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Is there such a thing as British industry any more? This important and difficult question is one I regularly find myself ignoring as I scroll through the headlines on the Guardian website, before clicking on a thing about tights. But I am vaguely aware we no longer mine coal or work steel or make cars, and that filthy foreign capitalists have ruined Easter by deciding Creme Eggs will now be made from glue and compost. What concerns me, though, is that I rarely see anything about the hidden threat to one of our greatest remaining homegrown industries: video game manual writing. This is a subject close to my heart, because my first job in games was writing the manuals for first-party PlayStation games. I worked on a long list of titles between 2001 and 2002, typing the words "Press X to jump" approximately 897,643 times. I like to think that in my own way, I played a small role in the success of classics like C-12: Final Resistance, AirBlade, and my personal magnum opus, Alpine Racer 3.
(It was with this text I found my narrative voice, experimenting with new literary forms until I finally came up with: "To jump, press X." The shockwaves reverberated through the manual writing establishment for months. But then they started asking what I would do next - where could the form possibly go from here? I pushed it too far, I suppose, with "X press, to jump." The world wasn't ready.)
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