Unreleased Work Policy Feedback

What time was this re-creation first proposed?

Well, it happens mostly when I want to make a page for an Alternate Reality Game. Those have so many pieces, so many red herrings and cyphers and content often time-dependent and even then often granted to specific, high-profile players, that it's quite impossible to experience the game properly after the game was completed, which has been true for every ARG I've made a page for but Dad. However, I follow a YouTuber whose bread and butter is analyzing and explaining internet horror works, including ARGs, and does it in such a way that allows me to understand the beats well enough to make pages.

If I had to do a deep-dive into ARG lore every time I wanted to make a new page, that page would never come just because of how time consuming and complicated the process is- especially if you don't know where to start!

That seems like a slightly different situation; an ARG that is already over and done is never going to be more accessible than it is now, so there's no advantage in waiting the way there is for a work that doesn't have a worldwide release yet but will in a few weeks. I can see an argument for that.

Well, it's still an issue of getting information second-hand, and then troping it. If it's acceptable for long-finished or abandoned ARGs, there's no reason why it shouldn't be acceptable for things like movies or video games, no matter when the information is given. All that should matter is being objective and accurate to the source, even if you can only trope the bits-and-pieces you see in a Let's Play.

And see, this is what I'm talking about. This is the same pattern that's been playing out over and over.

Me: As a general principle, it's best if people experience a work for themselves before they trope it.

You: Okay, but what about this very specific and rare circumstance?

Me: Okay, I can see how there could be some justification for bending the general principle a little in that one very specific and rare circumstance.

You: Throw the general principle out the window, it's clearly invalid!

If your only access to the work is through "bits and pieces"— your words, not mine— then your objectivity and accuracy are by nature in question. That could be acceptable if there's some oversight from someone who has actually experienced the work, but in cases where there is no such oversight, where everyone involved is working off piecemeal information, and where that piecemeal information will be replaced by widespread availability of the entire work within a matter of weeks anyway, there is no reason not to just wait until the work is available to everyone.

Edited by HighCrate on Aug 5th 2019 at 12:02:50 PM

That's a misrepresentation. What I'm saying is while I personally use second-hand information for ARGs, which are different than normal works and thus harder to "experience", MY "general principle" is that all that matters is accuracy and objectivity.

If a person heard from their neighor's-uncle's-second-cousin's-friend that a work has someone Dying Alone and they add the trope (assuming they can whip up enough context in this theoretical scenario), then the trope shouldn't be rendered invalid because of where the information came from, but solely based on accuracy.

I guess the way I see it is, while it's always good to have experienced a work first-hand before adding any tropes to a page (or making the page in full), the contents of the work doesn't suddenly change if you're watching a YouTuber talk about it with clips or do a speedrun. Maybe you don't know the full work, but from the bits you've seen- bits you've "experienced" second-hand- you should be able to trope at least some of the work.

There's a fundamental difference between a work being unreleased with nobody having seen it, and work that has been released but that not everyone can experience personally. If there's a way of getting objective information about a work, why does it matter if that information came from watching the work itself, or a very detailed review/analysis, or a short clip on YouTube, or the pictures on the DVD cover?

If an example is accurate, it's accurate.

Edit: I guess I should make it clear, I'm not talking about Pokemon Masters specifically as I generally don't care if the page gets made or not. I'm just talking about the wider "principle" of "only people who've experienced the work personally should be writing tropes for it". Pokemon Masters is an odd case that doesn't have any bearing on my overall opinion of policy.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 5th 2019 at 3:08:02 PM

Anyway, I'll go quiet for a little bit to let others pitch in on the debate. Hate sandwich posting.

MY "general principle" is that all that matters is accuracy and objectivity.

First-hand experience is more likely to be accurate and complete than second-hand experience, therefore where first-hand experience is available (or likely to become available in the near future), it should be prioritized over second-hand experience.

It is not needed for being generally objective. It's more for subjectivity, really.

Some YMMV absolutely requires first-hand experience. Anything directly related to how you play the game, that is, the person who is playing it, should always be first-hand. You however don't need it for stuff like actual environmental settings. You don't need it whatsoever for cutscene/storyline stuff either in general.

