Gaming fandoms

[elf]

I want to make a bunch of gaming pages at Fanlore. Mostly tabletop RPGs, because that's what I know well enough to just sit down with a template and throw in data; eventually, some hex-map-based wargames, some board and card games, and probably some online flash games.

I'm trying to figure out how to start, and I'd like some advice.

I've got the page for the RPG infobox, which automatically puts a page in category:games. I'm trying to figure out what other categories they go in.

How granular should categories get? Do all games stay lumped together under "Games," or should we have Games:tabletop RPG, :board-and-card, :console video game, :MMORPG, :LARP, :flash-based, :wargame, :online RPG, etc.?

I mean eventually. Right now, a dozen subcategories would be silly. But if I make 50 pages for RPGs... I have about that many sitting on my gaming shelf right now, without having to look for games I don't directly know anything about... the "Games" category is gonna get crowded with RPGs and elf's-other-favorite-games. (I am itching to create gamer-lore pages. The rest of fandom should know that many gamers once claimed that FGU stood for "Fucking Game is Unplayable.")

Also not sure what other categories games should have. I think of them as "fandom by source text," but there's some disagreement about that. I don't want to create 30 pages with wrong categories. Does "source text" mean "any canonical material for this fandom," or does it mean "consumable media: movie, tv, book, browsable website?" Are they source texts, or canon types, or a community? Or something else?

I am aware there is no current absolute answer. I'm asking for discussion to sort these issues out.

In the meantime, I'm setting up a template page for myself for RPGs. Not a fanlore-template, which is a bit of wiki-code, but a Word doc with the fanlore template and a couple of categories (including the sort-as bit and a stub marker) at the top, followed by a set of pre-established headers, which I don't expect to be able to fill in all at once. I plan to use this for "small" rpgs; industry leaders like D&D, GURPS, and Vampire: The Masquerade might be much more individualized.

I'm planning on the following sections for RPG (and similar):

• top section, unlabeled, giving the game genre (if any), type of character creation (random or point-based, class-specific or open-ended, etc.) mechanics details: crunchy or light, general power level, and any special fame or noteworthiness the game has achieved.
• History & Convention Activity, including both con-sponsored games and whether it's prominent among gamers who attend gaming conventions.
• Awards, including both awards the game itself has been nominated for or won, and awards available to players of the game. (At tournaments, mostly, although the internet has invented a few other types of awards.)
• Notable People, or BNFs, but gamers don't often know the phrase "BNF" so it'd be odd to use that. Could include both players of note, and designers/publishers who are active in a way that fandom notices. I don't like the label for this section.
• House Rules common to the game, or not common but published.
• Controversies--gonna be empty in most, possibly enough to leave it out entirely. (However, any game that had a 2nd edition, probably had controversies between players.)
• Common Character Types--You *can* write up half-orc clerics in D&D. I even knew someone who did. Once. However, Aragorn-wannabes are in pretty much every group.
• Game Tropes--another one that I'm not happy with the label. Maybe should call it Game Clichés. Every D&D player knows the "you all meet in a bar" setup; Champions players are familiar with "you're all in a bank in your secret IDs when a team of masked villains start waving guns around."
• Sourcebooks & Modules--both popular "official" ones, and fan-made worldbooks. Some games won't have any, but anything that got played much at least acquired a few zine-style adventure modules.
• Misc/Other Details, because I want to leave space for things that don't fit in that, so that would-be editors don't *not add info* because they can't figure out where to put it.

That's a lot of sections. Most pages on Fanlore don't have that many sections. Many games, arguably, don't need that much detail; the Midnight at the Well of Souls RPG probably never got played enough to get house rules or even common character types. (I keep forgetting it's not an FGU game.) OTOH, if the page is made with sections, someone might fill them in. If the page just says "this game was published in 1985 by a company that's long out of business; it's based on a series of SF novels; most gamers have never heard of it or the novels," it's not likely to ever get more info. And maybe there was some group that played it, loved it, and has a Geocities page now at the Wayback machine about which of its alien races worked better as actual PCs.

