Wiki: Games How To
This topic is for discussion of Wiki: Games, the Wiki: Games/List, and Game page content, as well as reporting issues that need fixing. Such a topic has been needed for a while, but now that there's an official call and news bulletin for editors to fill out Game pages, this seemed like a good time.
To start, I have some questions about Game groups and game-based organization:
1. Should pirate games, fangames and clones be included in Game groups? Long ago I put the Korean pirate Super Boy II in the Mario group, to make it easier to find for visitors who played it and thought it was a real Mario game. I also put the Castlevania clone 8 Eyes in the CV group, similarly to aid in its discovery by people who already like the gameplay of Castlevania. But I thought I should ask, are these kinds of games acceptable for "official" game groups, should only some of them be, or should they all be left out?
2. Should we really add every submission with no Game linked to a Game entry? (See the last part of the "official call" above.) Some are of controller test programs, uncategorizable ROMs, games run through automatic porting programs, and games that don't even exist. Do we want to "promote" these to the Game list, adding them to our search results and giving them our official approval? I thought this was why submissions stopped being automatically given Game entries circa 2012. Not every NoGame submission is this bad, but some do not fit the concept of Game-based organization and we should figure out something else to do with them, or leave them on NoGame.
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As someone working on this for the past few days, I guess can say what my approach has been regarding these (although not claiming it is the ideal approach everyone should take):
1. I have been adding the bootleg games to the GameGroups (Not that I came through many examples anyways). My logic was that someone is interested enough to click a game group will probably be interesting in every aspect of the series/franchise. And if not, then its still not doing any harm imho.
2. I have been adding a game entry to every submission without one especially provided it is an official licensed game. I added a couple of Homebrew games as well I think as there didn't seem to be any inherent problems about them. I have been leaving out submissions that have any of those nuances you mentioned above for now, and maintaining a list of them with reason why I did so. I am also leaving out ROM-Hacks because I assume the way they are dealt with will change as Playground is implemented.
Since the Wiki: Games page literally says "Game groups by franchise," I can kind of see fan games and pirates fitting that idea despite them not being "official" releases in the franchise. I don't think that I would put 8 Eyes with Castlevania, though, since they had separate development teams, publishers, and commercial releases.
Yes. For game resources too. We don't know what will be come acceptable in the future, and we want old info to be findable, so the best hub for it is game navigation pages.
Dacicus wrote:
I don't think that I would put 8 Eyes with Castlevania, though, since they had separate development teams, publishers, and commercial releases.
Looks like an edge case. I'd err on the side of showing more stuff, since more connections is better.
GMP wrote:
I am also leaving out ROM-Hacks because I assume the way they are dealt with will change as Playground is implemented.
Creating a page for every hack will be needed regardless.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
When it comes to the listing of games in our system, all games that start with the word "The" are currently placed in the "T" section of alphabetical lists. For example, in the NES tab of the Games page, there are currently 48 entries that start with the word "The." These are all in the "T" section.
I think we should we consider renaming these game entries by having "The" moved to the end of the game entry (i.e. changing The Goonies into Goonies, The) so that these games show up in the alphabetical list based on the first main word in the title instead of the word "The"? This is a standard way of alphabetizing titles in various other areas of life--one example being bibliographic notation.
Using The Goonies as an example, instead of being listed after The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, making this change would instead move it to being after Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode.
Here is an example of such alphabatizing using NES games from Wikipedia.
EDIT: If there's a way to have the games alphabatized the way I'm describing, but still displayed with "The" at the beginning of the name, that would also be fine. I just feel the alphabitizing needs to happen on the next word instead of "The."
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DrD2k9 wrote:
When it comes to the listing of games in our system, all games that start with the word "The" are currently placed in the "T" section of alphabetical lists. For example, in the NES tab of the Games page, there are currently 49 entries that start with the word "The." These are all in the "T" section.
I think we should we consider renaming these game entries by having "The" moved to the end of the game entry (i.e. changing The Goonies into Goonies, The) so that these games show up in the alphabetical list based on the first main word in the title instead of the word "The"? This is a standard way of alphabetizing titles in various other areas of life--one example being bibliographic notation.
Using The Goonies as an example, instead of being listed after The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, making this change would instead move it to being after Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode.
Here is an example of such alphabatizing using NES games from Wikipedia.
EDIT: If there's a way to have the games alphabatized the way I'm describing, but still displayed with "The" at the beginning of the name, that would also be fine. I just feel the alphabitizing needs to happen on the next word instead of "The."
I don't have a strong opinion, but I need to add that "author's" is usually moved to the end, like in "Aladdin, Disney's". I can see how both positions can be confusing from one or another POV.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
When it comes to the listing of games in our system, all games that start with the word "The" are currently placed in the "T" section of alphabetical lists. For example, in the NES tab of the Games page, there are currently 49 entries that start with the word "The." These are all in the "T" section.
