Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein


 * Please advise, much of this is going to be rewritten before the post ever goes live.


 * Potential title for forum post: "Revisiting branching fiction"

Introduction

 * "Here we are again, engaged in the Founding Conflict."

And I think this is why this topic remains one of the most contentious on the website, because at the end of the day we can't REALLY say that these stories fail any of our our four little rules. Are they fiction? Yes. Are they commercially licensed? Yes. Have they been officially released? Yes. Were they intended to be set in the Doctor Who Universe? Yes.

There have been many reasons given over the years as per why we don't cover multipath story structures. Some say they don't pass Rule 1, others say they fail Rule 4. But from my experience of talking to site admins over the years, there real reason is often unspoken because it sounds too silly to write down on paper. That being... That many years ago, we decided as a website that multi-path stories are fundamentally annoying to wiki-fy, and thus we should disclude them with prejudice.

This was especially true for the most complex examples. So it was decided to group all of these together in one category, and invalidate every single one to save us the trouble.

So I think that properly evaluating this topic has been widely earned as of today.

Today, we're going to have a few goals. First, I'll try to discuss the history of validation and multi-path stories. Then, I'd like to present and analyze a few examples of this "genre" -- listed from least complex to most complex. And the our goal today is to answer two questions. 1) Where is the line? When, during this list, does covering these stories become functionally impossible for the website; and 2) depending on where that line lies, is keeping all of these stories invalid justified?

If you're sitting comfortably, we'll begin.

Addressing history and precedent
If you want to understand why multipath stories are invalid, it should be known that the topic dates back to three primary topics: Attack of the Graske, the Find Your Fate novels, and the FASA Doctor Who Role Playing Game.

On the 30th of August, 2005, the TARDIS Canon Policy originally launched, written by User:Freethinker1of1. This page sought to imitate Memory Alpha's canon policy, and mostly sorted potential "sources" into if TARDIS Wiki would consider them canon. Things were very much in flux at this time, for instance the Peter Cushing Dalek films are listed as valid sources, while the novelisations are not. However, something that was set in stone from day one was that the FASA Roleplaying books were not considered valid.

The original intention of this "canon policy" was that further debates could be had to change the rules if the users deemed fit. For instance, in 2008, the Cushing films were changed from "Canon" to "Non-Canon." However, the FASA Roleplaying games being invalid was not challenged at the time. An extremely important note is that the rationale given was that the roleplaying games should be non-canon because they contradict the TV show and various books. The nature of the books had absolutely nothing to do with them being non-canon.

In March 2008, a forum user at Forum:Need more info on Omega asks about the Search for the Doctor novel featuring Omega, and User:Tangerineduel questions if the novel should be canon according to policy. He argues that as it's not quite a roleplaying book, but also not fully a novel. But most importantly, he argues that covering the book is controversial because there's more than one path, with no clarity on which path "counts" as happening in-universe.

In June 2010, User:CzechOut starts the post Forum:We need a policy on videogames, in anticipation of The Adventure Games. Here, Czech directly states his intention that as the wiki has precedent against the FASA roleplaying books, all games and video games should be considered non-canon.

"Per our canon policy, FASA roleplaying games are flatly disallowed, and I do think there are many problems with using videogames as valid resouces. Frankly, Attack of the Graske is tricky enough, and, to my mind, only exists as canon inasmuch as it gives the tiniest sliver of information about the Graske. But I do not believe the events and storyline described in that game actually exist in the DWU. The Doctor did not stop by your house one day and invite you on a test to see whether you could be a companion. Players of these games — that is to say we — are quite clearly not a part of the DWU.

The other problem with videogames is that, depending on how they're constructed, multiple outcomes can be possible. Thus comes the ugly and thorny issue of which outcome is canonical. Going back to Graske, we can't say whether the outcome where you lose and "don't have what it takes to be a companion" is the one we should adopt as "canon", or whether it's the "happier" ending.

If you'll note at the canon policy page, the policy on games is still said to be "in flux". We need to really hammer that out before we start incorporating material from videogames into articles. My recommendation would be to hold off citing from these things until we have a clearer notion. What would be a nightmare, I think, is if people started playing these new adventure games, while furiously jotting down notes and filling up the articles on Amy Pond, the Daleks, and the Eleventh Doctor — only to find out months from now that in fact the game had a branching architecture and it didn't actually include the same information every time it was played."