(Oh. eep. There's no Fanlore entry for Player Character. Nor NPC. There's one for GM, though. But not "The GM's Girlfriend," a topic that might be more suited for TVTropes than Fanlore.)

The real questions here (if you read through all that) are:
1) How to categorize a cluster of gaming pages, mostly tabletop RPG, but possibly a few others, so that they probably don't all need to be retouched later, and
2) Is my approach to RPG pages reasonable, or something that doesn't fit well with the rest of the wiki?

Comments

[anotherslashfan]

As a gamer I think your section division makes a lot of sense! And as far as I can tell, it'll still be good even if you don't have that much to say about a particular game - you can just leave out sections that aren't working for that particular example.
I don't really have much to offer regarding the categorizing since I'm not a well-versed editor. But I guess I'd start with medium-specific categories, for example: games:rpg or games:larp, subdividing in this category once a critical amount of pages has been reached. I do wonder how one would treat a thing that is a whole franchise spanning different mediums.

[elf]

Multimedia franchises can get tagged with several categories. I don't think LotR is currently tagged for games, but it could be, or more likely, a page could be created for MERP and the couple of boardgames that have been authorized.

I'm going with a category for Games:*Tabletop RPGs for now; still trying to sort out if I should put them in the "Source Text" category.

[extempore]

I'd start with medium-specific categories, for example: games:rpg or games:larp

But here the question would be: are RPGs a medium or a genre? If you look at video games, they're a genre - and a pretty overall genre at that with lots of sub-genres. Even a LARP would fall under RPG genre - after all it's a role playing game, just not played at the table or on a computer, but in and around some castle or somesuch. What would be the specific medium for a LARP or a RPG in general?

[briar_pipe]

It's important not to make users drill too deep when clicking through categories, so I think the RPG layer at least should be removed, no matter what we decide. It seems reasonable to me, given the complexity and history of the different RPG forms, to have them each be a top level under Games. I don't know that they need to be classified any other ways.

Does fanlore really distinguish between mediums and genres? It seems to me, from looking, that it's more about communities and canons. I think a general "Gaming Community" (or possibly a couple of those, if there's a big enough split somewhere) could encompass all the non-game pages, such as glossary terms, the genres chomiji was talking about, game publishers/producers, etc. I may be biased, though, as that's how we've sorted out the Anime & Manga Fandom (with separate communities for Doujin Fandom and Anime Music Video Fandom - again, multiple communities or subcommunities are an option).

[chomiji]

Last time I was worrying about gaming systems, there was categorization into class-based systems (D&D being the obvious example) and skills-based systems (GURPs, Hero, etc.). Some people really prefer one over the other. Also, "tabletop" RPGs can include both games that use miniatures and games that don't.

I really don't think about games as being organized by source text. Once a system is chosen, then I might worry about source texts. But the people with whom I've gamed have generally made up their own scenarios (sometimes borrowing bits of world-building or plot from some story they liked) or used preset generalized scenarios, rather than trying to reproduce some specific fictional world. So if I were reading this Fanlore section, I'd be aggravated that things weren't sorted by type of game system. Another set of categories might be scenario types: General (as in the base materials for systems like GURPs and D20), European Fantasy, Superheros, Espionage and/or Mysteries, Science Fiction (Near Future or Far Future), etc.

[elf]

I was thinking of the system as a source text, the equivalent of a movie or tv show that's the core material for a fandom.

I could potentially create a subcategory "Genre" under games, and use things like High Fantasy/ Superheroes/ Espionage/ Horror/ Space Opera/ Cyberpunk/ Modern-day/ Multi-genre. (Seems troublesome, though. Subcategories are supposed to be for large groups of things; not sure one should be created for genres like "western" that only have a handful of RPGs.)

