Esports Competitive Play Examples Location

Brought over from this ATT discussion.

Awesome/LeagueOfLegends and Funny/LeagueOfLegends both have folders dedicated to things that happened in competitive play. General consensus in Ask the Tropers was that the pages for the game should only have examples from the game, not from competitive play. However, that raises the question of where they should go (or if they should even be on the site at all). Personally, I think that they're glorified troper tales and shouldn't be on the site, but I can see the other side of the argument, as we do already have Awesome/ProGaming and Awesome/Sports.

Edited by Afterword on Aug 31st 2020 at 11:30:39 AM

To clarify my official position, competitive play is not exactly equivalent to Troper Tales because it is verifiable. There are livestreams and broadcasts and plenty of evidence someone could go through to find the examples in question.

It is still not applicable to troping a work, though. We maintain the position that all examples for a work must pertain to content in the work, not content created by fans, and that includes meta content like streaming, competitions, and the like.

• Awesome.Doom2016: That time on stream that xxFragMaster69420xx killed five players with one Gauss blast.

No, just no. To the bin with ye!

That said, this content is not untropable, period. For example, if a Let's Play has applicable audience reactions, those would be listed in the article for that Let's Player, assuming that it meets our standards for a wiki article. If a fanfic has (or expresses) audience reactions, those would be listed in the article for the fic, and so on. Thus, pro gaming audience reactions would go on the article for the pro gaming circuit or whatever, if we have such an article.

Now, this leads to another question... should we have articles for pro gaming? Pro gaming should be held to the same standards as professional sports as regards tropability. We don't list out seasons of the NFL as if they were work articles; we consider these to be Useful Notes. By policy, Useful Notes articles may not list trope examples, including Moments. Thus, pro gaming should not have Moments.

Of course, we aren't actually enforcing this policy in all cases. So the question is not, "what is the policy", but "do we enforce the policy?" and correspondingly, "Is it worth enforcing the policy if it makes a lot of people upset?"

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 31st 2020 at 11:49:14 AM

Sometimes I wonder if this sort of stuff would fit into a Player Tales kind of page, sort of Troper Tales but limited to player actions in games. On the one hand this limitation would likely prevent many of the problems that got Troper Tales cut as it's unlikely it will get into boring Real Life digressions or creepy stuff. On the other hand, some of the issues that got Troper Tales cut might still persist, such as bloviating and self-aggrandizement.

Regarding pro gaming ... how do we separate games from sports for the purpose of categorization? My sense is that games are usually much more constrained by their rules and settings than sports, but it's a continuum not discrete categories.

I see no reason to treat professional gaming and professional sports separately.

Saying sports examples aren't allowed because that sport or competition has a Useful Notes page is equivalent to saying that examples about e.g. World War I aren't allowed because of its page. (Or examples for every work created during The Golden Age of Animation being banned because that page exists, etc.)

This wiki has had sports examples for 15 years without issue. That ship has sailed.

And yet we don't allow examples for Useful Notes.

If "that ship has sailed", then by all means we should allow examples for pro gaming, but put them in their own articles.

So, would putting competitive esports tropes/moments separate from the articles for the games in question mean making new articles for various esports or (as it seems to be now) lumping it all under one esports article?

Edited by Afterword on Sep 5th 2020 at 1:37:35 PM

I kind of like Septimus's idea of a Player Tales namespace. I think the way to make it work is have a restriction that the player can't be the troper who added the example.

No, not Player Tales. Please no.

You could have subpages of Pro Gaming dedicated to each particular sport/game.

That's a better idea.

Yeah, in the event a split is required, we'd have Awesome.Pro Gaming Fighting Games, Awesome.Pro Gaming MOBA, and so on.