I think we should we consider renaming these game entries by having "The" moved to the end of the game entry (i.e. changing The Goonies into Goonies, The) so that these games show up in the alphabetical list based on the first main word in the title instead of the word "The"? This is a standard way of alphabetizing titles in various other areas of life--one example being bibliographic notation.
Using The Goonies as an example, instead of being listed after The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, making this change would instead move it to being after Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode.
Here is an example of such alphabatizing using NES games from Wikipedia.
EDIT: If there's a way to have the games alphabatized the way I'm describing, but still displayed with "The" at the beginning of the name, that would also be fine. I just feel the alphabitizing needs to happen on the next word instead of "The."
Object this idea. It doesnt make navigation any easier. It rather makes the list messier. People are going to find it if they know the game name well. Also ctrl+f exists. The number of titles that has this issue shouldnt be the factor. "Super" also has 17 titles in the NES games tab. If we are making many exceptions, the list would be very messy.
I always dislike when lists do this.
It might sound reasonable and easy to get used to, but this more heavily impacts people who aren't too familiar with the English language.
Having to know exactly which words at the start of a game title to leave out when searching through the list is just troublesome or even annoying.
I'd ask to please just leave the title and sort position as is.
Warning: Might glitch to creditsI will finish this ACE soon as possible
(or will I?)
While it would still be my personal preference, if doing so would create a greater problem, then the alphabetizing doesn't need changed.
I only suggested it in the first place due to that method being the standardized way for alpabetizing titles in English (which, while others languages are present, is our site's primary language).
The exact order of the lists isn't critical either way; because, as was already mentioned, we also have search functions to find things.
Thanks for the insight, everyone.
A compromise for the name sorting situation could be sorting Games by their GoodTools Name, but continuing to show the Display Name in lists, as GT names already have ", The" at the end. However, changing the sort may still be difficult for ESL users as Masterjun described.
feos wrote:
Don't you think nonexistent and self-created games, at least, should be left out of our databases? The former is pointless to catalog as there's not even a ROM to play it back on, and the latter can be abused by indie devs submitting their own titles, with us promising that we'll "advertise" it for them alongside Cave Story and our other vetted (notable, popular, etc.) game choices.
Also, if (almost) all submissions have a Game, should Userfiles as well? Currently individual userfiles are hard to find once they drop off the Recent list, especially since many don't have a Game linked to them.
Considering that a massive amount of games are not even originally English why not also include the original name? A lot of games are difficult to find using the English alphabet anyway. There are multiple different transliterations systems for languages, and some titles are not correct, incomplete due to human error. Also, in some Japanese games in many cases transliteration must be an educated guess since there are no pronunciation guides when they are using kanji in non standard ways. Having the original name as an alternate name would bypass those issues completely.
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Is it ok to provide the links to IPS patch files in the description of game pages for ROMHacks? I think it will be convenient for people to find them without any legal hassle/surfing through a lot of internet to have to find them. No to mention they could be taken down at anytime. For some ROMHacks I could not find IPS patches at all, I could only find them as entire ROMs in piracy sites. So I could create the correct IPS for that and provide it. Currently I have them stored in an archive.org item with the .ips files and instructions for how to run each movie (emulator to be used, hashes of the original rom to be patched, etc.) in text files.
There are multiple different transliterations systems for languages, and some titles are not correct, incomplete due to human error.
Can you give an example, or as many examples as possible of incorrect titles? Or do you mean the English titles are correct, but we should include as many other translations in tags as we can?
CoolHandMike wrote:
Also, in some Japanese games in many cases transliteration must be an educated guess since there are no pronunciation guides when they are using kanji in non standard ways. Having the original name as an alternate name would bypass those issues completely.
That's a good point. I edited SNES DoReMi Fantasy's tags to add the kanji title and it saved successfully. This probably should be done for all Japanese games at the very least.
GMP wrote:
Is it ok to provide the links to IPS patch files in the description of game pages for ROMHacks?
I would say yes, as it helps ensure the input files and that game will continue to be playable, and is like how we link to homebrew ROMs on our current publications. IPS patches also don't contain any copyrighted data from the original ROM. However, if the hack adds graphics or music from other published works, it would be an issue if such a patch was stored on this site. So Archive.org seems a good place for preserving them.
Should we consider retooling the "YT Tags" field to be a more generic "Search terms" field? Like a lot of this I feel could be applied towards other sorts of searches, ie, the site itself. Not sure if it's being used in the site search atm.
EDIT: Also I am rewriting the game editor how to currently, I'll incorporate changes as they get made to the editor.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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CoolKirby wrote:
A compromise for the name sorting situation could be sorting Games by their GoodTools Name, but continuing to show the Display Name in lists, as GT names already have ", The" at the end. However, changing the sort may still be difficult for ESL users as Masterjun described.
