Troping Let's Plays

We're actually in agreement then!

I think this gets into the larger debate of what counts as creative content.

Very much so, although let's be careful not to get things confused. Just because something is creative doesn't mean it's tropable, and not being tropable doesn't mean it's not creative.

In elementary school I used to draw little comic strips of airplanes dogfighting. That was creative, and it even had a little narrative structure, but I wouldn't try to make a TV Tropes article for it. I have at least that much self-respect.

But There Is No Such Thing as Notability.

Edited by Albert3105 on May 7th 2021 at 10:02:36 AM

Generally speaking any streamer or podcaster could be comparable to a news/sports anchor, talk show host or similar media personalities, but the problem is that the barrier to entry for online content is so low in this age that we need a lot more than a name with a placeholder page so we can avoid lowering the bar to making pages for your best friend. You can make a similar argument against fanfiction, but at least that is tangible content with a clear narrative purpose.

As said, stronger arguments for making pages for Let's Play content is how much energy and effort is put into the "physical" records of their sessions, the interaction with the fans and the variety of material produced. I've seen some make music videos out of their gameplay as they explore dungeons, while others are functionally unedited clips of the most interesting 30 minutes. If they can be considered a genuine online personality with intermingled accounts with Twitch, Youtube, Instagram, etc that helps.

I just did a cleanup of Gatorbox, and though it's not in the LP namespace, it has a lot of similar issues especially since Draco plays games. Specifically, it has a lot of tropes that just tropes Draco's opinions directly, and had a lot of other tropes that were about the levels he played (though all of those I've already cut, check the history if you're curious).

That's definitely a recurring issue. In lieu of any actual content, tropers will resort to just troping the games these people play.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 16th 2021 at 11:42:28 AM

Sorry for the late bump, but I realized another issue with this namespace: not everybody who starts as a Let's Player is just a Let's Player, even if they remain an online channel.

For example, Critikal is still in LetsPlay/ despite having shifted away from Let's Plays towards general commentary in recent years.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 18th 2021 at 2:14:27 PM

Creators who have substantial content besides let's plays should be in the WebVideo/ namespace.

Edited by rjd1922 on Jun 18th 2021 at 1:50:28 PM

I was reading through this thread and I saw a post I wanted to respond to.

This post made me think of another series that I am unsure of the tropability of: Meme House. A Twitch stream of a heavily modded The Sims 4 done by Joel of Vinesauce, the videos have what is I guess an attempted narrative made up on the fly of the characters in the streams, but is otherwise a normal Twitch stream of the game. How tropable is it?

Joel at least attempts to create a narrative.

It's total insanity, but it's tropable. There's a (completely nonsensical) attempt at a plotline. It's fun.

I was actually having similar thoughts about potentially splitting some longer Game Grumps series into Recap pages. For example, their Trauma Center playthrough spends enough time making up stories and jokes about the characters to make it into its own story. Though it might overlap significantly with the character page so I'm unsure if it's necessary.

I've read some talk about cutting the Vinesauce pages earlier in the thread. I think they can easily stay. In fact, they're an example of the kind of LP that should probably stay. They craft silly plotlines with their LPs and generally have fun. Apart from the Meme House mentioned above, they've also made similar LPs of Tomodachi Life, Miitopia, and Animal Crossing. And probably others.

I think critics or reviewers can stay, too. They don't depict many tropes, but they discuss a lot of trope.

The issue here is that we should keep the troping strictly to their video content, and not the people themselves, which is a bit trickier to do with such Internet celebrities. But it can be done.

Edited by WackyPancake on Jun 18th 2021 at 9:59:14 PM

Regardless, we should deprecate Let's Play as a namespace and move all those articles to Web Video or Web Animation, as appropriate.

I still disagree, unless we decide to delete a significant number of LPs; LetsPlay/, talking over gameplay footage, is at least as worthy of a namespace as, VisualNovel/, LightNovel/ or Manga/. If people want to merge those namespaces with broader ones, that would require a separate project thread.

Edited by rjd1922 on Jun 18th 2021 at 12:59:47 PM

I think one issue that makes LetsPlay/ different is not every LP is in the same medium anyway. Some are web videos, and some (like the older Something Awful ones) are text.

I was arguing to split it.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 19th 2021 at 4:44:08 AM

That sounds like a reason to split the namespace up, not for keeping it.

So what namespace would text-based LPs go under? WebOriginal/? I thought we were phasing that namespace out.

I'm opposed to the split, but I'm interested in hearing the proposal on where text LPs would go.

Presumably Literature or Blog?

Why wouldn't it belong to Literature/? That's the medium the story is being told in. The only other reasonable option I see is Fanfic/, but that's more due to the "derivative based on copyrighted content" separation that we enforce.

Let's Plays don't inherently have stories. Some do- like how some blogs do- but a lot of them are just someone playing the game. In this case, the story is the story of the game itself.

Hence, troping that let's player is redundant.

Right, my statement was premised on the assumption that the work had unique tropes separate from the original game.

I don't think we should have text LPs in Literature/. Does that mean it would go in the Literature folder on trope pages? That could be confusing. Do we even have any pages on text/screenshot-based LPs?

I still say moving all pages in the LetsPlay/ namespace is a massive waste of time and would only serve to make it less clear what pages are about. Sure, people reading the pages can probably tell if they're reading about a Let's Play, but the advantage of the LetsPlay/ namespace is that you can tell what it is on trope and related pages.

Edited by rjd1922 on Jun 19th 2021 at 5:01:26 AM