In so many circles have I seen walkthrough use lamented as the actual bane of other people’s existences — the idea that other gamers might need enough help to use them, or the idea that other gamers would use them. Allegedly you are not a “hardcore enough gamer” if you need to use them. Some people devote way too much of their time to defining what is a “hardcore enough gamer” to come up with arbitrary requirements as to what this… entails, and I try to avoid these conversations and associating myself with these people, but I’ve seen enough peripheral complaining about walkthrough use that I had to mention it.

You are not a bad gamer, or “not hardcore enough of a gamer”, if you need to use a walkthrough.

Even if you need to use a walkthrough for every single game you play, that does not define you as a gamer.

You are not “less than” for needing assistance in games.

This is an insiduous form of gatekeeping, and I dislike it a lot. God only knows that I’ve used walkthroughs when playing games, especially with Bub, to cut down on the amount of screen time that I expose myself to in the name of not giving myself an unnecessary migraine. If I can plan out what I’m going to do in a game when, I can shorten my exposure to the screen, which is an extremely good thing. This allows me to continue to enjoy something that I love, let me play video games with Bub, all while not walking myself into a particularly severe migraine — for me — because I spent hours wandering around lost in a video game.

So far, walkthroughs have allowed us to enjoy games in that they allow us to shave off time that would otherwise have been spent wandering around absolutely lost causing a migraine for no reason. We achieve short objectives, frequently save the game just in case, I monitor for symptoms, and we continue from there…

But there is a reason that there is the ongoing joke that our backlog is far taller than Bub. No shame in that.