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I've been pondering how best to add topics that have nothing to do with fanfic, and don't fit into fanfic-esque tropes like zines. A lot of these are gaming-related (tabletop RPG, mostly, but some tabletop wargaming); some are... other.
Candidates for Office: This morning, I was thinking about the buttons that said "Don't blame me; I voted for Bill & Opus." And realized there's a meme/trope of fictional characters running for election. I've seen election materials for Bill & Opus, Kodos vs Kang, Cthulhu For President ("why settle for the lesser evil?"), that-dude-on-West-Wing (shows you how much attention I pay to the show), and so on. I have no idea how to make a Fanlore entry for this... trope? Meme? Fannish activity? What do I call it -- "fictional characters running for office in the real world?" "Weasley is ourpresident king?"
Gaming group homebrews: A lot of (D&D) gaming groups came up with their own spinoff/crossover game systems. Some of them were trying to patch the (many many) holes in the D&D system; others wanted a way to cover activities that D&D didn't allow for. I know--distantly--of several of these. They were common. Almost every group I'd ever heard of had something like this. One of my local D&D groups had "Mutant D&D," mixing high fantasy & something like Marvel Comics. (I never knew details; I was out of the state for most of that.) Other groups had extensive rules for playing vampires & werewolves, long before White Wolf existed. Another group switched D&D to a point-based system where each weapon proficiency had its own skill level, and you earned points every time you made a roll based on it. Others invented races & classes either grabbed from books, or invented entirely. (And then there was the Snits' Revenge/Tunnels & Trolls crossover. Don't ask.)
I don't know (1) what to call these things or (2) how many people involved, or how detailed, a particular set of homebrew rules needed to be, to "deserve" its own entry. Maybe there should just be one for "gaming homebrew?" Except they weren't usually called "homebrew." They were called whatever term the local group came up with. (The D&D point thing? "New System." Which term would be recognized by, oh, a dozen gamers on the planet, I think.) I don't know quite how to categorize them on Fanlore, other than "gaming/RPG" and "fannish activity." And while I know they existed pretty much everywhere, I only know details for groups I directly played with. If I put a single page up for "gaming homebrew," that implies that future gamers who find the site should have their systems placed as footnotes or a paragraph on that page, instead of getting a whole page.
There are *hundreds* of these. Thousands, probably. I don't know if each one should get a page (certainly each fanfic doesn't get a page; this is kinda-sorta the gamer equivalent? maybe?); but they don't run in patterns like fanfic--they don't sort by origin game (I'd guess that 80% or more are D&D based, because that's what EVERYONE used), and very few have a scope beyond a dozen gamers.
Gaming worldbooks: Another fine gaming tradition that I'm lost as to whether/how to put on Fanlore. A lot of gaming groups, a lot of GM's, (Heh! Fanlore needs a "GM" entry! ... I'll think about it.) had their own worlds written up. Maps, descriptions of important characters, regions where There Be Dragons (or worse, 'cos everyone was up for dragons, but the Dungeon Caverns of the Mind Flayers was a lot more scary), retired PC's who joined the NPC binder, and so on. Some few of these were published at the level of fanzine, photocopied & handed around to a gaming club; most were individual, a single copy shared by several players.
On the one hand--too small for Fanlore. My "world" of Seilar (it was an island) was known to maybe 10-15 players, ever (although I gather some of those games are maybe still going on, so maybe it's up to 3 dozen by now); I was the only one who had a map. On the other hand--maybe writeups of a few of the smaller gaming worlds would encourage bigger ones, the handful of college-library groups who had elaborate shared worlds, to put their info on Fanlore too.
Canon sources: Should Fanlore have entries for canon that spawned fannish activity that can't quite be described? Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame books were dear to many gamers, and the city of "Pandathaway" worked its way into many gameworlds, but I'm not sure what to say about it other than "this was important gamer fiction." (Did it directly inspire a type of gaming? No, it validated a gaming trope that was/is near universal: the "write up yourselves as characters" game.) (Which, um. Probably needs a page. If I can figure out what to call it.) Other canon-things with fanac: Rocky Horror Picture Show (it's there; not sure whether/how to place the common-and-rare things about being on a RHPS cast, much less regional variants in audience lines), Magic: The Gathering (I don't even know where to *start*), some albums (Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, Beatles). Dice. Shouldn't Fanlore have an entry about dice? Gamers have lore about dice. (Gamers *threaten* their dice when the rolls aren't good.)
