Troping Let's Plays

Agreed.

I agree that Let's Plays are a genre within Web Videos (and 100% Completion Walkthroughs without Audio Commentary are a subgenre of Let's Plays).

However, on this topic, why do we separate Anime & Manga from Asian Animation, Eastern Animation, and Western Animation?

Yet, we don't split Video Games into Japanese Video Games, Asian Video Games, and Western Video Games.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 18th 2021 at 9:50:03 AM

Arguing that point is a separate thread, but can be answered by the Media Categories FAQ.

Made a new page about splitting Video Games into Eastern and Western Video Games:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16187982910A85474200&page=1#1

Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 18th 2021 at 10:14:25 AM

Late to the discussion, but I agree the Let's Play namespace is pretty pointless. However, I do think that certain LP that include in-universe Audience Reactions could be recorded, as well as those that craft an actual story around the game. I just don't see why that's worth a namespace when Video Review Show doesn't get its own namespace. What makes video games more special here? It's just another web genre.

I don't watch any LP-ers besides Game Grumps and we've already discussed them as an exception so it's hard to determine, but I do wonder how tropable their personas are, as they do joke about themselves in a way distinct from their professional persona (i.e. Arin's constant jokes about having sex with dudes despite his real life assertions that he's not actually attracted to men in real life).

Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 23rd 2021 at 2:23:57 PM

I don't think Let's Play is inherently a genre of Web Video. Forum-based screenshot LPs on sites like Something Awful are a thing, and people have recorded themselves playing games on VHS. Gameplay footage with commentary is at least as worthy of a separate namespace as Web Animation. The only way I'd support getting rid of the LetsPlay/ namespace is if we get rid of LPs that lack a narrative; otherwise it's a lot of work for nothing.

Well said. IMO, given that we do trope other non-narrative works (e.g. documentaries) it makes sense to keep LPs.

Documentaries still have editing though and are presented to suit a specific narrative, even if that narrative is just the history of speedrunning an old NES game. The presentation and editing fictionalizes the content to a certain degree, or at least presents it in a way that's more of a dramatic retelling of reality rather than literal, objective reality. We can trope it because the whole presentation of the documentary adds a narrative and some creative intent.

Let's Plays don't have that, at least not for the most part. Again, some Let's Players will add narrative and edit things to present a specific, unique story of their own design. But most just play the game, and that adds no actual narrative or creativity.

A work needs narrative content in order to qualify for an article. A picture of the sunset might be a great work of art, but it needs to use tropes before we can allow a page for the image. Regardless of what happens to the namespace, articles that don't contain examples of narrative content are supposed to be cleaned up/removed.

Most let's play pages have enough tropes. The issue is whether they're troping the LPers rather than a narrative work.

A minor point here, but I would argue that while let's plays are indeed not a genre within web video specifically, they are still a genre: just as, say, documentaries can be any of written, video, and so on, so too a let's play can be any of screenshot, video, and so on.

I'm inclined to suspect that this reflects more a gap in our trope-catalogue than a general untropability of such visual works.

That said, based on previous posts in this thread, there is a line that TV Tropes has in place regarding what sorts of work are considered to be eligible for troping, and let's plays (and some documentary works) fall outside of it.

Let's Play is literally web video. It's video, and it's on the web (well, the Internet, but "web" is kind of a stuck term). It's not animation. Sometimes it has a live image of the LP'er, sometimes not, but that distinction is superfluous. It is a genre of entertainment.

Frankly, just writing that paragraph makes me realize how arbitrary our media namespaces are, but that's water under the bridge.

By removing the namespace, we want to stop people thinking that LPs are tropable as discrete works. It's really that simple.

The line between LPs and Web Video has blurred in the last decade, and the traditional video LP often feels like a dead genre because everyone's moved on to Twitch.

An LP that is in text form would just go under Web Original. We put superhero movies under Film and superhero comics under Comic Book, because we categorize by medium, not genre.

I believe we've depreciated the Web Original namespace unless there's nowhere else to put a work.

Text based web content goes into Literature/, not WebOriginal/.

Regarding tropability, is something like the Hermitcraft Server not really that tropable, given that the most "tropable" things are basically cross-actor interactions and collaborative events?

I agree. That's troping the players more than the game.

I disagree with the notion that Let's Plays are not inherently tropeable, especially commentaries. By the same logic, stand up comedians and wrestlers are also not tropeable except...they are.

What you're adding tropes to is not the person behind the videos, it's the content that they put out.

Comedians I get, but wrestlers? What? Don't they have entire narratives and personas written around them? That's the definition of tropeable.

As for comedians being tropeable, most stand-up routines are more structured than making random funny voices on the fly and laughing at their own jokes like most Game Grumps episodes are.

I'm not sure how comedy could ever not be considered creative media. Obviously we still have to be careful not to apply tropes to comedians as real people.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 24th 2021 at 12:10:27 PM

Bump

I wanna know about the tropability of the Dream SMP. Some of it's most troped "storylines" are scripted, but does it make it tropable in this case?

"Scripted" generally means it has a plot of some kind and it isn't just real people doing random things, so yes, it's tropable.

It seems like most people agree that at the very least Let's Play shouldn't be its own namespace. How would we get this change made?