I'm thinking of starting with subcats for the "Games" category, to include Tabletop RPG, Console Video Game, Online Flash Game, Board Game, Card Game (all those CCGs, and things like Munchkin & Illuminati), Wargame (this may need a more specific definition; I'm thinking of those hexmap things, not Axis & Allies), maybe others if there's enough of them.

[chomiji]

"the system as a source text"

Ahh, gotcha. I was thinking of things like the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which are built around a specific work of fiction.

As I have no experience creating/editing Fanlore articles, I'll take your word that those genres would make things cumbersome. I do have experience in web content management, and one of the things we always recommend for a new offering is to decide on who your audience is/are and what those people want to do with your site. But I guess Fanlore already has an inherent mission, and I'm going afield from it. Still, I'd mention somewhere the class-based vs. skills-based split, because I've seen fearsome arguments between fans of the different types.

LOL, yes, when I was starting in gaming, I also thought of those carefully mapped out strategic games as "those hexmap things"!

[elf]

Gaming genres would be difficult, because that's a very tiny section within the scope of Fanlore, and people who are searching for wiki-style info on games aren't likely to need to search or sort by genre. It should be on the gaming template (and it is), so it's on the page, but odds are, people won't be looking for "info about High Fantasy RPGs" and not wanting to see info about Cyberpunk RPGs.

I'm thinking of gaming systems as "source text," like TV shows; so the main page for a game system would be included in the "Fandoms by source text" page, but if specific modules or sourcebooks for that system got pages, those wouldn't be source texts. (Keep on the Borderlands deserves its own wiki page. So does the Temple of Elemental Evil series. The only sourcebook I can think of that might want its own page is GURPS Cyberpunk, with the Secret Service raid and all that.)

I'm trying to think of how to label RPGs that are specific media tie-ins. Amber, MERP, Call of Cthulhu (special bonus points for resurrecting an obscure literary collection), and all those boxed licensed things from the late 80's/early 90's with three booklets (player guide, GM guide, prepackaged adventure).

Wizards. Stormbringer. Elfquest. Midnight at the Well of Souls. Dr. Who. (I don't have that one.) And the newer ones, which are single-book games... Firefly, Supernatural, Smallville.

[aethel]

Fanlore hasn't ever created categories for genres of source texts, unless you count anime. For example, we have a Live-action Television category, but no Wild West show category. We have a page instead. A Tabletop RPG category would be fine; high fantasy RPGs would not. This may be an unwritten rule, but a) it doesn't match the current category pattern, b) we don't want to encourage people to create pages about nonfannish things by having too many canon-focused categories, and c) fanworks have genres, too, so there's a lot of potential for confusion. If some of those Canon Type subcategories get to be unmanageably huge, we might want to look at breaking them down further with genres, but I think it will cause problems.

[briar_pipe]

Most of the folks I know do play using specific rulesets (Paranoia, various White Wolf, Earthdawn, In Nomine, specific unpublished rulesets they created, or even D&D) with built-in world-building, which makes them very much canons to me.

It sounds like your experience has been a bit different. Do you think you're looking at canon types/subcategories? Or are you thinking maybe genres or even glossary terms?

To me, with or without miniatures is more of a style choice, but certainly some games run better with them, and some don't need them at all. I don't know if I would classify games with or without miniatures as separate types? But that may just be me, not being into miniatures. ^_^

[chomiji]

"Do you think you're looking at canon types/subcategories? Or are you thinking maybe genres or even glossary terms?"

Could be. As I mentioned above to elf, I may be going afield of what Fanlore is meant to do and be. My bad.

"It sounds like your experience has been a bit different."

Quite possible - I've been gaming since the late 1970s. Our current campaign is a space opera based on 1930-1950s pulp SF, using primarily D20 Modern and Future. At one point I was in a D20 spy campaign. I also played in some online games on the old CompuServe game forum, which were mainly GURPs-based, including the GURPs port of the White Wolf stuff. But there was also a GURPs Japanese mythology campaign.