- User:CzechOut, Forum:We need a policy on videogames

However, Czech faced minor pushback from users due to the BBC having made a statement saying The Adventure Games were canon. The game Dalek Attack is also debated, as Czech believes it to be a multi-path game while others point to the novel Head Games referencing the events of the game.

The forum goes off topic from there, with Czech making a bulleted list of reasons why City of the Daleks apparently lacks internal consistency with a post-Time War Doctor Who universe, and thus he disagrees with the BBC calling it canon.

Several months later, User:Tangerineduel makes a closing post of sorts, stating:

"The video games (old and new) conventionally have a single ending and have key moments of story throughout them. It is the story/plot that we use as our source rather than the individual character/player actions. In the canon policy and on the GAME page this would be noted."

- User:Tangerineduel, Forum:We need a policy on videogames

So precedent was set. Video games would not all be invalid by default, but any game with even the most slightly-branching details would be far more likely to be called non-canon.

Now, an interesting note is that Attack of the Graske wasn't actually marked at invalid until December 2012. This was a result of Thread:117868, wherein User:MystExplorer asked why this game wasn't marked at NON-DWU, at which point Czech indicated it must have been added and then removed. However, according to what I can tell, it's actually a situation where no one ever added the invalid template, and the admins just presumed it was already there.

In 2012, Forum:Doctor Who: Worlds in Time brings the topic of video games back into the forefront. This is one of the first debates I took part in on the website, and as I'll discuss later I think the wrong judgement was made with this one. It's during this forum that Czech presented User:CzechOut/Video game policy, his pitch for how the wiki should go-about covering games.

Czech' biggest issues at this point remains the concept of "you" being the main character, and he feels strongly against the concept. Two specific examples here would be Human (Attack of the Graske) and Companion (Worlds in Time), which he specifically rails against in the debate. In his pitched policy, only games with characters "created and named by the game developer" should count as canon. In the debate, Czech hammers home that "Any game which centrally has a character you created and uses items you created is fanfic."

He also states that in a situation where a game has a good ending and a bad ending, "the outcome which is considered canonical by this wiki is the one in which the player succeeds."

Towards the end of this debate, it is pointed out by User:Tybort that the Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate novels have never been selected out as canon or non-canon. The topic is also connected directly back to the FASA games, and how T:CANON still stated in 2012 that they were non-canon for contradicting "primary sources." Czech states:

"Clearly, the current wording at T:CAN is not the real reason the FASA thing is banned. Narrative contradiction is the rule of the DWU, not the exception, so you can't throw something out just because it doesn't jive with another story. The real reason for the ban must surely be that RPGs are internally unstable narratives. They don't come out the same each time you play them. So anything which happens differently each time you play it shouldn't be considered a part of our tardis.wikia.com canon, because we don't know which outcome to go with. This would mean things like the DYD and FYF books would also be slapped with a warning. I don't see anything wrong with saying: Only those narratives with a consistent narrative, experienced in the same way for all those that consume that narrative, may be considered a valid source for the writing of articles. [emphasis his, not mine]"

- Czech, Forum:Doctor Who: Worlds in Time

In the forum, I strongly disagreed with this suggestion, as I felt it was a little bit much. But in the end, the rule was implemented, and from that point forwards, all branching stories were considered automatically invalid on the website. Forum:Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate are NOTDWU from here on out clarified that Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate were impacted by this. Czech includes an admin chat with User:Tangerineduel where the two decide to invalidate the books for being too complex.

"yeah, i think this is one case where if people complain, tough it's too much work"

- Czech, on why Find Your Fate and Decide Your Destiny were invalidated

Now, the most recent update on this front was that in December 2020, it was apparently noted that AUDIO: Flip-Flop technically is a "branching story". Thus, based on Czech's definition from 2012, it shouldn't be something we cover.

On this wiki, calling a story in the Big Finish Main Range "invalid" would be paramount to blasphemy, so an alteration was hastily added (to my understanding, without discussion, since we didn't have a place to discuss it even) to T:VS. This alteration clarified that when a story depicts the branching nature of its story as "timey-wimey-ness", then it should be valid. This is a very broad change to the rules, the ramifications of which has never been discussed.

Now before we go any further, I think we have to address the elephant in the room: the dated nature of these older debates, mostly due to the constant references to the TARDIS Canon Policy.