Sounds confusing.
CoolKirby wrote:
Don't you think nonexistent and self-created games, at least, should be left out of our databases? The former is pointless to catalog as there's not even a ROM to play it back on, and the latter can be abused by indie devs submitting their own titles, with us promising that we'll "advertise" it for them alongside Cave Story and our other vetted (notable, popular, etc.) game choices.
For non-existent games there's nothing to catalog so yeah we can't do that. For low quality homebrews I don't see why it would become damaging.
CoolKirby wrote:
Also, if (almost) all submissions have a Game, should Userfiles as well?
Yes. And game resources too.
CoolHandMike wrote:
Considering that a massive amount of games are not even originally English why not also include the original name? A lot of games are difficult to find using the English alphabet anyway. There are multiple different transliterations systems for languages, and some titles are not correct, incomplete due to human error. Also, in some Japanese games in many cases transliteration must be an educated guess since there are no pronunciation guides when they are using kanji in non standard ways. Having the original name as an alternate name would bypass those issues completely.
Agreed. We should always have an ascii-only name cataloged for easier searching if the game was called non-ascii, and having the non-ascii name cataloged on top of that also makes sense for non-ascii searching, whoever can afford it.
GMP wrote:
Is it ok to provide the links to IPS patch files in the description of game pages for ROMHacks? I think it will be convenient for people to find them without any legal hassle/surfing through a lot of internet to have to find them. No to mention they could be taken down at anytime. For some ROMHacks I could not find IPS patches at all, I could only find them as entire ROMs in piracy sites. So I could create the correct IPS for that and provide it. Currently I have them stored in an archive.org item with the .ips files and instructions for how to run each movie (emulator to be used, hashes of the original rom to be patched, etc.) in text files.
Should we consider retooling the "YT Tags" field to be a more generic "Search terms" field? Like a lot of this I feel could be applied towards other sorts of searches, ie, the site itself. Not sure if it's being used in the site search atm.
Depends on how well those tags work on YT itself, and I don't know enough about it.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Also, if (almost) all submissions have a Game, should Userfiles as well?
Yes. And game resources too.
Is there a way to generate a list of Userfiles without an associated Game? I went back through my files in the last few days and made associations where possible, but some of them are general-purpose scripts.
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Dacicus wrote:
Is there a way to generate a list of Userfiles without an associated Game? I went back through my files in the last few days and made associations where possible, but some of them are general-purpose scripts.
Sounds like it's worth a feature request on github,
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Dacicus wrote:
feos wrote:
CoolKirby wrote:
Also, if (almost) all submissions have a Game, should Userfiles as well?
Yes. And game resources too.
Is there a way to generate a list of Userfiles without an associated Game? I went back through my files in the last few days and made associations where possible, but some of them are general-purpose scripts.
Yes, it is important to caveat this. All userfiles for a game, should have a game. General purpose scripts do not. The advantage is that if it has a game, it can be found from a game. The idea is to start with a game and then easily find all site content that pertains to it
So I created a wip games database guide.
I did intentionally not mention what to do with duplicate, troll, etc. entries. I want to move away from repurposing entries because frankly I find it obnoxious that it was asked of users. There is now a UI for deleting game entries that only appears if it has no publications, submissions, and userfiles linked to it, but currently it does not remove the entry from game groups and game genres automatically leaving you kinda screwed if you don't remove those beforehand. As such I can't exactly recommend doing that either.
In any case, I would like feedback.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Looks good so far. Should we have more guidance on what makes a good game description? Copying a movie description would be pointless as it would appear twice on a game page then, but maybe something more focused on the game's story or history, like for Arcade Donkey Kong? Also, we should add a note to include the Japanese alphabet title in tags for relevant games, like CoolHandMike mentioned (example here). Otherwise I only see minor edits to be made, like punctuation. I like your assurance that Search key will be removed (as it no longer determines the page URL and is just a hassle to fill in now) and that replacing the screenshot is okay in some cases.
Memory wrote:
I did intentionally not mention what to do with duplicate, troll, etc. entries.
For the record, I think the games database is clear of such entries now. Any discussion would be toward avoiding future problematic entries being created, or dealing with them if they are (like if Pokémon Gen 1 is reduced to one game with Blue/Red/etc as GameVersions, leaving duplicates behind). So far we've established that nonexistent games don't get an entry. Discussion can still be made on things like video player cartridges, controller test programs, and other such things. I'm for excluding both of those.
For now, how about if a game has no publications, submissions, or userfiles, it shouldn't have an entry? This seems simple and avoids encouraging editors to do unnecessary extra work, like adding consoles' entire libraries to the database. Also, some Wii and Linux games aren't TASable due to compatibility issues, so they couldn't have TAS work yet anyway.