LARPing: LARP has an entry at Fanlore. LARP stands for "Live Action Role-Playing," and is the gaming where people dress up in costumes and enact games. It works something like "host a murder mystery" things. I don't like LARPing. I know vaguely that there's a lot of White Wolf LARPs, and some SCA-ish, D&D-ish LARPs, and, um, other LARPs. There's big clubs, and little ones, and a whole lot of variations in style and scope. I'm about as qualified to write up LARPing as I am to write up podficcing.
Except that there are dozens of podfic-savvy people involved with Fanlore, so that's more-or-less getting covered; there's apparently approximately zero other (tabletop RPG) gamer-people involved with Fanlore, so LARPing is *not* getting covered. Will not get covered, until someone writes up something about it that encourages people who actually *understand* LARPing to say something about it.
Non-Sci-fi/media/convention fanac: Off the top of my head: SCA. RenFaire. Should these have Fanlore entries? If so, they're *huge* sectors of fandom. Should the connections between D&D, renfaires, LARPing, cosplay, and the steampunk movement be explored at Fanlore? If so, how?
... and so on. Fanlore's awfully heavy with fic-fandom, which I understand 'cos that's what was of great current interest to the founders, and because it's easy to attract people on a topic that already has lots of activity. I don't quite think other things are being "neglected" as "haven't caught on yet." But I'd like to see some discussion of how those things can catch on, and what kinds of categories will be useful in dealing with them.
Candidates for Office: This morning, I was thinking about the buttons that said "Don't blame me; I voted for Bill & Opus." And realized there's a meme/trope of fictional characters running for election. I've seen election materials for Bill & Opus, Kodos vs Kang, Cthulhu For President ("why settle for the lesser evil?"), that-dude-on-West-Wing (shows you how much attention I pay to the show), and so on. I have no idea how to make a Fanlore entry for this... trope? Meme? Fannish activity? What do I call it -- "fictional characters running for office in the real world?" "Weasley is our
Gaming group homebrews: A lot of (D&D) gaming groups came up with their own spinoff/crossover game systems. Some of them were trying to patch the (many many) holes in the D&D system; others wanted a way to cover activities that D&D didn't allow for. I know--distantly--of several of these. They were common. Almost every group I'd ever heard of had something like this. One of my local D&D groups had "Mutant D&D," mixing high fantasy & something like Marvel Comics. (I never knew details; I was out of the state for most of that.) Other groups had extensive rules for playing vampires & werewolves, long before White Wolf existed. Another group switched D&D to a point-based system where each weapon proficiency had its own skill level, and you earned points every time you made a roll based on it. Others invented races & classes either grabbed from books, or invented entirely. (And then there was the Snits' Revenge/Tunnels & Trolls crossover. Don't ask.)
I don't know (1) what to call these things or (2) how many people involved, or how detailed, a particular set of homebrew rules needed to be, to "deserve" its own entry. Maybe there should just be one for "gaming homebrew?" Except they weren't usually called "homebrew." They were called whatever term the local group came up with. (The D&D point thing? "New System." Which term would be recognized by, oh, a dozen gamers on the planet, I think.) I don't know quite how to categorize them on Fanlore, other than "gaming/RPG" and "fannish activity." And while I know they existed pretty much everywhere, I only know details for groups I directly played with. If I put a single page up for "gaming homebrew," that implies that future gamers who find the site should have their systems placed as footnotes or a paragraph on that page, instead of getting a whole page.
There are *hundreds* of these. Thousands, probably. I don't know if each one should get a page (certainly each fanfic doesn't get a page; this is kinda-sorta the gamer equivalent? maybe?); but they don't run in patterns like fanfic--they don't sort by origin game (I'd guess that 80% or more are D&D based, because that's what EVERYONE used), and very few have a scope beyond a dozen gamers.
Gaming worldbooks: Another fine gaming tradition that I'm lost as to whether/how to put on Fanlore. A lot of gaming groups, a lot of GM's, (Heh! Fanlore needs a "GM" entry! ... I'll think about it.) had their own worlds written up. Maps, descriptions of important characters, regions where There Be Dragons (or worse, 'cos everyone was up for dragons, but the Dungeon Caverns of the Mind Flayers was a lot more scary), retired PC's who joined the NPC binder, and so on. Some few of these were published at the level of fanzine, photocopied & handed around to a gaming club; most were individual, a single copy shared by several players.
On the one hand--too small for Fanlore. My "world" of Seilar (it was an island) was known to maybe 10-15 players, ever (although I gather some of those games are maybe still going on, so maybe it's up to 3 dozen by now); I was the only one who had a map. On the other hand--maybe writeups of a few of the smaller gaming worlds would encourage bigger ones, the handful of college-library groups who had elaborate shared worlds, to put their info on Fanlore too.