It honestly hasn't been an actual issue to do get information second-hand. Reality is, not everybody can beat a game to experience a cutscene. Nor do they have the money to get all these games(and some would rather not emulate too). Watching a LP gives a ton of useful and accurate information. It's not rocket science to check the actual video and make sure it's not a hack/coded too. It's actually super easy to ask alone. Never mind the videos are generally labeled for people's conveniences. Stuff like The Scrappy will related to cutscenes-type stuff. Nobody needs to play the game to get that down. Scrappy Mechanic, on the other hand, does need first-hand experience since it's not just subjective, but it might not be as bad as the video lets on.

A lot of tropes are very easy to add as long as you do the research(and watching proper playthroughs count very much so as doing the research). Many gameplay-based where you'll need even more research or first-hand experience. For instance, you don't need to play the game to know how elemental weaknesses work in Pokemon. It's easy to find examples for that. Though I will see that character pages shouldn't rely on lore alone, as that tends to only give a "species" set of information instead of specific versions of the characters. But that's a small issue I have with stuff like the Digimon and Pokemon pages.

It hasn't been an issue, until it was an issue (people wanting to create a page when no one had first-hand experience of the work, and the second-hand accounts were vague and contradictory). So I argued that we wait, and we did, and as far as I can see it all worked out fine, and I'm honestly not sure what the problem is at this point.

Then we can look at each specific work and decide if waiting is needed or not.

First-hand experience isn't a necessity whatsoever.

It doesn't mean second-hand is always going to be usable.

Look at each one as it comes up.

Also, the issue with Pokemon Masters wasn't even whether a troper here had first-hand experience whatsoever. It was finding out what kind of release it was to make sure it was "officially released" or not so we can trope it properly. We had fully usable videos. We just had no actual confirmation on its release type to make sure it falls under the scope of the thread or not for a while. Most of the time was spent on a rules derail instead of actually checking how it was released. That's something that needs to be hard avoided. No more rules derails, please. Let's actually figure out the release type first and then go from there. That's all we need to do to figure out if it falls under the scope of the Unreleased Work Thread or not. The rest is having verifiable content(which I do agree pictures are not actually good enough, as those can be beta screenshots. Even with trustworthy sources like Serebii. It doesn't really tell us what kind of release it is either. It could be a frame-perfect shot). Videos on the other hand are significantly more useful and show literal gameplay. As well as cutscenes and story. They're vastly accurate in itself as a source. As long as we know the type of release, we can trope it under those specifics.

I have a bunch of thoughts to write down about the current policy later but I wanted to talk about two things.

Pokemon Masters: I don't understand why such a big deal was made about this. Precedent states that a work is free game once it's released, and it was released. It wasn't even a demo, just a semi-standard^note I say semi because the game didn't have all its features available timed regional release. It was even released in English (which is more than can be said about most foreign releases) and is accessible to anyone with a VPN.

I also think it's laughable that we should mandate personal work experience to trope something, if only because it's totally non-enforceable.

Edited by Karxrida on Aug 5th 2019 at 2:56:48 AM

Edit: I'm out. I maintain that given the scarcity and contradictory nature of the available information at the time, it was absolutely the right move to wait on creating the Pokemon Masters page. As far as I'm concerned the whole thing was resolved in a satisfactory manner and I see no point in continuing to belabor it.

Edited by HighCrate on Aug 5th 2019 at 3:12:39 AM

We're going in circles again...

Yeah. We've been talking more about HighCrate than we have about the policy. And the part of the policy that I do want to talk about concerns second-hand sources, which HighCrate is going to object to, which means we'll just be dragged into this again. It's frustrating.

Edited by DragonRanger on Aug 5th 2019 at 3:16:11 AM

HighCrate's interpretation of secondhand troping started this whole mess. So in a sense, it should be one of the first things we look into.

At the very least, having another concrete example to examine (if that's what this is) might break us out of this logjam.

It's important to look into the situation so we handle it better next time.