Memory wrote:
I want to move away from repurposing entries because frankly I find it obnoxious that it was asked of users. There is now a UI for deleting game entries that only appears if it has no publications, submissions, and userfiles linked to it
It's nice to have a second option for removing bad entries, but wouldn't deleting them leave number gaps, like what happens when a submission is deleted by staff? This isn't the only submission that appears as a 404 page for me and most other users. Which makes me wonder why we don't assign new submissions in those empty slots. And for the games database, a complete, uninterrupted set, why 404-error its empty entries when you can repurpose them to point to games with actual TAS work done, in only a few clicks?
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CoolKirby wrote:
For now, how about if a game has no publications, submissions, or userfiles, it shouldn't have an entry? This seems simple and avoids encouraging editors to do unnecessary extra work, like adding consoles' entire libraries to the database. Also, some Wii and Linux games aren't TASable due to compatibility issues, so they couldn't have TAS work yet anyway.
I think being absent from our DB is a good way of saying "we don't have anything for this game". And it may be majority of existing games on some platform.
CoolKirby wrote:
It's nice to have a second option for removing bad entries, but wouldn't deleting them leave number gaps, like what happens when a submission is deleted by staff? This isn't the only submission that appears as a 404 page for me and most other users. Which makes me wonder why we don't assign new submissions in those empty slots. And for the games database, a complete, uninterrupted set, why 404-error its empty entries when you can repurpose them to point to games with actual TAS work done, in only a few clicks?
What's the benefit of having continuous IDs if ID by itself doesn't tell any info? It's just like a video URL on youtube to me.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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An abbreviation for the game name
limited to 8 characters
I think with how some games didn't have common abbreviations that can help searching, there are some arbitrary abbreviations that don't make sense, like humalad, bmbokupa, or tokgojts (try guessing which games they represent). You'd think the point of abbreviations might be simply shortening the game name by (semi-)arbitrarily dropping letters, but then how does one know how to search for it, and which letters to drop to get the desired result? If the search is done by only putting in the first letter of each word, then at least it's a predictable system. But then it could just be automated instead, no need for inventing things.
The only other DB where short name of a software was limited to 8 letters was MAME, and it was only limited because of 100 year old DOS limitations for filenames. Now that's where inventing the short name could be tricky, since it has to also remain unique. Some people may see value in us listing what MAME calls a given game, but their system is also weird, like they consider the European name the default and add extra identifiers to other versions, and sometimes those identifiers feel backwards. But I dunno what purpose having this info would have for us.
YouTube Tags: used for finding YouTube encodes of TASes for the game through Google and YouTube's search feature.
When editing, include keywords from the game name and popular abbreviations, broken up into one or two-word groups. This will make the game easier to find for people who only remember part of the name or only know a very different international title. Tags should be separated by commas, with no extra spaces in between.
Is 2 words a hard limit?
The old site kept lots of Relations info. Was it dropped upon migration or is it still kept hidden?
Otherwise the new page looks good.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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feos wrote:
The only other DB where short name of a software was limited to 8 letters was MAME, and it was only limited because of 100 year old DOS limitations for filenames. Now that's where inventing the short name could be tricky, since it has to also remain unique. Some people may see value in us listing what MAME calls a given game, but their system is also weird, like they consider the European name the default and add extra identifiers to other versions, and sometimes those identifiers feel backwards.
Don't forget that MAME's "shortnames" for some games are also changed whenever a new version is released. For example, the database of MAME Action Replay is peppered with game notes in the style of:
"Renamed from 'something' to 'something else' in MAME version 0.XYZ
So use shortname 'something' for versions before XYZ
And use shortname 'something else' for versions XYZ onward"
Trying to keep track of the shortname changes for a submission the same way the MAME team does just sounds like unnecessary extra work and headaches in my opinion...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
I'm not opposed to asking for the abbreviations field to be changed or removed if people don't see much value in it. I'm not sure if it's used in anything in the site code.
So there has been a major change to game entries where instead of having a system tied to the game entry, it is tied to an individual game version. Therefore game entries can have multiple systems listed and have proper cross-system obsoletion. There is also now an admin only operation to rewire existing game pages together.
In my opinion, it makes sense to have game entries shared whenever gameplay is extremely similar, and cross obsoletion can occur. Pokemon versions (Red/Green/Blue/Yellow for example) and various modern operating systems are cases of this. What is not a case is say a GameBoy Advance game and a GameCube game based on the same license with the same title. These are likely to be two completely different games.
My goal long-term is to have people navigate the site largely through game pages, so I'm itching to get started. But if there's any adjustments that make sense, post them.
EDIT: Another potential example would be Lion King SNES vs Genesis. While traditionally cross system obsoletion has not occurred for those games, I feel they are similar enough that people searching for the game are likely to want to see either if not both.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
