Yech - where'd that puking emoticon go?
If there was one negative to the advent of CD's, it was the loss of so much great liner art and album cover art. Take a look at Iron Maiden's album covers some time - Riggs' details were so impressive, and now you need a magnifying glass to see them (and I'm not even that old yet!). And you'll never see a CD liner with a working zipper (Stones fans know whereof I speak).
I absolutely agree wholeheartedly about the old LP album covers vs. CD liner notes. The art that went with an album was sometimes so great, so well done, that it became decades-long lasting icons of pop-culture (think Floyd's prism, the Beatle's crossing the street, the lips...) The direct relationship between music and paintings has been a century tradition dating back to at least Impressionism, and even before that if you count other mediums like Opera or Architecture.
However, we're not talking about music and cover-art. We're talking about a computer game, which I will be among the many detractors to Ebert and say Yes, Games Are Art (well, some of them are, anyway), but in this case, the medium by its very nature combines the visual and audio aspects of the art into one interactive format, as opposed to a music album where the cover art and the music are typically separate entities. When music and visual art weren't separate, they were music videos, in which case the cover to the VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray of the Video was really unimportant in comparison to the video itself. The same really applies to games.
At one point in time, the cover-art to a game was crucial to selling it, because graphics were so limited in scope (if they indeed existed at all). Zork's iconic brick lettering and opening door, for instance. Plus the advertising budget for new games was practically nil when gaming was in its infancy. Sales depended largely on consumers curiously browsing new titles at the game store and seeing the large box with the cool cover art to convince them to buy a game that consisted of pure text.
But these days, games have their own advertising budgets, there are blogs, web pages, entire magazines, even TV networks dedicated to bombarding us with info about new games, and rabid-fanbases of established franchises. With the advent of fileshares like Steam, some will never see a game-inna-box again. Even if it came in a box, let's face it, most of us would buy Civ5 even if it came in a plain white box with nothing but black lettering saying "CiV" and a barcode. That never would have survived in the old days, but the dependency on game-cover art is so much less important now than it used to be, because the cover-art in most cases can't even begin to touch the experience of the game itself.
Lastly, it's CiV we're talking about, not Mass Effect, or Dragon Age, or some other epic of mind-blowing graphics. Even a book of hand-drawn game art would be rather pointless when you could head down to the local book store and get a modestly priced book of famous buildings and structures throughout history. My son has a book of famous world buildings like Ankor Wat and Hagia Sophia that he makes me read to him every night. Much better than what could have been included as "bonus art" in a CiV manual.
Also, as many have pointed out, the unit, building, and tech trees will all be obsolete by the time the game goes gold, even more so by the first patch, and will bear no resemblence to reality once expansion packs release. Literally the only thing the instruction manual would need would be a brief history of the development, and some basics on gameplay (like how to build improvements, how to move about), which is the least-likely to change aspect of CiV through all the patches and expansions. The rest is all contained in-game, or, let's be honest, in easily printed charts that will appear on Civfanatics about 30 seconds after the game is released.
So, why print big manuals and waste so many trees that could otherwise used to chop-rush an early wonder or something?
