Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Essential articles/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Wanted: Constructive criticism

If criticism is posted in the summaries on this page constructive suggestions should also be addded, or the note fleshed out here in the talk page. F.i.,

The real-time tactics article: "Not so much in depth as it should be"; what did the editor find missing?
The comment on Computer and video game genres, "This article is just plain weird"; eh? Not very helpful.
Simulation game, "...noticing a trend? Needs focus"

etc... In short, there have been quite a few disorganised, almost raving, POV-infested complaint-edits to the page lately without accompanying constructive efforts. Mikademus 18:18, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, it's no Peer Review, that's for sure; I just call it as I see it and move on. Ideally the Workshop would solve this, but it hasn't been touched in a while. The CVG template on talk pages has a built-in ToDo list, and that would also be a better place for in-depth comments. Lengthy comments in tables, not so much so. Nifboy 18:47, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, it would be good if you could drop few notes on what you're missing in the talk of the relevant articles and I'll see if I can contribute sometihng to the ones I'm watching. Mikademus 20:14, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, some of those aren't mine. But I've killed some of the more egregious examples. Nifboy 21:10, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Idea

It might be an idea to nominate this article for the GCOTW. Jacoplane 00:22, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Using article validation

According to this week's Signpost, the article validation feature will be going live soon. I think that once this feature is available we should use it to establish the quality of the articles found in this list. If everyone in the wikiproject does the validation that would provide us with a more general consensus on the quality of articles. Jacoplane 06:10, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

It sounds interesting. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 07:32, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Workshop

How about starting a collaboration similar to the GCOTW, but focused entirely on articles on this list. ( Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer and video games/Essential articles/Workshop ??). We'd try and move an article up to Good article status, and move on. There is currently no active way to work on non-stubs articles within the scope of the Wikiproject, this seems like a good place to start. Jaco plane 03:00, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, there was Wikipedia:Computer and video games improvement drive, but it seems to be dead. Some of the most essential ones might go to the main Wikipedia:Article Improvement Drive. Nifboy 03:11, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I know. I've mentioned it here too. Actually getting articles nominated for the general AID is kind of a bitch, we can spend a long time with process/voting. Therefore I think we should just move ahead here, even if we have less people. Lead by example! Jaco plane 03:27, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. If I read you correctly, this wouldn't be a weekly thing; more of an open-ended time frame? Hopefully after enough work is done on the essential articles, we could entend this to CVG articles in general (although that's probably a pipe dream in all reality). I'm all for moving forward on this, although I think the "workshop" should cover two or three articles at a time, switching them out as needed. --Pagrashtak 05:03, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

A couple of suggested genres

These are not played by traditional gamers, but are historically important, and are still played and developed. They arose in the days before graphical terminals were widely available.

roguelike games, which tend to have great longevity and which are still under active development (see usenet rec.games.roguelike.*), and which have inspired the modern Diablo. While there is some crossover with role-playing games, they're a distinct genre.

However, Theres not that many roguelike games, and thus would it be encyclopedia 1.0 worthy? Roguelike games are generally considered hack and slash games, with random genators --Larsinio 20:30, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

While the overall gameplay is indeed hack and slash, the feel is very different, partly because the games are non-graphical or barely graphical, and because the complexity tends to be very much higher, with hundreds of monster and object types.-gadfium 20:48, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Youre argument about diablo being roguelike then doesnt apply if in context of graphics. And many rpgs tend to be very complex specially in terms of using procedural algorithms to create items and monsters.. ANd in terms of complexity, it is known trait of computer role playing games, compared to console rpgs. --Larsinio 22:21, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, I think it's fairly obvious Diablo is a direct descendant of roguelikes, which (IMO) counts as a roguelike. As far as the number of games, City-building game has fewer, and I can name unlisted roguelikes for both the Genesis and Game Gear (Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, respectively). I might be biased, though, because I play NetHack with 32x32 tiles. Nifboy 22:50, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

It is obvious that diablos is a decendednt of rogue. You said that the games are barely graphical though in nature, which contradicted the comparison with diablo IMO. The question is tho, are there enough roguelike games to justify its inclusion as an essential article. I feel that it is a minor sub genre, with most of its features being attributed ot role playing games and their reliance upon statistics in general. Im not saying its not avalid sub-genre, im just saying its not essential to the context of this page's goal. ---Larsinio 22:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

In terms of numbers, this section lists about 50, and List of Angband variants lists about 60, although there is a small amount of overlap between the lists. I suspect there's about 10 Angband variants actively maintained, although I haven't been part of the scene for some years.

For interactive fiction, baf.wurb.com lists well over 100 titles beginning with the letter 'A'. I haven't tried to count the full number available. If we were to restrict genres based on the number of games readily available, interactive fiction would be one of the last genres to be dropped.

I wouldn't call diablo a roguelike exactly, but it's openly acknowledged by its developers that they were influenced by roguelike games. There's always lots of crossover between game genres and styles. To take an extreme example of such a crossover, there's an implementation of NetHack written for the interactive fiction engine Z-machine. This doesn't make roguelikes and interactive fiction the same genre.

