Troping Let's Plays

We have general rule against troping real people, and it was brought up in a recent TLP thread that there is a problem with troping Let's Plays, which often have very little divide between the content and the creator. As Fighteer said here, most let's plays and streams do not count as tropable works, which makes sense because they are just a person playing a video game, not a narrative. But why then do we have an entire namespace Let's Play? Do most of the works in it actually qualify as being in the supposed minority that "involve creativity"?

Edited by TheMountainKing on Apr 11th 2021 at 10:23:52 AM

Yeah, I've never understood this either. Even the let's players that do go beyond simple commentary and feature more narrative bits like sketches are still like 90% straight commentary. The same can be said for Video Review Shows.

Markiplier is the only one off the top of my head that has a significant amount of narrative works: Who Killed Markiplier?, A Heist with Markiplier, A Date With Markiplier, Unus Annus, and a ton of smaller scale sketches and appearances in other narrative works like Five Nights at Freddy's: The Musical. But those (mostly) have their own pages, so the Let's Play page is redundant (but it could be turned into a Creator page, I guess).

The Game Grumps have some narrative works, but nowhere near as much as Markiplier, and they're not even in the Let's Play namespace for some reason.

Edited by Primis on Apr 11th 2021 at 9:27:01 AM

i thought about this when i ran across the LetsPlay.Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 page, which, while much more narrative than most let's plays (and deliberately so, they staged it to have a "progression" and character arcs of sorts), still doesn't exactly have as much meat to its narrative as the page would imply. for general "creator-based" let's play pages, i would argue they aren't really worthwhile for troping since it gets dangerously close to troping real people and usually leads to shoehorns and stretches regardless.

there are some instances where i could argue for keeping a let's player's page on account of discussing tropes and having their own distinct running jokes and themes, like Retsupurae, but those would be exceptional cases. on a similar note, i'm wondering how much it'd be worth keeping Virtual YouTubers beyond "useful notes" on a similar principle, since they're just "Let's Players But They're Anime Girls You Can Buy Merchandise Of!"

Edited by NoUsername on Apr 11th 2021 at 10:58:25 AM

There's also a clause in Auto-Erotic Troping about this. Some Let's Players (Tobuscus comes to mind) get really into characters and craft a lot of original material, such as songs, but even so they should have more content than just LPs and/or reaction videos.

What I'd like to do is retire Let's Play as a namespace entirely and force any articles about those types of creators to go to the Web Video namespace and have some additional content.

This is not to say that an LP can't be recommended as a fan work, but that it cannot be troped as a creative work.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 11th 2021 at 11:03:17 AM

@Re: Game Grumps: I think what tends to elevate them beyond your bog-standard LP channel is that they not only have creative works (sketches, characters, animations, music, etc), but they're also a comedy channel. In fact, the comedy aspect is more prevalent than the LP aspect, considering they focus more on being funny than actually playing games well. Their comedy is tropeworthy in the same way any comedy is.

also why does the game grumps page phrase it like "Grump" and "Not So Grump" are "characters" that arin and danny play? is that just like, a joke, or...?

It's just describing their personalities in the context of the show. Arin is the "Grump" because he complains about the games. Danny is "Not So Grump" because he's a lot more positive. They're not characters per say, just descriptors.

Well, the point is that they qualify for a Web Video article, not just a Let's Play article due to having content beyond just LPs.

I would suggest that the player's experience of and commentary over the game are themselves the narrative: the story of that player's playthrough. And, since it's shared with others, the result becomes a sort of combination of stage-improv (without a stage) and documentary.

The result is likely somewhat anaemic compared to other media, but I think that there's narrative there that can potentially be troped.

Specifically, I would suggest that the let's player's actions and reactions be troped more or less as one would the subject of a documentary.

Documentaries are tropable since they can have a narrative and always have devices to push their message. Let’s plays, no.

I know. But no specific namespace.

Edited by Delibirda on Apr 12th 2021 at 6:53:32 PM

#3:

the problem with VTubers is that there's always some level of Kayfabe enforced with them, especially the bigger agencies where they probably contractually oblige you to give some level of lip service to your character and not leak your personal information. not that agencies have to remind them of that, the fans will very well do that for them by doing the digital equivalent of pelting you with rotten produce for even vagueposting about their real life identities. anything that sounds like the VTuber is talking about them personally can just be written off as part of their character and nobody would question it, as far as i've seen.

the way i see it, low effort let's plays that are literally just playing and reacting, sure. i'm on the fence for stuff like Vinesauce (which is what the original ATT thread was about), but clearly there's apparently enough "content" there that three fan games spawned from the fanbase solely based off of jokes that eventually got their own "lore", so to speak. so maybe they got something going in their favor.

