don't feel like they are wasting their time / it would be quicker just to open the wiki?
• Can you provide multiple ways to figure out the thing that needs to be figured out?
• Does it make sense to randomly drop solutions to problems, if the player takes too long - to ensure that progress is made?
• Does it make sense to allow the player to ask for a hint in some way?

Answer 5

The more random you make everything in your game, the less it can be wikied (to coin a term).

Having said that, it will probably also make your game very difficult to develop, balance and maintain. At some level of your code, there is always going to be a framework or structure of some kind, even if that is meta-meta-meta-meta structure, structure can still be documented. And naturally, a completely structureless game is also not really a playable game.

Of course, if it's that abstract, I'm not sure how enjoyable it could be, since the broader the scope, the harder it is to balance, and the more levels of meta you have, the closer to an infinity of possibilities you're getting for gameplay. Good luck wrestling that particular hydra.

Also, procedural generation is its own entire sub-science of games programming that can take years to learn. But if it you're interested, by all means go for it. It's fascinating.

Answer 6

I believe the main reason someone will start looking online for answers is because the game doesn't give them those answers. If there's some in-game way to look up the exact damage formula, or where to go to advance a quest, or the drop tables of every enemy so they can find a certain item, then as long as said resource is correct and well-built, players will most likely default to using that resource instead of an external one.

You may notice that this directly contravenes the desire of wanting players to "figure it out themselves". But just because the game lists everything out, doesn't mean the player will automatically understand how they all work together, or what the optimal strategy is. And you don't necessarily have to reveal everything immediately, as long as the player's never thinking "I need to know X right now, where is it?". Besides, many casual players will naturally not look anything up (online or otherwise) until they feel stuck.

None of this is going to stop at least three wikis from appearing, of course. Advanced players will always want/need to know more than you ever thought necessary. Speedrunners will want to share tricks and glitches. Devoted fans will want to advertise and analyse the lore to bring in more new players. You could always try the direct route and make a wiki yourself, which would in theory allow you to control its content (and maybe have the game use it directly), but the moment you tell people "no" about documenting something, they're gone to make their own.

Fundamentally, this question is "how do I keep people here instead of going elsewhere?". And the answer to that is almost always: "do what they need better than anywhere else".

Answer 7

Straight answer:

Create everything procedurally. Even items and enemies. Therefore, there will be nothing to catalogue.

However:

My gut feeling is that players creating a wiki is very often a good thing, rather than a necessary evil, as you seem to believe.

From your (dev's) POV:

Wikis encourage community building. You need a community. Secondly, a well-made and popular wiki is itself a great advertisement for your game and a way for inquiring players to see what your game is like before they buy it.

I don't have a hard proof, but I'd wager nuggets vs nuts that many Fandom wikis are actually written by the developing or publishing company employees, rather than players - highlighting how a well-made wiki is important for marketing purposes, as well as establishing what is canon and what is not.

From players' POV:

Most games can be played without wikis. However, it does not necessarily make sense to do so, depending on player's perspective. A game can easily be deep and complex enough to be prohibitive for a single player to 'complete' or 'solve'.

• You can explore all story paths, but that would require an exhaustive search of all dialogue options and whatnot. There are often exponentially many such paths. Thus, in practice, finding all details in the story is a community-sourced effort. This is already obvious in games as simple as short visual novels, not to mention enormous RPGs.
• Do you publish the game's mechanics? If you do, does your game actually conform to what is documented? In very many cases the answer to at least one of these questions is no. Some players like min-maxing, but to min-max you must know actual mechanics (like damage formulas etc), and that is often only possible with some reverse-engineering, which is a skill only few players possess. This is already obvious with games as simple as tower defense.
• Though wikis are notoriously bad for this, what if your game is successful enough to develop a meta? It has to be published and discussed somewhere.

From your (dev's) POV again:

All of the points above will typically only be considered and valued by your most dedicated fans. And you need dedicated fans. These will form the core of your community.

Answer 8

Personally I use a wiki to look up missing information. I would like tooltips that tell me everything.

I hate it when there are hidden unexplained mechanics. Mechanics that are not supposed to be found out. For example diminishing returns on crit or something. I can feel that something is not quite right/ rigged and then I will look it up.

Or simply damage calculations. Does this bonus work with that other one? Is this only applied to the base damage? When the tooltips says „more“ what the heck does this mean? 1 percent? 50 percent?

