Becoming increasingly rare and we are speaking on different things. You are talking about a manual that explains how to make your washing machine wash. That is important, yes, but I am talking about a manual that explains how an appliance works.

the days of a manual explaining anything like an error code are basically dead. Name one appliance manufacturer that lists anything beyond the most basic of troubleshooting (“turn it off and back on”)

Like go back and look at an appliance manual from the 70s/80s/maybe 90s and you will see a more robust explanation of what to do when things go wrong. The further back you go the more likely you will see parts numbers, circuit diagrams, or be able to order a service manual that has such information.

We expect this shit level of documentation because we live in a throwaway culture that has tolerated this pisspoor level of documentation for decades. “Oh the washer isn’t working? It’s showing an E-05 error? Guess we better just go buy a new washer” or pay the manufacturer $120 for a “service charge” to find out that code means the latch sensor died and it’s a $30 part that is a simple 5 minute job except you can’t get the part because they won’t sell it to you

LMBO, and sometimes it does come with a service manual, but you have to take the machine apart to find it like with my Samsung Washing machine

but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.

I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.

I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description “wasn’t helpful” and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted “a warning light is on” and nothing else of my ramblings.

So sometimes it’s also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.

They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.

It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.

But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.

Kama Sutra?

Don’t fuck the manual!

Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days.

we were lucky if we or family members in the house could speak enough english to know what the fuck was even on screen.

Which also proves the point that a manual isn’t preventing anything.

Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.

Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).

King’s Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn’t beat it.

A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Manuals were needed because they contained information that was missing from the games. Since that time, game design principles have evolved, and most of what used to be in game manuals was eventually included in the games themselves in a semi-diegetic manner. For example, the Codex in Mass Effect, or the books in various Larian games.

Player training is another aspect that has evolved beyond needing a written summary. Half-Life 2 is an excellent example. The player’s attention is drawn to a demonstration of a mechanic, then they are gated until they solve a simple puzzle involving that mechanic, then a more complex puzzle involving previously learned mechanics. For example: the player sees an energy ball in a socket activating a bridge; then the player has to launch an energy ball into an empty socket; then the player has to bounce an energy ball off a wall to reach an empty socket. Other great examples are Soul Reaver 1, Dishonored, and obviously, Portal.

I’m not against the idea of supplementary printed material, as long as it remains supplementary. If printed material is required* to make a game playable, then it’s a failure of game design.

* obviously excludes the other extreme end of the spectrum where reading printed material is an integral part of the gameplay, like various Zachtronics games.

You might look into some Zachtronics games. Both ExaPunks and Shenzhen I/O require their paper manual counterparts to be played.

Tunic is rtfm the game

Or you miss something from the one time tutorial and go through a ton of the game not knowing you can do a certain thing. Then you watch some YouTube video where someone does that thing and you’re like FUCK I COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THAT ALL ALONG!

If someone in the 80s or 90s was going to the trouble of copying roms onto new boards and making plastic enclosures, then photocopying a little booklet really isn’t that much of a heavy lift.

And FTFM. Find the fucking manual.

And perhaps TTFM. Translate the fucking manual either from broken chinese-english or the tech-lingo + missing context information which is almost every manpage on Linux, making it nearly useless for the average user unless you got hours and hours of time to understand all the adjacent concepts and commands.

Unironically, if you bing Windows API related queries rather than googling them, you’re much more likely to find a relevant manual page that answers your question clearly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is actively worsening Windows-related queries to make Windows look bad and sell Android devices and Chromebooks. Another example is that googling msvcp140.dll not found or similar queries gives you loads of dodgy download this individual DLL here and put it in System32 and we promise we’ve not tampered with it websites instead of the page for the universal MSVC redistributable installer that’s the only supported way to get the DLL (and a bunch of other related ones) as an end user.

As for silly nomenclature, generally on Windows, API functions are much more likely to describe what they do and much less likely to be a town in Wales. If you don’t already know what fstat does, it’s much easier to guess that GetFileTime would be the right function to get a file’s last modification time than fstat, for example.

I have been told that the reason their publically available training, problem solving, and educational material is so terrible is because there is a secret printed guidebook somewhere that makes everything make sense and if everyone had it it could negatively impact the windows economy.

I do not know if that is true, but I have been told it and it does kind of explain why sites like learn.microsoft.com are so terrible that I would rather treat the world book encyclopedia 1969 edition from A to Z including the index than try to figure out how to run a single powershell command from the educational materials available on that site.

I just want to say I’m glad other people understand how ridiculous of a suggestion this is for fixing Windows problems. It has become such a low effort nonsensical approach because people don’t truly understand what it does and it feels like doing something. It’s the new ‘have you tried turning it off and on again.’ dism and sfc. Then when someone mentions how absurd the thinking is that this fixes anything but a small negligible fraction of issues, someone always chimes in how there was this one time where it worked for them. Perpetuating this low effort, almost useless approach to troubleshooting. I’ve fixed more issues with BIOS updates than I have with either of those tools.