Does using walkthroughs help you?

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Ever since video games has changed in the gaming community, we have game walkthrough websites, physical and digital game guides, and YouTube videos by other gamers covering 100 percent of a game they're playing to unlock every secret that is available.

Does it help you in any sort of way such as watching a video gaining tips on how to beat a boss easily by watching the player in video on how they do it? Does it help you in finding collectibles that you may have missed if you have played a single-player campaign when you started a new game for the first time? Does it help you in unlocking hidden and harder Trophy and Achievements in certain games?

For the people who don't bother with using walkthroughs, are you simply interested in playing a video game for the pure enjoyment and not bothered with walkthroughs? Do you simply move on to another game, or go back and play the last one on a higher difficulty setting for a greater challenge that offers you more unlockables when completing them?

I believe using video game walkthroughs can be beneficial to me because I see myself as completionist and want unlock everything by meeting every criteria to reach 100% in order to learn about the games' easter eggs and secrets.

Does it help you in any sort of way from your own view?

I will use a walkthrough after completing the game once, or after a certain level of frustration is reached.
Otherwise it ruins all the suspense.

I need walkthroughs &/or guides for a lot of games because I get confused easily...but I never read/watch the story spoilers until I beat the game or reach the point of frustration where I just give up

They help me if I'm genuinely stuck (i.e. I need to solve a cat hair puzzle that makes no sense whatsoever).

I'll use a walkthrough (in text form) if I am completely stuck...half the time I read it and go "Ohhhh, duh."

Or if I'm really sick of a game and I just want it to be over, but I don't quite feel like giving up on it completely.

I find them very helpful. I prefer walkthroughs on youtube now. Very visual and you get to see the person play it and see how they do it. I don't use them on games that are easy. I mostly use them on games like Zelda or Paper Mario, those kind of games and when I get stuck in any game.

i use walktroughs when i cant complete something and usulu it is realy helpfull but there is a game called psi ops and i watched a waltrou there but i still cant complete it so sometimes walktrous are good some times it still dont work even with a walkthrou

Yes, they do. They also show the stuff I missed like secrets.

I will definitely use a YouTube walkthrough when something is really frustrating and not clear to me in a game. However I'm very careful not to skim too far ahead in a video, as so I don't spoil the story for myself.

I mainly use walkthroughs if I get stuck and, after several tries, can not figure out how to get unstuck.

Sometimes though I may start losing interest in a game and will watch walkthroughs before starting a mission just so I can complete it with less time and effort.

yes they do i had too use one for 7th Guest it made my head hurt

I don't use walkthroughs... I use cheats! except for when you can't get everything with cheats... like the Rock star tokens in Midnight Club dub edition. thing's like that.
I don't always cheat though... unless it's Fallout NV or similar games, I just toggle god mode for that one.

Yes, walkthroughs help me a lot. I don't use them unless I need to, and I only read what I need to so I can avoid spoilers. I love spoiler free faqs for that reason. I occasionally watch youtube faqs or LPs, but only if I can't find a faq that describes things in a way that makes sense to me, or if no other faqs exist. I used to hold out as long as possible without using a faq, and I still sometimes do that, but now I'm more inclined to use faqs not long after I get stuck.

It used to be the case that many gamers (or probably their parents, in many cases) would shell out around £15 for a great big book which contained a 100% full walkthrough for one specific title.
There were also full walkthroughs printed in gaming magazines like Amiga Power (especially walkthroughs of Point and Click adventures) , and many children made an appearance on 'Games Master' ; a show in which a highly esteemed famous astrophysicist dressed up as a disembodied cyborg head and told little kids how to get past parts of computer games where they were stuck.
'Bad influence' took a slightly different approach by featuring a character called Nam Rood who would tell people button-press combination cheats for various games, in a segment of the show.
Nowadays you can just look stuff up online for free, which I obviously think is a much better arrangement.

The simple fact of it is that a lot of puzzles are a bit poorly designed in computer games.... and the answer is never going to be obvious until you look it up.
Then when you do, it turns out that half a million people seem to be asking about the same thing.
Often with such puzzles, I just think "dang, well I'm glad that I looked it up because that is a piss-poor puzzle and I'd never have guessed you were meant to solve it like that."

For just three spoiler-free recent examples which I found :

The "music box" puzzle in Secret of Cape West.....

Trying to take a picture of the bubble monster in Beyond Good and Evil...

and the "Kamikaze" trophy section for Heavy Rain (which I gave up even trying to get in the end)

Oh, and I cheated shamelessly in order to finish the PS2 version of Arc the Lad (Arc twilight of the spirits) because the game design is piss poor and the final boss is literally 100 levels too difficult to do normally. I used one of those code breaker discs to make my characters 100 levels tougher right at the end of the game after being repeatedly trounced, which made the final battle into a still formidable (and finally actually enjoyable) challenge.

I also feel that being able to 'cheat' is important given the number of bugs and glitches which games contain.
For example, while playing Beyond Good and Evil my character slipped off a pipe then fell down into a completely black room.
No matter what I did, nothing happened... she could move around and stuff, but the rest of the screen remained totally black.
I couldn't figure out how to escape, so I looked it up.
It turned out to be a glitch (she was meant to stick to the pipe and sidle along it sideways against a wall, not just fall off like a dumbass) ... so I had to load up a save and try it again.