So what would you do with game systems that aren't locked into specific types of worlds and scenarios, like D20 Modern, which can be used for spy games, urban fantasy, or whatever? Or GURPs, which has both modules that cover generic categories (like Black Ops) and modules for specific fictional works (like Bujold's Vorkosigan series)?

And I'm not into miniatures at all! We do often use some sort of tactical display when we have action scenes, especially with combat. Nowadays it's usually a whiteboard with the location plan drawn with markers, and magnets or sticky notes for the characters and opponents.

[elf]

magnets or sticky notes for the characters and opponents

We usually have figurines for the characters, although they don't tend to be too directly representative. ("Okay, who's using what? Doug's the mage, so he gets the mage figurine. Zak's wearing plate mail so he gets the guy in full armor. Elf is a woman, so she gets the woman figurine. Plz to ignore the fur bikini.") Opponents and NPCs are usually represented by extra dice.

Orcs are large 6-siders; kobolds are small 6-siders; ogres are 12-siders. Horses are 8-siders with another die on top of them. When the GM brings out 20-siders for "the surprise monsters in the hidden room," we know we've got problems.

[chomiji]

Hee! We have much the same thing when the GM breaks out the larger-size sticky notes. "OMG, exactly how how large are those guard robots ?!"

[briar_pipe]

I may be going afield of what Fanlore is meant to do and be.

Not necessarily! The thing about Fanlore is that it's got this great open theory behind it, but the actual organization was conceived within one particular meta-fandom (Western media fandom), so the structure started out very much tailored to that. Our purpose here is to shift that structure to fit Gaming fandom (which, omg, did I actually refer to all of gamers everywhere as part of some über-fandom? Because lol). That may require quite a bit of shuffling the original structure.

Basically, Fanlore organizes pages around Sources, Communities, Activities, Tropes&Genres, Fanworks, etc. I think elf was suggesting we put the actual rulebooks for tabletop into "Sources by Canon Type", along with a whole bunch of other game rules/structures/etc., as a Games category (which already exists), and then we make a bunch of subcategories there based on type of game. But then we can also create pages on particular modules, so I could see GURPS getting a broad page with a "Here are a bunch of modules!" section, pointing to modules that each have their own pages. And then there could also be Genre pages for Space Opera games, and Spy games, and High Fantasy games, etc., which could be cross-linked.

The question I really can't answer is, what does one call the gaming community?

(Magnets or sticky notes = much more fun than figurines. I also like the stuffed animal approach. ^_^)

[extempore]

Gaming sites! \o/ Always a good idea! =D

"Sourcebooks & Modules" is aimed pretty much soley at tabletop gaming, I think. At least in my little corner of video gaming I have never come across sourcebooks unless the video game itself was a derivate from a tabletop game. Which, I guess, made this part stand out a little to me: my approach to RPG pages

What do you consider an RPG page? Is it tied to a medium as well as to a certain structural and narrative composition?

I'd see things like "Common Character Types" or "Game Tropes" as well as part of tabletop gaming, because in your conventional RPG video game the player doesn't have that influence over game tropes or character classes. Those aspects are usually part of a fixed frame created by the developers and can be modified only in small ways.

Aside from a few stubs, I have edited only one game page so far (World of Warcraft, woefully outdated already), and as for categories... I found I liked simplicity. I liked that all games were simply in a GAMES category (even though I can't find my way there from the top, i.e. I have no idea how to get there from the "browse categories" links on the left menu). Especially franchises would have probably a lot of additional tags, if we started to use Video Game, Tabletop, Puzzle, Trading Card Games, Mobile Apps and so on. And I'm not even starting with all the categories and genres trade and game journalists (and more recently, game scholars) have come up for video games - MMORPG, Jump'n'Run, Simulations, Shooters etc. - where there is still much debate and genres aren't easy to define. ;)

In short: To me, Fanlore isn't really about the "what" of the medium (like "what platform is it being played on", "what are the specifics of the various character classes" or "what lore does the world have"), but more about things like "who did what in that fandom" or "what did that game inspire fans to do" or "is there a connection between game devs and players?". I'd prefer not too much sub-categories for games, since there simply is no consensus (at least in video gaming) on a lot of "putting-in-a-specific-box".