In mid-2012, while these changes were still going on, T:CANON was changed drastically. It moved from being the main space where the website clarified what was and wasn't canon, to a page all about the concept of canon not existing for Doctor Who. This is, in a basic sense, the same version of T:CANON that we have today. After this, Tardis:Valid sources was created, becoming the new home to dictating what topics we do and do not cover.

For a time, the "Non-Canon" category was replaced with "Non-DWU." But this changed in November 2015 with Thread:180396. Here, it was agreed upon by most users that Non-DWU was not a satisfactory term for invalid content. Not only did it imply that all non-valid stories fail Rule 4 and Rule 4 alone, at the end of the day the term was not fundamentally different from "non-canon."

And so, as Czech put it, “Consensus to change was (lukewarmly) established.”

Now, the reason I bring this up is that I think since 2015, and especially since the REAL early days of 2005-2008, the site has changed. Not only in priorities, but in our ideology.

This wiki used to cover Ten Doctors. That was it. And we used to have very strict guidelines about what did and didn’t fit, because we were trying to figure out what was canon to the Doctor Who franchise. Is Unbound canon? No. Is Scream of the Shalka canon? No. Is Dimensions in Time canon? No.

But now, consider the following. The Timeless Child arc has introduced the idea that there are potentially hundreds of rogue, uncatalogued incarnations of the Doctor. Big Finish has began releasing audio stories using alternate scripts from early Fourth Doctor stories, which we have covered without even needing a debate. Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have released contradictory stories depicted the regeneration of the Eighth Doctor, both covered with equal footing. And we do not debate the canonicity of these sources, because we instead are bound to a set of internal rules which we view as entirely removed from the concept of canon.

And I believe that when we go about these debates, we truly have such a different perspective about these things that it does bring merit to revisiting this topic. I think, for instance, that covering self-insert characters is a lot less controversial for those reading this post today than it was to the editors of 2012. And a video game contradicting some element of the TV series is a lot less likely to be brought up as proof of why it shouldn't "count" on the website.

Are branching narratives non-canonical? Perhaps. Maybe Czech was right on that front. However, I don't think this should effect if they are considered valid on Tardis Wiki. Thus, I think it's entirely fair for us to re-evaluate the stories that these few forums so swiftly discarded.

Why are branching stories invalid... right now?
One of the things you'll find on this wiki is that topics like this have a long history, where the reasoning given when precedent was first set is not exactly the reason given now. More recent debates, from my memory, have preferred to contextualize invalidating branching stories through some reading of our "four little rules," rather than the concept of canon and continuity.

So based on what I have read, these are the primary reasons that an admin today would say branching stories are invalid:


 * 1) Because these stories depict a non-consistent series of events, we can not say which version certainly took place within the Doctor Who Universe.
 * 2) Diverging narrative stories are often not even real narratives, thus they fail (the old) Rule 1, Only stories count. Not only were branching narratives considered to fail the old Rule 1, some would argue Rule 1 was partially created because of the forums cited above.
 * 3) Covering these stories is not only against Rules 1 and 4, but is technically impossible. We could not cover these stories if we wanted to. Covering multipath stories on a wiki is ugly, difficult, headache inducing, and should never be attempted.

Personally, I don't think the first one stands up ten years later. If you actually read through Rule 4, there is no language in the text about a concrete version of a source needing to be the definitive version that is "set in the Doctor's universe." It merely states that the intent needs to have been that the story was set in the Doctor Who Universe at the time of publication. Indeed, we cover several non-GAME stories which have more than one "version" which is known to exist.

As for argument 2, it's obvious that this deserves re-evaluation now that Rule 1 has fundamentally regenerated, now being Only works of fiction count. However, even if Rule 1 was still Only stories count, I think branching narratives are still narratives.

At the end of the day, in spite of what some people will tell you, reason #3 has always secretly been the primary reason that these sources were made not-valid. If you take the time to go and read through these old forums you'll see this brought up often. Not only were the "four little rules" not considered when this choice was made, this decision predates the four little rules.

In the past decade, whenever I have approached revisiting this, the overwhelming feeling has been that there is some hesitation to allowing any branching storylines, because some of the more complicated ones would be truly, truly difficult to cover. And so, to make things easier, we cover nothing and call it a day. And it's always been about that much more than it's ever been about T:VS.