I guess my point is that there's a world of computer gaming which began before computers had graphics cards; it's not dead yet; and some modern games still draw inspiration from that world. To some extent, History of computer and video games does cover it. I'm not going to be upset if you don't include these games in your list of essential articles; I just wanted to make sure you hadn't overlooked them.-gadfium 23:24, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

(And, for the record, Gadfium isn't me.) Nifboy 23:30, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I knew that! -gadfium 00:10, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

interactive fiction, or text adventure games as they used to be called. These also moved to become graphical and the genre of graphical adventure games developed, with Myst a typical example. The text-only or lightweight graphical interactive fiction genre still continues strongly.

Yeah I agree. Games like Zork definitely made a huge impact. I think they should definitely be included on the list. One of the problems we have with this page at the moment is that we have not attempted to define the scope of "essential", which is of course a rather subjective term. Personally, I feel that we actually need a lot more articles than are currently listed here, but we need to start with the core topics and make sure that they are good enough. Jaco plane 00:24, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to see your list of game genres include at least a little on these two. Unfortunately, I'm not volunteering to help, I have a number of other areas I'm heavily involved with on Wikipedia and my time here will be limited from the end of this month.-gadfium 20:27, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I, myself, would like to see a little bit more on Turn-based tactics as a genre, which seems be spread out amongst the RPG or Strategy articles without much cohesiveness. Nifboy 22:50, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Games by system

I though it would be a good idea to sort out individual games by systems, so I started by listing notable games for the NES, SNES and N64. Of course, there are plenty of systems to go, such as the Xbox, the PS systems, and the handhelds, among others. It's important that we establish good articles for games spanning every system, in addition to all the other video game-related topics. -- gakon5

I would actually like to keep as few individual game articles as possible, being that, in the grand scheme of things, they aren't essential except for a small handful. There might be a case for a separate Wikireader for individual games, though, so I'm going to leave the section in. Nifboy 06:12, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be ideal to pick 5-15 essential games for each system as the primary list of individual games. Such a categorization would be easy to select any desired total number of games from. Fredrik Johansson - talk - contribs 05:56, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

On the same hand, how many of these are part of a series? Almost all the killer apps for Nintendo systems are part of the Zelda, Metroid, or Mario series, for example. We've already got both the Zelda series and Link; do we also need LoZ, LttP, and OoT? Nifboy 07:04, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes. The purpose of this list is to provide an index, not to represent a final selection. Fredrik Johansson - talk - contribs 11:10, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I guess I can't argue with that. It was just something that was bothering me. That's all. Nifboy 15:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah... and about this list... isn't there anyone who cares about the handhelds? The only one there is "Gameboy"... and even those range from the original Game Boy to the GBA. Shouldn't they have their own sections? It isn't so bad that there's no DS or PSP ones, as they have only been created in the last two years (sorry for not being more specific), but then again, there are quite a few hits for the DS (one word: Nintendogs), and two years is a somewhat long time technology-wise. You've got a section for the Sega Saturn! It's a shame that the Game Boys have to share one... and if you need someone to put down DS articles, I'll be more than happy to. Sorry about not creating a new section for this, but it seemed relevant. Also I agree about putting down individual games. Some Mario Bros. fans would be angry if you included Mario Bros. II with the rest of the series. K, i'm done now. ;) 1337 r0XX0r 21:23, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Feel free to add them yourself. Be Bold! (Edit: I have since added sections for the DS and PSP, particularly since Nintendogs is a really good idea.) Nifboy 22:35, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Consider it done. I also added a few GBA and DS games I thought should be included. They're not rated, but then again it doesn't seem that rare... If you see any games I missed, feel free to add them. 1337 r0XX0r 21:26, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Oops. I forgot about the Game Boy Color. And I forgot to take the GBA games out of "Game Boy". I'll fix it quick. But does anyone know of any good Game Boy Color games? I only remember the Pokemon ones... Guess I'll have to research. :p 1337 r0XX0r 14:47, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Essential articles

Does anyone else feel that this list is getting a little large? --Pagrashtak 04:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think it's a side effect of not knowing just how essential is essential enough for a CD/print edition. We (well, I am, not sure about anyone else) are still in the process of rating articles, but haven't decided whether to include them yet. I'd wager half the articles listed wouldn't make it into a all-purpose print Wiki, but a Wikireader or, even better a CD version, might include *all* of our listed B+class articles, and maybe some more.

(Edit) To make a long story short, we can trim when we figure out how much room we need to fit the information into. Nifboy 05:30, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

The new "need" column has addressed this problem for me. --Pagrashtak 00:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

1.0 and Readers

I think instead of having two fields entitled "Reader" and "Print" (which no one is using anyway), there should be one field which flags an article as either very important (ie One Point Oh important) or kinda important (ie CVG-related reader important). That'd be a good way to identify the most essential in this Essential Articles list, since this list is, indeed, becoming very large.

