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.

[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.

[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! *_____*

[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.

[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.