So that is the primary inspiration for this post. I basically wanted to figure out... Where is the line? If we really think some branching narratives are impossible to cover on a technical level... Then is it really justified that all branching narratives should be not-valid?

Furthermore, my mission statement today is also to construct a theory of coverage. To kind of establish the basic theory of how wiki-fying branching narratives would function.

Precedent in Valid stories
Before we discuss the theory of coverage, we should first talk about the history and precedent that valid sources can deliver to us.

As we've established, in 2010 the release of The Adventure Games created a sort-of War on Video Games, where the games were so controversial with some on the website that an attempt was made to invalidate them.

So what was really the issue? Well, in the games, you can lose. You can actually die, or worse, cease to exist. The feeling among some was that this meant that these games had multiple endings, and thus no one narrative... Or at the very least, no such thing as a unified gaming experience. If Amy and the Doctor could die, in game, how was this set inside the Doctor Who universe?

This topic had to be dropped when the BBC ultimately put out a statement saying that games were, in fact, set inside the Doctor Who universe.

Since then, the Adventure Games have been covered as valid stories with little controversy. So how do we reconcile a story that has, as it's been said, multiple endings?

Well, there's a general acceptance that sometimes in video games, there are features which are part of the gameplay that don't necessarily contribute to the story itself. Death cutscenes are a feature of most video games, and yet there are still many sites dedicated to covering the story of video games.

Another example of this can be found in the infamous GAME: The Mazes of Time. In this title, if the Doctor is killed he regenerates and then the game resets. However, when you’re playing as Amy Pond, this same thing happens.

Despite this, we don’t typically say “Amy had the power to regenerate (GAME: The Maze of Time)” nor do we treat The Adventure Games or The Mazes of Time as branching storylines. If it doesn’t happen to Amy, it doesn’t happen to the Doctor either, it’s just a feature of the game.

The lesson here is that SOMETIMES, gameplay features are included which shouldn’t necessarily be treated as part of the coverage.

This leads us to the recently validated, GAME: Legacy. This game features a set, pre-scripted series of storylines and cutscenes that one has to earn through typical phone-game-shenanigans. You have the ability to customize your "team" to beat the puzzles and such, but this does not effect the story.

For instance, an in-game narrative might feature the First Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Martha Jones. Then, during the gameplay segments, you might possibly change this team to other characters you've unlocked... But this doesn't effect the plot of the game, nor the cutscenes. The story is not effected by whatever gameplay choices you make.

Again, the lesson here is that branching gameplay mechanics do not insinuate branching storylines in-game.

The same can be said for GAME: Dalek Attack, which despite the controversy in 2010 we currently cover as a valid story. Because the cutscenes clearly depict the Seventh Doctor, we essentially deem that this is the plot to the game, in spite of other Doctors also being optional choices.

The final precedent I want to discuss comes from non-video game sources.

In 1976, as their license for Doctor Who was about to slip away, TV Comic began reprinting old Doctor Who stories, but with the Fourth Doctor's likeness (barely) drawn over them. An example of this can be found on the page COMIC: Doomcloud.

As I'll mention below, we have staked quite a long-running precedent on covering both versions of these comics. Thus, we have made a precedent of how to cover a piece of media when it has more than one "potential telling." I'll mention this again in just a moment.

Doctor Who: Infinity
We’re going to begin this post properly with the NOTVALID story most similar to content we already cover -- GAME: Infinity.

to be added

Attack of the Graske


Attack of the Graske is a video game designed for living rooms, where the player makes their way through the story by selecting different options. It's something like a pop-quiz, where you need to pay attention to get all the answers right. This is also the story which introduced the Graske, who became a staple of Doctor Who spin-off media in the Russel T Davies era before the species finally made a triumphant cameo in TV: The End of Time.

This is an excellent game to begin our study of branching stories, because it is perhaps the most simple "branching story" in the entire DW franchise. In total, there are really only two endings:


 * Ending 1 (the good ending): The human reverse the settings, destroying the Changelings and sending all the original people back to their homes. The little girl celebrates Christmas with her family. The Doctor tells the human he did a good job, and he might come back for them one day.


 * Ending 2 (the bad ending): The human freezes the base, trapping the Graske but also the kidnapped victims. Back on Earth, we see the Changelings still on Earth, laughing maniacally. The little girl's Christmas is ruined. The Doctor tells the human they aren't ready to be a companion, but they may be one day.

