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

[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.