But in any case - someone is working on game pages! *_____*

[elf]

I'm thinking specifically of tabletop RPGs, the kind with pencils and dice and sometimes dungeon maps and minatures. (And I tend to use "RPG" as shorthand for that; I'm sorry about that, and I'll try to remember to be more precise. In my defense, I can only say that I've been doing that kind of gaming since 1978, and I still think of any game involving pixels as "that new stuff.")

I have many sharp thoughts on the differences between MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs, and am often annoyed that they use a lot of the same vocabulary, because the dynamics and play styles are so different. I'm still sorting out how to define the differences I perceive, so I don't have a nice blog post going over that.

I do want to focus on things like "What does the game inspire fans to do" (including common adventure styles, custom character-sheet design, fan-made worldbooks) and "connection between creators and players" (which is often very, very close in tabletop games) and things like that.

I don't want to make categories for video games; I don't know enough about them to sort them. I know how *I'd* categorize them, but since I barely play any of them, my categories are suspect at best. But I do want to be able to click on a link for tabletop RPGs and bounce through those, and I might want to read about various hexmap-and-terrain-modifiers wargames (I'm sure there's a better label for those) without being distracted by RPGs.

What do you consider an RPG page? Is it tied to a medium as well as to a certain structural and narrative composition?

That's a more existential question than I can deal with here. I'm planning on making pages for RPGs that have rulebooks and are intended to be played by a group of people together in a room, usually armed with pencils, paper and dice. I'm not trying to sort out The True Essential Nature Of RPGs; just making Fanlore entries for the games I know and love. (Or know and hate. Or have heard of and boggled that anyone thought that would be a fun way to spend an afternoon. You get the idea.)

[chomiji]

" .. 'connection between creators and players' (which is often very, very close in tabletop games)"

Yes! I generally gave players a general background on the scenario, and then I'd work with them to develop their specific character backgrounds - which would in turn give me additional details for the overall setting.

[extempore]

I still think of any game involving pixels as "that new stuff."

Considering that "Twennis for Two", created in 1958, is seen as the first computer game by many, and home gaming hit the mainstream in the 80ies, I'd say it's not so new anymore. ;) Today, you often have already second generations playing together with their parents.

differences between MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs

MMOs are a very specific form of role play games, even among computer games. For example, I started my role play computer gaming with a traditional single player RPG created in the game world of "Das Schwarze Auge", a German tabletop game. After that it was lots of Japanese RPGs where you still have the same mechanics you can find in tabletop games (character stats, dice rolls, decision making etc.) but all runs in the background so the player can focus on the story and character parts. Especially more recent RPGs like the Dragon Age series or Skyrim give the player a lot of agency, in some cases a very open world where the player can do anything, go anywhere, interact in a lot of different ways with the game environment and where their choices have great impact on the outcome of the game. But those are all single player games.

MMOs on the other hand are played online and since there are hundreds of thousands - in some successful games several millions - of people playing together, the game has to focus more on the technical structures than on the plot-related ones. For example, your character can't really be a hero with a unique storyline, because the world is full of heroes just like them. But there is still place for roleplay - only it's between the players, not between a player and an NPC.
In World of Warcraft, for instance, I have been part of a serverwide group that tackles more difficult foes together (called "raiding"), and we specifically were looking for roleplayers. Many of us are or were tabletop players as well. We are situated on a RP server, and all of us like to flesh out characters, spend time to develop them and have them interact with others. We had various scenarios the respective "game masters" took great care in preparing, treks into dangerous areas with low level characters, celebrations and parties, secret societies, traders, city guards, religious orders and so on. Some campaigns were coordinated cross-faction, so you could have actual battles with the enemy faction players - battles that differed from usual PvP (player versus player) by giving the others time to role play (for example the preperation to an assault, the setting up of supply lines etc.). We consider ourselves role players.
The benefit of doing this within a computer game is a beautiful and detailed environment (cities, castles, villages, nature) free to use, the drawback is that it's done with typing text in the chat box, not via voice chat.

