Forum:We need a policy on videogames

With the arrival of Doctor Who: The Adventure Games comes a problem that's been bubbling around unresolved for a very long time on the wiki. Are games actually canon? There is precedence for not allowing games as valid resources on this wiki. 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.

To sum up, we need:
 * 1) To clearly enumerate which games are canon and which aren't (cause clearly they aren't all canon)
 * 2) To decide whether a 3rd person perspective aids a game's case for canon statue, versus a 1st person perspective
 * 3) To decide how a game with a branching narrative shall be treated (does the fact that it can have multiple outcomes immediately render it outside canon, since its results aren't static?)
 * 4) To better explain at canon policy why the FASA games were "outlawed"
 * 5) To decide whether it might not be reasonable to impose a ban for a length of time on posting information from certain videogames (notably the most current ones), in order to give people time to actually play them so that their structure and outcomes can be fully understood. Indeed, with the Adventure Games, it may turn out to be important to play all of them to completely understand the narrative contained within.

There may be other points that arise, but these seem to be good starting points.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  21:43, June 9, 2010 (UTC)