The simplest way for me not to sie a wiki would be a combat log. I love combat logs. Another options is at least clear damage numbers. That’s the bare minimum for me.

Answer 9

This is a bad goal, not worth pursuing

Having an extensive Wiki is a sign of your game being good and attracting engaged players not a sign of any flaw in your game design. Most usage of the Wiki is by players who have already explored the game already and are looking for more information and understanding. They're doing this because they are already excited and engaged by your game. Well done! You made it.

Meanwhile trying to avoid features that could be described on a Wiki is likely to make your game worse not better because you're avoiding game features that are fun and interesting for your target players. There may be a handful of players who want to alt-Tab to a wiki to discover what narrative events do, but there are many more who will engage with and enjoy the game as it is presented. Let the minority play how they want rather than undercutting the majority.

But good in-game descriptions and tooltips are still beneficial

No-one will remember everything you tell them, and players don't read anyway, so designing visually understandable interfaces, etc. and making sure that players can always find information again will make your UI better for all players as well as cutting off some part of Wiki usage.

Answer 10

If a player is stuck on a difficult puzzle, and is unwilling to seek external assistance, one of four things may happen:

1. The player may eventually solve the problem on their own, in a manner that leaves them pleased with the fact they were able to reason it out.

2. The player may eventually solve the problem on their own, but feel that the game has just wasted hours of their time.

3. The player may abandon efforts to solve the puzzle, but proceed onward with other parts of the game.

4. The player may abandon the game.

Outside assistance is only a "spoiler" if #1 above would have been possible in its absence. It may be seen as neutral if #3 would have been the alternative. If the alternatives would have been #2 or #4, outside assistance is unlikely to make the player's experience any worse.

If a game is designed to observe what a player is doing and offer targeted advice, that may allow players to achieve the level of satisfaction that would have flowed from #1 in cases where that might not otherwise be possible, especially if the hint can be something like "You might not understand what was really happening in level 4. You might want to replay that level while looking carefully for anything that might seem strange." A very subtle hint that a player who figures out what was happening could get the satisfaction of doing so, but may prevent a player from grinding until they find a solution they don't understand and from which they get no satisfaction.

If a game does a really good job of steering players toward finding solutions in a satisfying manner, a wiki is likely to sugest that players will enjoy the game more if they try ot benefit from that. A wiki would be unlikely to say "To solve this level, you need to move up, left, left, down, right, ... etc." unless none of the people who wrote it were able to get any satisaction out of the puzle, and wouldn't expect anyone ot experience the puzzle as anything other than an annoying obstacle to enjoyment.

Answer 11

This is not a good solution.

You can be openly hostile to the player.

Nothing is stopping you. It's your game. You can obfuscate everything.

Randomise names; items, places, menu options, everything. Hide every detail. Tell them nothing. Encrypt game data at rest. Use abstract iconography that means nothing.

Make the mechanics as obtuse as possible. That item that make you deal double damage? Secretly it also disables your ability to crit. That enemy that always seems to bug the game and cause it to crash? That's intentional.

Tell the player nothing. Make them doubt everything. Hate them with every line of code you hammer into the system.

There's no answer.

Ultimately, everything can be wikified. Even the above hostile game can be wikified, it'll just take longer and be harder. Anything made of information can be catalogued.

Humans are naturally often quite contrarian too; if you make it harder, you can encourage them further. They'll want to beat you by wikifying your game.

Bonus Cruelty

Penalise the player for pressing ALT+TAB, defocusing the game window or pressing PrtScn. Make it harder for people to start the process.

Answer 12

I see a good example of this with the game Shattered Pixel Dungeon. It has many items with whose abilities change with different effects. You can easily see a description of these items, and how its effects alter usage, quickly and easily. This description also shows before you use each item. In playing, I have never needed to check the wiki because everything I need to know about an action is there before I do it.

As for a wikiless progression, SPD is completely linear so the manner of progression is discovered after the first level is completed. To apply that to a more open world game, you could have repeating patterns that the player can identify (unlike Terraria where progression happens from unconsistent, sometimes unrelated, actions).

In short, don't hide valuable information and have progressional patterns the player can lock on to.

Answer 13

It comes down to how much info you include in the game. The player turns to a wiki when either they don't know what to do or how to do it.