... and I'll stop now. *blush*

tl;dr: To me, any game that enables the participants to assume the role of a character and play it out in some way, is an RPG. Be it a tabletop game, a LARP, a computer game, a communication training in a company, or dressing up with my 5 year old niece to re-enact some fairy tale. I guess, I focus more on the similarities than on the differences of the various flavours. =)

[elf]

To me, any game that enables the participants to assume the role of a character and play it out in some way, is an RPG.

I'm growing toward that concept, but I'm not quite there yet. (Playing Glitch during these last few weeks has broadened my worldview to an amazing degree.) Having better luck with the MMOs than the single-player pre-set-adventure RPGs; haven't wrapped my head around that being a "role" any more than Mario in Donkey Kong is a "role." (I loved "Adventure" for the Atari 2600. It was styled after tabletop RPGs... but it was a puzzle-game; there was no personality involved.)

But that's semantic nit-picking and my biases; I'm not begrudging the label RPG to include the AD&D computer games and World of Warcraft and even more diverse games. I'm just trying to sort out how to put the ones I know something about on Fanlore.

I'm learning to focus more on the similarities; where the differences matter, for Fanlore, is in templates and infoboxes... it doesn't matter how similar Zelda: Legend of Wind Waker is to AD&D; the infobox that has a spot for "dice" isn't appropriate for both of them, and the Wind Waker infobox should have a spot for OS/Platform.

I don't know what else belongs in video RPG infoboxes, nor what differences there should be between single-player and MMO things. I know what info's important and relevant to tabletop RPGs, at least enough to make a basic outline that's subject to tweaking for individual games.

[extempore]

To me, personally, it would be enough to just have the possibility of writing what medium the RPG is played in (as it's on the general fandom by source template, I think), and to add either tabletop, video game and so on. Because it's about the fandom, not the medium, and I usually look for fandom related pages. So there would be a fandom category "Dungeons and Dragons" and all incarnations would have one "start" page, listing tabletop, MMORPG, PSP, movies, TV-series etc. als mediums. Then, if there are big fandoms within a fandom with very different communities and practices, there can always be made seperate pages, like D&D_(tabletop) or something like that. Those pages would still be listed under the game as well as the fandom category and would be immediately distinguishable, if one browses those categories.

I understand, if some people prefer to be able to search fanlore for only video games or tabletop games, which would require seperate categories. It just feels like too much splitting up, more like "general Wikipedia" to me, if you know what I mean. ;)

[extempore]

(And I just researched Glitch - hadn't hear of it before - and am sad that it's discontinued. It looked like a game I'd have enjoyed.)

[elf]

I am Glitching like a mad fiend until Sunday evening when it closes forever. It is beyond awesome; the closing announcement thread in the forums is 22 pages and growing. (And I have the whole thing saved & screencapped.)

The endgame play is borderline-frantic, as would be expected, and loaded with an incredible amount of sharing--everyone knows all their tools and toys and artifacts are going away in a few days, and there's a whole lot of "who needs [nifty item X]? There's a stack of them in front of my house; come and get 'em."

And aside from that, it's beautiful. But I have snaps and screencaps and I'm gonna get the book.

[briar_pipe]

Yay! I'm so glad you're doing this!

I think having separate categories is good, and I like the ones you've offered. We might want to make a category wishlist and put it somewhere for when there are actually pages to put in each category. Either way, RPG definitely needs to be sorted into LARP, Tabletop, Online and MMORPG at the bare minimum. In fact, I would go ahead and make those top-level subcats under "Games", rather than adding an RPG layer that would only add clicks for users.

I think of them as "fandom by source text," but there's some disagreement about that.

