and figures I too was a student at flight school, whose success or failure depended on knowing my planes inside and out. My other favorite was called Darklands , and it was a role-playing game set in medieval Germany, where you could (among many other things) brew potions. Its copy protection scheme tasked me with matching a certain symbol to its alchemical meaning; the symbols were distributed across the massive brick of a manual that came with it. Often times, the symbols would be set opposite a beautiful woodcut or an interesting historical tidbit, and on the way to solving the copy protection challenge I'd sometimes get sidetracked for twenty minutes in the world of medieval Germany. A lot of it was extraneous, of course; but this simply made it much easier to imagine my way into the heads of my characters, where such arcane knowledge would live anyway. For a ten year old with an overactive imagination, the manuals were no small part in making me love these games. For me, the apotheosis of manuals came not long after that. First there was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans' faux-parchment-covered, runed-and-illustrated ambigram of a manual, which dedicated far more space to transmitting backstory than it did to describing the nuts and bolts of software. Dramatic illustrations of knights fighting demons, paragraphs of text about why Orcish buildings were rounded instead of squared off, a whole short story about the kingdom of Azeroth -- these things, not the crude graphics and MIDI