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

[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.