Besides from what's above, you can obviously get the proceeding questions right or wrong. If you get the quiz right, the Doctor says you're awesome. If you get them wrong, the Doctor tells you the right answer.

But since no realistic page would ever cover something like that, the only choice that effects the wider narrative is if the player picks the good ending or the bad ending.

The brilliant thing about this topic is that we could easily cover this story simply by using your greatest linguistic tool on this website. The magical power of the phrase... "According to one source..."

Or perhaps, more suited in this case, "According to one telling..."

So:


 * According to one telling, the human chose to freeze the base, trapping the Graske but also those kidnapped. All of the Changelings remained in place, and the Doctor told the human they weren't ready to be his companion.


 * But, according to a different possibility, the human instead chose to reverse the Graske's controls, destroying the Changelings and returning their victims to their home worlds. In this source, the Doctor told the human he might come back for them one day for more adventures.

To call back to what I said earlier, there ARE stories we cover on this website that currently have more than one "telling," as it were. To quote our page for 10 Downing Street:


 * In 1974, the Third Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart met with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street to discuss the approaching poison cloud caused by the Zircon. According to another account, it was the Fourth Doctor, Joan Brown and General Maxwell-Lennon. (COMIC: Doomcloud)

Indeed, covering the two main "paths" of this story would be no more difficult than covering Revenge of the Cybermen and Return of the Cybermen concurrently, which we currently do without controversy.

Before we move on, I should also say that another reason this story was constantly discounted was due to "You" being the main character. At one point in this wiki's history, breaking the fourth wall or involving the audience in any way was seen as extremely controversial. Today, I really think we're officially past this, and I personally have no problem with a page like Human (Attack of the Graske) (even if the page we have right now isn't written very well). But if anyone still harbors this as a dealbreaker, that would be a good thing to bring up in the general debate.

The Saviour of Time
So again, we're going non-chronologically here, basically sorting a few examples from least complex to most complex.

So The Saviour of Time is a 2017 Twelfth Doctor game which was playable through Skype. While it no longer works, I'm willing to bet many people here have enough chat records of this title to make this a non-issue, and our current page on it is pretty meticulous as-is.

The game surrounded the Twelfth Doctor searching for the elusive Key to Time, and recruiting a human (you) to help him in his journey.

This game, from what I've seen, does not have multiple endings. But it does feature two major elements that will be essential to discussing if we want to find a way to cover these types of stories. But both elements are actually part of the same thing: player intractability.

When entering the TARDIS, the player is asked his or her name, and the Doctor will blindly accept whatever you type after this. Type "Why do you want to know?" and he'll call you that for the rest of the game, which works as it matches the Twelfth Doctor's personality.

Next, there's the ability to get the Doctor to say unique things based on what you type into chat, be that as a response or a non-sequitur. If you tell the game that your name is Jack Harkness, the Doctor will say he once knew someone with that name. If you ask about the Cybermen, the Doctor will say: "I may never look at Cybermen the same way after poor PE became one. Actually, I rather hope I never have to look at one at all." This is a reference to Danny Pink.

So the first big question is how do we cover a character who literally has an infinite number of possible names? The answer is to just name the page Human (The Saviour of Time), and have it stated in the opening passage:


 * The human's true name varied widely depending on possible tellings.

Well then, what about all these minor references which only happen if you know which keywords to type in? Here, we could make use of our old allies: according to..., if, and possibly.

So, Danny Pink's page could list under the legacy subsection:


 * According to a telling of one source, a human might have asked the Twelfth Doctor who the Cybermen were. The Doctor potentially responded that he hadn't been able to look at the race the same since "PE" had been turned into one.

Already, this is acceptable language to cover the most basic user interaction without violating any of our other rules. We only discuss these branches as possible paths in a specific telling of this source.

Additionally, I should note that minor plot moments in this game do have a few forks, but not in major ways. For instance, if the user fails to control some part of the TARDIS enough times, the Doctor will take back over. But this is not so complex that it's impossible to cover. Again:


 * According to one telling of this source, the human pulled the TARDIS' lever. In other tellings, it was the Doctor who pulled it after the human failed to.

Why you would want to cover a detail so specific, I have no idea. But I'm just trying to prove it is possible, as historically we have invalidated stories for branching options this ridiculously minor.