As I noted, let's plays do have a narrative: the story of the player's experience with the game; how they react to it and how it reacts to them. (And occasionally how extraneous matters affect that experience.)

It's not a traditional narrative, and it's essentially an improv one, but it is a narrative, I argue.

Hmm. They don't deserve their own namespace at least.

That is not a scripted narrative, nor is it a fictional one. It is a real person doing real things. This is a crucial distinction. Booker DeWitt killing racists in the sky is a fictional narrative that someone sat down and wrote. Joe Twatface playing Bioshock Infinite is a real person and he is doing real things; there is no narrative because nobody is writing the story.

It's exactly the same as Sally Overreactor blogging about her daily life playing video games. It's a real person doing real things. There is no fictionalization, therefore no narrative, therefore no tropes. It's not even really a documentary, because that takes real events and places a narrative structure around them.

Now, there are some very rare LPs that are done in-character, with an adopted persona and an intentionally crafted meta-narrative. Those may be troped as such, but effort must be taken to draw the line between real and fictional people.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 13th 2021 at 12:32:02 PM

well, then the issue becomes whether or not Let's Players' reactions tread too close to "troping real people" territory. i can guarantee you people are more likely to bring that up the less substantial their content is (e.g. it's literally just the Let's Plays).

edit:

more edit:

considering how well the rules are enforced around here, i think people are smart enough to do that. at least, from my limited perspective, the Vinesauce page tends to stay away from real life matters (it certainly helps that the streamers do the same and usually keep private matters private, as they should)

Edited by Freecom on Apr 13th 2021 at 12:36:15 PM

Just to be clear, making improvised jokes and adopting funny accents is not enough to qualify as "in-character". I don't know squat about Vinesauce but I find it very dubious that they would rise above this bar.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 13th 2021 at 12:43:27 PM

I believe Team Four Star does in-character LPs as their Dragon Ball Z Abridged characters, but I've never watched them.

Excactly!

Edited by Delibirda on Apr 13th 2021 at 8:02:10 PM

so basically the cutline for troping them is someone's gotta have written a skit or playing up a character at least

Making improvised jokes or "funny accents" may not qualify as in-character, but surely it qualifies as tropable?

Not really. I could get you on a Zoom call and use a funny accent. We don't write up a trope article for that.

Also, I technically just made a joke. That's two of the minimum three. Next, I will be sarcastic.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 13th 2021 at 5:10:26 AM

Yeah, there's a difference between cracking jokes while playing games, and having actual creative content. Again, I think Game Grumps is a good example of a channel that has enough creative content to it to be more than just an LP. Arin and Danny invent characters and mini stories involving them, or they create distinct personalities for the characters in the games they play beyond the canon personalities (Their DDLC playthrough for example makes Monica a robot and Yuri an obsessive fan of Clifford the Big Red Dog).

There's a difference between them and, say, LaurenZSide, who might have some more creative content but doesn't transform the medium in most cases; she'll crack jokes while playing games but she's still just playing games and joking around, not actually creating a narrative.

I am not so sure about the namespace, would the proper place for the page on that be WebOriginal.Discussion Equals 16181940280 A 68595100 Page Equals 1 Comment Dash 21 (with an appropriate custom title to fix the punctuation of course)?

In my opinion, people on this site have historically been extremely willing to interpret anything but the most straight-laced factual presentation as an "online persona". That's always felt pretty sketchy to me.

By which logic, an unscripted documentary covering human beings should also be non-tropable, as it also deals with real people doing real things without a script to direct them.

I disagree that an unscripted narrative is non-tropable. I really don't see why it should be: tropes often describe behaviours found in works, and the origin of those behaviours—whether written by an author or ad-libbed in the moment—doesn't seem important to me.

That is a problem, but I'm inclined to say that a case in which a real person's actions are encapsulated into a work by that person might be worth considering for an exception to the rule.

[edit] But see my last two paragraphs (in the second set of "edit tags"), below. [/edit]

From my perspective, that's not where the main of the narrative is in such cases. Rather, it's in their interactions with and reactions to the game: do they throw themselves into the fray or hold back? Are they taken in by the mole, or suspect them from the outset? Do they claw their way through the final boss, only barely grabbing victory at last, or do they breeze through it?

Some of this might manifest through quipping—or those moments when the quips fall away—but it's not the be-all and end-all.

[edit] Thinking about it a little more, perhaps the risk of allowing any troping of real people is too high.

I think that it's a loss, as I stand by my assertion that there's a real narrative in a let's play that can very much be troped. However, there are solid reasons to avoid troping real people, and they're perhaps too significant to warrant an exception. [/edit]

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 14th 2021 at 5:30:16 PM