Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20151212000440/@comment-188432-20160630224643

Thanks to all who participated in this discussion.

As we've said many times about several things on the wiki, the declaration of invalidity has nothing to do with what's "canon" or what you personally can believe about "Doctor Who truths".

By contrast, the writing of our articles here at Tardis requires some level of certainty. It's basically impossible to deal with single events that might have involved different characters or different outcomes, depending on who's playing the game. This is a game that involves every major character in the DWU, and yet it happens -- for you -- only to those characters that you actively choose. I can play a level using Ten, Donna and Strax. You can do the same thing with Four, Vicki, and Polly. I can be victorious on my first go. You can take several hundred attempts. So what's the real story? Was it a Fourth Doctor Adventure? Did it happen to Donna? Was it an easy victory or a hard one. And how was the victory achieved? Were they using weapons that looked like balls? Or jack-o-lanterns? Or Christmas trees? Who scored the killing blow? The Doctor? Donna? Sarah? We just don't know for certain. It's equivalent to a choose-your-own-adventure book, and those have long been disallowed.

Additionally, the notion that there is some divorce between gameplay and story must be strenuously rejected. The fact that the dialogue in the interstitial "moments" stays the same doesn't prove anything about authorial intent -- except that they're trying to keep the file size low enough to be played on a wide range of devices. It's a technical choice, not a literary one. After all, there's no technical barrier -- other than the memory of the small devices on which the game is to be played -- to having the interstitial moments played out with every character combo available. It could have been programmed that way, but it wasn't.

Perhaps the biggest objection, though, is that it's illogical to suggest that if you spend all your time with your bespoke team that you're supposed to believe you're actually playing with some other team. Arguing that you're not supposed to believe that the fighting happened as it happened for you is a bit like saying, "Well, I saw Luke get into his X-wing right before the Trench Run at the end of Star Wars, but some other dude actually piloted the craft to victory."

No. stories are not a series of set-ups. They're a series of conflicts, portrayed in their entirety. You see Luke strap in, you see him go into the Death Star trenches, you see him successfully land his shot, you see him go home. Nobody else, save R2, is in that ship along the way.

That's why Legacy is not a story. It's a game with narrative elements that attempt to add verisimilitude to the mix -- and to distinguish it in the marketplace, as was pointed out above, from Candy Crush.

Therefore, Legends posits an impossible, irresolvable conundrum that we just can't allow administratively.

Fortunately, there's a reasonably large wiki which already exists to take your edits about the game. This matters because no one is saying that your edits about it aren't valuable; they're just not a part of the mission of this particular wiki.

Conclusion
Having had nearly six months of fresh discussion on the matter, and following an original discussion that was itself lengthy, no new information has been presented to alter the original decision. Accordingly, this thread is now closed. Please don't open yet another one on this same topic.