And on that subject, some numbers need to be defined. As in, how many articles are going to be listed here. For example, in the Games by system section, 10 articles need to be flagged "very important" for each system. but that's just an example. -- gakon5 21:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree there should be some metric for how important a topic is, regardless of its article's status. I'm not sure it should supplant the current fields (which are, in essence, a combination of an article's importance and quality) but I wouldn't be opposed to adding another small field. Nifboy 23:39, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

There is now a new need field in the tables. If there need to be more categories we can add them. Nifboy 00:09, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

That's good, although I think there only need be two categories: High- and Mid-level importance (maybe a third). If an article on this page's "need" is put down as "Low," why is it there at all? That goes for the Reader and Print scales as well; we can't add an article here and then flag it as "Out." -- gakon5

I was thinking we could adapt this to a worklist of sorts. Low is there for someone to ask "Why is this here?" without having to remove it and/or make a section on the talk page about it (because if it was added, someone thinks it's important). Nifboy 00:20, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Sweet! I promise I'll try and make some progress on the Workshop soon. Jaco plane 00:21, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Featured and good articles

I've changed the page to where featured articles and good articles are above A and repesented by the appropriate icons. They could possibly use a different background color. Let me know what you think. --Pagrashtak 01:01, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that's how every other worklist I've seen does it. Some articles ought to be re-rated now, though. Nifboy 04:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Standards set by Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team

There is an article assesment system here: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment, which we should probably adopt for this page too. Jaco plane 07:04, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Eh. I think ours is "close enough" as to be compatable; the only major difference being that we call our "start" articles C articles and our stubs D articles (neither of which are up for consideration for 1.0). Nifboy 20:21, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. In any case I think the 1.0 Editorial team is held up in endless discussions about policy and I have seen few actual steps towards 1.0 come from them. I think we should just push ahead ourselves. jaco plane 02:16, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Article assessment is another interesting system of assessing articles. Something similar to this might be good for the Workshop. jaco plane 22:25, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Now that 1.0 has rewritten the scale to put A-class above GA, maybe we should switch over to the 1.0 scale. Nifboy 05:25, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Bias?

I may just be imagining things but I feel like theres a little bit of systemic bias towards popular genres (real time strategy versus turn based or management games), bias towards console games rather than pc games as being more influential, bias torwards Japanese developers (console) being more influential. Bias i mean in terms of choosign whats essential. I mean of course we can comte to a consensus, but these biaseas are ones that I feel are endemic to wikipedia in terms of size and scope of articles of these types. --Larsinio 18:09, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I have been using popularity as a factor of how essential a subject is, so I'm not convinced that, in and of itself, a bad thing. From this everything else follows. I do confess to a US bias, though, and you're welcome to make your own additions and change things as you see fit. Nifboy 18:42, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

POV?

Is this page subject to WP:NPOV? I said the following about Real-time strategy and it was edited with the comment "NPOV". Because I really do think it's important, I'm placing the comment here in full: "(No refs, history is mostly a list of games and weasel words; for example, no discussion of WHY Warcraft and Warcraft 2 "arguably usherd in the era of contemporary RTS by its treatment of the burgeoning genre elements and grundbreaking popularity.")". Nifboy 23:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

The point of this page is to collect points of view. I suggest restoring the comments. Fredrik Johansson 23:31, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

That's what I thought. I'm separating my comments with bullets and signing without date to encourage multiple points of view per entry. Nifboy 23:50, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

This invites counter-commenting. It might get messy... Mikademus 07:20, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

If it does, just take it to the article's talk page and leave a note that its status is disputed. Fredrik Johansson 09:15, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Console Bias?

I love consoles and PCs the same, really, but much of the list, specifically the 'individual games' section, ignores PC games. Yeah, you have your ubiquitous Dooms and Nethacks, but there's little else, and there is definitely a hell of a lot of important PC Games in history. The 'games by system' section covers a fair bit, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like it's lacking. Lockeownzj00 21:51, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Add what you feel is important. Me, my comp is a PoS so I don't really keep up with the important PC games. Nifboy 22:05, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

It's not just individual games, there's no computer listed in there at all, well, I tell a lie, there's the commodore 64 listed as a 'console' which it definitively wasn't. Where are the Amiga, Atari ST, MSX etc ? Equendil 03:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Templates

I think maybe we could make some Talk page templates for Top and High priority articles, informing people that it's something that seriously needs to be awesome for one point oh. It's say like:

This article has been deemed a Top/High priority by WikiProject Computer and video games to reach Wikipedia 1.0 quality. Please help us/WikiProject CVG in bringing this article to a suitable level of quality (ie featured status).

Well, not in that wording, but you get the idea. And on a related note, there's never been a better time than now to start working on some articles in this very lengthy list. Better getting working on the Workshop (was that a pun?). -- gakon5 00:58, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll have to think about that, but I definitely would not support it until there is a vote to decide which articles are top priority. Our "essential" list is already way too large. Pagra shtak 02:38, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, right now this list is all over the place. I think we might need to set a "bar" of sorts to judge how big (or small) the list should be. Maybe also make a new field where you can explain why you think an article is Top priority. Like, for Super Mario Bros. on the NES, you'd say "Duh. It's SMB. Of course it's top." -- gakon5