The Lonely Assassins
to be added

Worlds in Time
So, Worlds in Time is something that personally hits home for me. It's a game I played a lot when I was a kid, and I took a lot of time to try and add details about it to this site. However, after a debate, it was decided that not only would the game be considered invalid on this website, we would also effectively ban users from adding information about the game to our own page about it. At the time, there was an official BBC Wiki site for WiT, so our judgement was that we should link to that and otherwise keep it all off of TARDIS Data Core.

This is one of the only times in this site's history that we've decided to give an entire licensed title to another wiki, and additionally a non-Fandom-wiki, one which was not in-universe... And that wiki no longer exists. Wayback archives of the website are also frustratingly incomplete, meaning information once stored there which is gone for good. Most of what does remains pertains to mechanics but not content.

The game has been offline since 2014, meaning there's a ton of information about it that will likely never be archived, which otherwise would have been organically on this website. So I hope I'm not over-stepping my boundaries when I say that the treatment of World's in Time is the biggest mistake ever made by Tardis Wiki.

So the point is that this is one where I'm biased, and parts of this game are lost media. But I do believe, as I did then, that covering this title was always within our reach. Worlds in Time was an online "free to play" MMOG published in 2012. The game would start with a character customization screen, allowing you change your name, gender (male or female only) and race (human, Silurian, Catkind, or Tree of Cheem). This is absolutely a lot more complex than just changing your name. At the time, I created a page called "Companion (Worlds in Time)" to cover this character, which covered the branching details about the character in the behind-the-scenes section mostly.

Of course, the game was an MMOG, so each level is designed with four people being intended to play at once. You could get other players in the game to join your team, but if you didn't have friends who were into Doctor Who, the game had 11 NPC assistants, and would randomly assign three of them to your team. This is a minor escalation of variables, as you could play any specific level with any three of these NPCs, or none of them.

My stance in this case is that we would cover each of these characters as people who existed and knew the Doctor, but we would use language like "possibly" and "according to..." to describe their further adventures. For instance, our page on the assistant Will currently states:


 * Will was an "assistant" of the Eleventh Doctor, recruited by him to try and fix time after a temporal event had disrupted the universe.


 * According to one possibility, this companion may have helped another companion hunt for time shards along other assistants. Other possible assistants in these adventures included Darren, Mal, Meera, Noma, Nneka, Silas, Steven, Talia, Camile, and Gethin. (NOTVALID: Worlds in Time)

So the basic gist of Worlds in Time is there were a bunch of planets and eras in the game you could jump between, and each location had a set number of storylines to discover, bad guys to fight, allies to meet, etc. The planets included Earth, New Earth, Mars, Alfava Metraxis, Ember, Messaline, Skaro and the Starship UK.

Each planet had a series of Interventions/Adventures, which were akin to serials. Each "serial" had several episodes or levels. So if you beat around four or levels, you had a completed episode of the game. You could also type your own responses into the game's chat window, but this didn't effect the pre-scripted dialogue going on around you, and was really just a way for people in a server to talk to each other. Each "episode" played out the same way every time, with the only differences I can find online between play throughs having to do with patches and some people playing the original BETA release.

But the original debate from a decade ago decided that the game was a multipath story. Why was that? Well, you could play the various episodes and planets in any order you wanted to. I remember finishing all the Earth levels first, then moving on to Ember and Messaline. But, it was entirely possible to play a few Earth levels then switch to Mars for a level, then switch to Ember and so-on. So it was decided that because the game had no single "track", and it allowed you to customize your character, it was akin to the Find Your Fate novels.

I have always thought this made no sense what-so-ever, and was furthermore an ongoing example of this website's refusal to understand fundamental video game mechanics.

If you all don't mind some non-Doctor Who terminology, as a kid I immediately compared this game to Kingdom Hearts I and II. In these two games, you go to various worlds populated by Square Enix and Disney characters, but often the order you do these levels is extremely optional. Sometimes, you can just leave a planet without finishing the story and go start a different planet. Occasionally, a planet from the second act can be saved until literally right before the final boss. But I don't think this really impacts the story that is told in the game, and if Kingdom Hearts had Doctor Who characters instead of Disney ones, I think we would be able to cover it very effectively.