I'm not sure how to explain this the way I mean it, but sometimes how something looks to outsiders is not the bar one should use for deciding how to define a fandom. Fanlore is about inclusion, which means fangroups defining and explaining themselves, rather than having those explanations or definitions imposed from the outside, even by fans from other communities. So I would look seriously at chomiji's comment above, but not at the comments of folks who don't game, except to try to make clarifying statements where needed.

For me personally, the gaming divisions go something like this:
- Community = the gaming community at large, probably divided into online and in-person and some other finer distinctions depending on how you want to slice it.
- Canon Types = types of games, with many having subdivisions (flash games, RPGs, card games, and board games would all have obvious subcats).
- Source Texts = the games themselves. We take these source texts and play using them, and that is the "Fandom by Source Text". So Earthdawn is a source text, and people might make specific pages for campaigns, for major events/settings/elements of the source canon and how players have used those, for tropes that have been raised, debates and wanks, etc. Or those might all be listed on the main page, if the fandom is small.
- Activities = tournaments, cons, modding, etc. I don't think I would count campaigns here - I would subcat those to the game they're based on, much like characters or pairings are done now. Which means we'd need a template for that.

Of course, that's just me.

I think automatically defining all games as activities simply because one is being active in them is missing the point that writing, drawing, making vids, podficcing, and all of these other elements are also activities. A game's ruleset and/or structure is every bit as canon as a video or a book. The point is that we take all of these and play with them. Rather than being giving a single, clear narrative, we're given the opportunity to create our own narratives. I think that's what trips up folks who are more familiar with other canon types.

Re: Terms and Tropes, go for it! I find at least half the pages I create are of this type right now. Adding them creates a good structure for later editors.

Mostly what I think you need are some good templates. Sounds like you're already getting there.

[elf]

Tropes.

Ack. I just realized I need to write up the "Head of Vecna" thing.

My current gaming group had a GM who convinced the party they'd found the Head of Vecna. Five party members managed to kill themselves off trying to get it to work.

[havocthecat]

And maybe a category for gambling where we basically have a landing page saying we don't currently deal with that kind of gaming? Because that's also defined as gaming, and so it would be useful for disambiguation purposes, if nothing else.

[elf]

So far, there's no direct entry for "gaming." We have Games, and RPGs, and other kinds of games, so the confusion won't show up for a while.

Which is good, because the idea of trying to define "gaming" in a way that excludes poker and slot machines, includes D&D, Tomb Raider, WoW, and Starfleet Battles, probably Advanced Squad Leader, Talisman, and MtG, but possibly not Monopoly, Chess or Candyland... twitch.

[liviapenn]

Heh, you just made me curious to see how ff.net sorts things... Apparently they've just got one big category called Games... it does seem to be mostly video games, but also includes Talisman & Magic: The Gathering, as well as things like Clue, Candyland, Tetris, Solitaire, Oregon Trail, etc.

I don't think there's really a need to have a Fanlore definition of "gaming" that excludes certain types of games etc.-- if those sources don't have fandoms with recognizable fannish activity, then it wouldn't be appropriate to make pages for them on Fanlore. But, if there is some (for example) undiscovered anthropomorfic slot machine fandom, or Scrabble fan clubs with zines or competitive Scrabble player RPF or whatever, then it wouldn't make sense to pre-emptively exclude them just because we think, "well, poker isn't something people are fannish about." So, I wouldn't really worry about trying to have a super-specific definition.

[elf]

Conservation of Momentum by Roseclaw: 11000 words of Candyland fic at AO3.

So yeah, I'm perfectly happy to leave the definition of "gaming" loose and open, and if we're ever bombarded by crowds demanding to know where the poker and slot machine info is, we can reconsider that. (I know there are poker etc. tournaments, and presumably some kind of fan culture around those. I don't think I'm stepping on any toes by saying those aren't what we *think* of when we say "fandom," and I don't think the people into those things are interested in Fanlore as a repository for info about them. But hey, if that's wrong, shrug; more info is better than less.)