We didn't handle Pokemon Masters well. It became a derail on what rules existed, having multiple Mods having to come in to stop the derail. What we need to do instead is find out the kind of release it is and trope it based upon that next time.

Also, it's perfectly fine if you want to have first-hand experience to trope something High Crate. But expecting that of others isn't very fair either. That's the main issue. That said, it's still appreciated you gave your reasons why. That's part of why the thread exists. Different viewpoints are absolutely great. In the end, people more agree with the idea of second-hand sources being fair. Can we just agree to work together on this instead? Of course you don't need to use that kind of source(but others do, so let's not fret over that specifically). I however do think it's important we make sure the source itself is valid first before using it. That's absolutely important.

I mean, that's why I was asking "has anyone here actually played it?" Because when I Googled it, I got a lot of vague or contradictory information about where / whether / in what form it was actually out. Having somebody step forward to say, "Yes, I've played it, I can vouch for the fact that it's been released and whether it's a full release or just a demo or preview build" would have helped a lot.

Edited by HighCrate on Aug 5th 2019 at 4:30:53 AM

It's safe to say Google can only do so much.

It's better to ask the players, even if they're offsite. The only reason I asked if you could do so, High Crate, is you already searched offsite for information. This feels like a more feasible solution than waiting a long time for someone to say something. If somebody already asked offsite, they'd speak up anyway.

Not that we expect people to ask offsite either. But it is a useful tool we can use too. I've talked to Serebii before, for instance(via Smashboards, as he's a member of it). He was playing the game(albeit, his screenshots are not very useful anyway, but he's another person to ask).

My thought is this; look at who is willing to ask offsite via the tools they have in these situations. If nobody wants to, we should wait till someone else played it(of course, this is only for the purpose of determining what kind of release it is. This has nothing to do with using regular Let's Play videos as troping material. That's already a hard ruling that it's fine. I know it seems silly to re-clarify it, but it's probably best to say it anyway so I don't confuse anyone).

Moving on from Pokémon Masters...

My issue with the current policy's second-hand sources rule is that I cannot understand why some sources coming through official channels are considered valid (trailers and demos) and some aren't (press releases and websites). I get the distinction that the former have actual bits of the work in them, but I fail to see why that matters.

For some concrete examples:

• Kamen Rider Zero-One had a press conference with a trailer, and toku magazines have begun featuring the series in order to hype up its premiere. Yet under our policy, the trailer and only the trailer is valid.
• Characters.Pokemon Gym Leaders Galar was scrubbed of information from the Pokemon Sword and Shield website not too long ago. What I find a little hypocritical is that the page uses the official images of the characters, but tropes describing things that are directly in those images were still commented out.

Full disclosure: Zero-One also has a leaked toy catalog. I'm not defending that source, I'm just giving a heads-up that some of its information might seep into the officially-revealed stuff because a lot of the fandom doesn't make the distinction, and it's not always easy to keep track of what still isn't supposed to be public.

Images don't really tell us much of anything. Telling us someone exists doesn't give us anything to even trope about the character. We need actual details. It gives us enough maybe for a slight description of the page itself, and a neat list to keep in mind for later, like official names. But that's useful material... for later only.

Trailers however give us far more context. We see the actual action. We see how they respond to situations. We see the motions of an attack, and so on.

At least, that's how I understand the issue.

Edited by Irene on Aug 5th 2019 at 7:02:33 AM

The way I see it is, those things should be valid if we're going to call trailers valid. However, pictures alone aren't context; I can only assume the tropes added were appearance tropes, which makes it all the more likely they were ZCEs.

Another way to put it is: If the official work were released, would those examples be considered ZCEs? If so, they're also ZCEs during pre-release.

My understanding is slightly different: it's not that we are trusting trailers to show us more of what will happen in the final work. It's that we're treating trailers as tropable works in and of themselves, so the tropes that happen within them still happen even if the work the trailer is advertising changes or even gets canceled and never sees the light of day.

Edited by HighCrate on Aug 5th 2019 at 5:13:10 AM

That's pretty much what I mean by pictures, yeah~

Ah, fair point. I didn't think about it that way. Mind you, that's definitely what I mean by context, heh.