So in the case of Worlds in Time, it would be enough to just say: "This companion went to Earth, New Earth, Mars, Alfava Metraxis, Ember, Messaline, Skaro and the Starship UK." We don't even need to say "what order these events took place in varied," because it's so inconsequential to the story and arguably a huge part of how our site operates in the first place. We don't consider The Two Doctors invalid for its dubious and constantly contradicted placement in the Second Doctor's story, so why should it matter what order the WiT levels take place in?

So a game taking place in a customizable level ordering shouldn't impact our ability to cover it as a story.

At the end of the day, putting aside level ordering and the NPC assistants, there's only two details that are complex here: the fact that the protagonist has four potential species and two genders. I feel, given the language and tactics we've already introduced in this thread, covering these paths in-universe would be barely more complex than the likes of Attack of the Graske.

If we accept all of what is said above as true, the only thing making covering this game difficult is the whole "lost media" angle. Out of the 33 "levels" in this game, I'd say about 9 or 10 you can find recordings of, which is a pretty major loss when it comes to archiving Who media. But I don't think something being currently lost has ever been used to rule against something on this wiki, and I feel with some confidence that more material from this title is likely to be found in the next few years.

Sixth Doctor Find Your Fate
Okay, so here's where we start to get back to stories with multiple endings. It's interesting to note how this is supposedly the definition of this "genre" of fiction, yet so many examples so far haven't really matched that energy.

this section is not remotely completed or even started, I just have some notes

One theory I have is that citing stories like this could be greatly improved by, which is an experimental citation template being created by User:Bongo50. If you haven't seen it in action before, it allows you to add more information to a collapsable box. This is merely experimental, so we could not use this on pages until it is officially launched. BUT I want to show a few examples of how improving technology like this could make covering these stories easier.

One theory here is that if we could just customize our story citation, covering these stories as a set number of tellings is much easier in practice. For instance:


 * While one telling of this source indicated that Omega was victorious, destroyed Earth, and conquered Gallifrey (PROSE: ) most other tellings indicated that the Doctor was successful in defeating Omega. (PROSE: )

Other than the error message caused by the test template not liking the story's infobox, you can see here that this allows us to cover the various "endings" of the novel as co-existing sources. I figured we could either cite the page numbers, or if we had a complicated plot description we could cite the endings. The first ending physically in the book could be "Ending 1", and so on.

But a big question worth asking is: if we don’t count death cutscenes as part of the coverage, should we not count these short, automatic bad endings only meant to cause you to flip to the previous “checkpoint” in the book? And especially, what if that ending implicitly features the Doctor’s regeneration or death?

My take is that we should still cover “bad endings” in these books as one potential telling of the source, but certainly one of the lesser ones. For instance, here’s a possible passage based on War of the Robots:


 * ’’One possibility was that the Tenth Doctor was killed during this adventure (PROSE: War of the Robots, page #?) However, most other sources indicated that this Doctor survived to later regenerate due to radiation poisoning in 2010. (TV: The End of Time, et. al) Indeed, other tellings in the source indicated that the Doctor triumphed. (PROSE: Book name, page #?)’’

I think covering "bad endings" that could be read as part of a completed narrative is different from discarding death animations and the like. Furthermore, as many illustrations in these novels depict bad endings, I think covering this is really a must.

At the end of the day, I also think that this isn't as detrimental as it might have seemed a decade ago, for one simple reason. For the past few years, countless pages on the wiki have included this blurb of text:

"This article needs a big cleanup. As detailed at Thread:264489, to avoid overly long articles, highly-recurring character pages' biography should only have AT MOST 2-3 sentences per story, not whole paragraphs of plot detail. This page needs a major cleanup in that area."

- Every page on the wiki

So basically, we actually encourage people to dumb down sources we cover to two to three sentences. Thus, any forking details not wholly important to the full story do not need to be covered on pages like Sixth Doctor and Tenth Doctor. Instead, only the most brief and basic plot description should be included.

to be finished

The Time Crocodile
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Strangely, it seems to me that this story should already be valid based on that tricky 2020 revision to T:VS:

"(This rule should not be considered to apply to the likes of AUDIO: Flip-Flop, where the "choose your own adventure" format is pastiched to depict "timey-wimey" phenomena, and the authorial intent is clearly that all the paths are equally and simultaneously real.)"

- T:VS, on the ban on branching stories

FASA Role Playing Games
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Battle For the Universe
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Discussion
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