Canon sources: Should Fanlore have entries for canon that spawned fannish activity that can't quite be described? Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame books were dear to many gamers, and the city of "Pandathaway" worked its way into many gameworlds, but I'm not sure what to say about it other than "this was important gamer fiction." (Did it directly inspire a type of gaming? No, it validated a gaming trope that was/is near universal: the "write up yourselves as characters" game.) (Which, um. Probably needs a page. If I can figure out what to call it.) Other canon-things with fanac: Rocky Horror Picture Show (it's there; not sure whether/how to place the common-and-rare things about being on a RHPS cast, much less regional variants in audience lines), Magic: The Gathering (I don't even know where to *start*), some albums (Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, Beatles). Dice. Shouldn't Fanlore have an entry about dice? Gamers have lore about dice. (Gamers *threaten* their dice when the rolls aren't good.)
LARPing: LARP has an entry at Fanlore. LARP stands for "Live Action Role-Playing," and is the gaming where people dress up in costumes and enact games. It works something like "host a murder mystery" things. I don't like LARPing. I know vaguely that there's a lot of White Wolf LARPs, and some SCA-ish, D&D-ish LARPs, and, um, other LARPs. There's big clubs, and little ones, and a whole lot of variations in style and scope. I'm about as qualified to write up LARPing as I am to write up podficcing.
Except that there are dozens of podfic-savvy people involved with Fanlore, so that's more-or-less getting covered; there's apparently approximately zero other (tabletop RPG) gamer-people involved with Fanlore, so LARPing is *not* getting covered. Will not get covered, until someone writes up something about it that encourages people who actually *understand* LARPing to say something about it.
Non-Sci-fi/media/convention fanac: Off the top of my head: SCA. RenFaire. Should these have Fanlore entries? If so, they're *huge* sectors of fandom. Should the connections between D&D, renfaires, LARPing, cosplay, and the steampunk movement be explored at Fanlore? If so, how?
... and so on. Fanlore's awfully heavy with fic-fandom, which I understand 'cos that's what was of great current interest to the founders, and because it's easy to attract people on a topic that already has lots of activity. I don't quite think other things are being "neglected" as "haven't caught on yet." But I'd like to see some discussion of how those things can catch on, and what kinds of categories will be useful in dealing with them.
no subject
I don't think "mainstream" music or sports fandom (the non-RPF aspects, I assume?) are within the scope of Fanlore, but I'm not familiar with them. The question to ask is: are they producing creative works? I gather there's some zine publishing happening in punk, but a "subculture" isn't necessarily the same as a "fandom." Hard to say where the line is.
Civil War reinactments are probably not within the scope of Fanlore either--reenactors don't think of themselves as fans, do they?
I know Fanlore would be happy to have more information about gaming in general, but I don't know enough about it to advise you on specifics. There are already some media fandom livejournal RPGs documented on Fanlore, but they can be read by non-players like fanfiction. Come to think of it, I'd like to read a page that compares Livejournal RPGs with other types....
If this helps, the What_Fanlore_is_not page says that Fanlore is an encyclopedia of fannish culture, as opposed to an encyclopedia of pop culture.
no subject
In music... letterzines, club meetings, cosplay (KISS makeup, that single-white-glove), poetry, posters, fictional album covers, dolls in dioramas, meta-essays, collages, gingerbread men cookies in band costumes... plenty of creative works.
The good news: No, they don't, for the most part, consider themselves "our kind" of fans, and vice-versa, and except for the spots where Bandom or American Idol fandom makes them converge, there's not much crossing of the streams. Yay.
Civil War reenactments are probably not Fanlore-ish. Except that there's plentiful crossover between them & Renfaire & SCA, which crosses over to a lot of convention-based cosplay; the "historical reenactor" thing gets blurry.
I'm mostly musing. I'm not so much interested in "should Fanlore have a Civil War reenactor page?" (which, um, maybe, if someone cares about it & knows some details), but "how *much* gaming stuff should I throw at Fanlore, and if I find anyone to cover LARPing, should that extend to SCA & Renfaire?"
I'm looking past the boundaries of what I know is wanted, trying to figure out what the borderline, "meh, we could have a bit of that, I suppose" areas are, as opposed to, "why don't we have info about this? We should totally have a page on that!"
I've got some vague thoughts that it'd be easier to get content for the gaps if the boundaries were stretched farther. But they really are vague, unfinished thoughts.
no subject
Music fans also produce, um, music, which I'm certain qualifies as a creative work!