Souls like games typically have large wikis around stats and character builds because they don't do a good job of conveying what stats are important to a certain play style.

To "solve" that need for a wiki: you could remove the choice by giving the player fixed classes that auto allocate their stats, or you could provide them insight to what the outcome is going to be, maybe a "combat rating" so that they can tell a point in arcane is more important than a point in faith for their current build, or how to balance agi vs str.

It is not unusual for games that have collecting mechanics dedicated finding all of a certain item scattered about. For those I think you are just going to have to live with the wiki, as either you make it so easy that everyone finds everything (not fun), or people make a wiki of where they are.

In general to stop the need for a wiki provide the info in game, and help the player know what a choice means before they make it. On the other hand lots of players see that as hand holding and don't like it, so making it trigger-able like the clairvoyance spell in Skyrim can be a good balance between providing info to players who want it and not pushing it on players who don't.

Answer 14

You have two options:

Keep your game small

If all of the mechanics of your game can fit onto a single page in Wikipedia, your players will probably not go to the trouble to generate an entire dedicated wiki. Many classic games, such as Galaga and Pong do not have any wikis for them.

Keep your community small

If you have fewer than 50 players, and if your game provides a link to a place for them to gather (such as a Discord server), then players will probably just share information there instead of going to the trouble of making a wiki.

Otherwise, you'll get a wiki

If the game is complicated enough to fill a wiki, and if it has a community large enough to sustain a wiki, it will have a wiki.

Answer 15

I understand your concern: some players minmax the fun out of the game for everyone else.

I don't think that addressing "wikis" specifically is going to help you: people can have the same behaviors via a discord server for example.

Since you can't prevent people from documenting your game, you can only discourage these actions. Writing wikis takes time; reading wikis takes time. Make the reward for these not worth the time taken.

This has an added benefit: players who do not want to use wikis/cheatsheets/solutions are not punished by their choice.

An example of how to do this could be creating a game where roleplay is important. An example of these are the "werewolf" kind of games where figuring out lying players makes the game very situational. I'm sure there are wikis but players who don't use them are not at a great disadvantage.

Another example are purely single-player games. While solutions/cheats/wikis are of course widely available, there's really no downside to just playing the game without reading anything.

Both these examples doesn't really avoid the wiki but it avoid the toxicity that comes with them.

Good luck with your game! It would be quite interesting to know what solution you adopted.

Answer 16

Provide a searchable transcript/datadump on your website.

Outer Wilds came up in the comments as a game that is designed to be played without a wiki because it has a great in-game log. However, while OW is played without a wiki, it doesn't mean it doesn't need a wiki.

JMac: It might be interesting to look at something like Outer Wilds. The game provides a way to track of what you've found/done, so it's fairly easy to remember what is going on. Yet because of the structure of the game, people are adamant (maybe too much) that you shouldn't look anything up outside the game.

Outer Wilds nevertheless has a fandom wikia. When I've used this, it's because I'm talking about the game and am unable or unwilling to launch the game, fly out to a planet, and find the appropriate text/screenshot for myself.

Since making a wiki takes a lot of time and effort, if there's already a complete catalogue that your experienced players can refer to, they won't take it upon themselves to make one.

(I wouldn't require having the game installed, either. I understand there's some concern of "Why would anybody buy my game if they can just open up the transcript and read it?" but the same applies to watching a let's play. Having a bog-standard website means your players can link to it, reference it on their phones, etc.)

Make your own wiki/guide and ask the community to use/recommend it.

In-game help is great thematically, but often garbage for usability, since it's written in a game engine and not a browser engine. Even supposing it meets the bare minimum (pausing the game, readable text on a readable backdrop, having a scroll bar that actually works using the scroll wheel) there's lots of more minor concerns. Does it scroll at the appropriate speed? Does it let users select text? ctrl-F? Click a link and then go back to the previous one? Open in new tab? Bookmark a frequently visited page? Does it let them change the font and font size? If a visually impaired player reads text using a magnifier, have you tested it with that?

It's really hard to get in-game help to a point where it's unquestionably better than using a browser.

Somebody is going to reach a point in your game and search "[gamename] guide level 4". If you want to control how spoiler-y the guide they come across is, take the first spot in the search results yourself. If you're building an in-game "wiki" application, you've already got all the writing done--paste the contents online with appropriate ordering and spoiler tags.