Talk:Virtual Pool 3

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Fair use rationale for Image:Al-v-Am.jpg

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 – Fair use rationale provided.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 03:53, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• It's been solved now. Visibilia (talk) 17:15, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

New-ish version

Possible bootleg, 2004, distributor listed as Global Star, with new cover,, in DVD-style case.[7] Could well be a completely different game that just stole the name. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 21:53, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Massive deletion

@Izno: This mass-deletion of content does not appear to be supportable. Games, like all other works of fiction, are permissible primary sources for their own content. And some of the material deleted had explicitly cited other sources. If there's something in particular that isn't primary-sourceable to the game itself, or to a third-party source, or which seems like WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE trivia, let's discuss removing that particular bit. However, the coverage of VP3's game play isn't excessive compared to larger VG articles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:14, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Some comments:

1. Gameplay is not usually self-sourced for video games. If the gameplay is important, it will usually have been covered liberally in reliable secondary sources. A number of video game articles, especially pre-Internet-dominance era, or on console, which come with manuals, sometimes source to their manuals, under the allowance of SELFPUB (limited and only for purposes of comprehensiveness). Completely unsourced as this article is now is barely even a rarity. A chunk of this section is also promotional or weaselly.
2. Plot is usually self-sourced (and actually invokes sources because video games can be tedious to get through), though some editors advocate only for plot which has a presence in RSS (I'm not one of them). This article indicates no plot so that's not bothersome.
3. The "online play" list of tournament winners is not sourced to RSS. This was my predominant issue with the article. A good chunk of that section also fails the RSS test and appears to be promotional (the presence of the external links in the table is indicative).
4. The article generally makes claims that are original research or which go beyond the SKYISBLUE test.
5. General reference for a content guideline would be WP:VG/GL. The stuff therein should be mostly familiar, though there might be a gotcha' that I don't remember that isn't obviously derived from a sitewide guideline or policy (in which case the derivation should be made explicit or the guideline removed, probably).

If you need/want help sourcing this, the easiest way is to pick out sources from the VG reliable source custom google search; the article now lists at least 4 potential sources (even though they don't have actual citations for some reason). Other sources might be listed at Metacritic or GameRankings but should be crosschecked against the list of consensus reliable sources. --Izno (talk) 12:47, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

@Izno: I'm willing to compromise on this of course; I know the material needs work, some of it could be trimmed, and there are some tone/approach problems. The thing to do probably is to tackle these things one issue at a time, e.g. starting with simple promo tone stuff, and fixing up links to be proper cites. However, a mass-deletion of all the material when only some of it is an issue, and some issues are fixable, is hard to sit still for, especially given the enormous amount of material in some "exciting" VG articles (see, e.g., The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind), and what seems to me a general bias against pool sims as not "interesting enough" (I've had to defend several of these articles against wrong-headed deletion attempts).

1. I think that WP:WPVG coming up with it's own WP:LOCALCONSENSUS that conflicts with WP:V and WP:PRIMARY and WP:ABOUTSELF policy is, well, a policy problem. A comparatively small group of editors can't declare on their own that sourcing permissible as a matter of policy isn't permitted in "their" articles. Anything permissible as primary-sourceable for a film, novel, TV series, or comic book is also permissible for video games.
2. The game actually does have a plot (in one mode); we're just not covering it here. And it's not much of a plot; about on par with various other sports sims. There are various characters with names, a few of them are sims of real people like Jeanette Lee, but mostly not. There's also various modes without this, e.g. you can just set up a virtual table and practice shots.
3. It is sourced, though weakly, and the wording before the table is poor. This may well be the only pool sim that's ever pro-am / semi-pro gamer competition (it might not be, but it's certainly at least very unusual, and it helps establish notability, and it's encyclopedically relevant. VIPLadder still seems to exist, and still uses VP3, but it might just be on "autopilot" and not really a functional system in 2017; I dunno; the 2012 date of last championship (in the article anyway) is the same year VP4 came out). The presence of external links isn't necessarily promotional; often it's just sourcing by people who don't know what they're doing yet. The tournament-hosting organization is a good enough source for dates, winners, etc. We just don't need links on a per-winner basis (I removed those), and the links retained need to be formatted as proper source citations. I have what may just be an outright prejudice against WP's obsessive and trivia-mongering coverage of "E-Sports" or "eSports" (even writing it that way; it's ungrammatical under English capitalization rules in virtually every style guide ever written). It's not encyclopedic to me to list pseudonymous usernames and to treat gamers as celebs to write articles about, except in the rare case that a gamer is notable in truly independent RS, i.e. outside gaming publications. But I think I'm in the minority in this view, so I'm not sure what to do with this table.

   But even a "down with gamer-cruft" curmudgeon like me sees encyclopedic value in the facts of the years and divisions, i.e. "yes, there was a world Virtual Pool 3 tournament for the cowboy pool game in 2007". I think that WPVG people are apt to insist that the winner's usernames be included, but hopefully I'm wrong. Countries? Only if the competition was set up along national lines like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, and only if the names are included. At any rate, I don't buy the argument that the entire table is "promotional" since the event series apparently isn't running any longer, VIPLadder is/was free, even the links to players were to stats, not to personal websites (i.e., a clear attempt to source the player names and rankings), and we have plenty of coverage of e-sports events elsewhere.

   The entire event table could be compressed into a paragraph or a short list, saying which disciplines had a championship in which year, and without the winner names, since none of them are notable.

4. This game (the whole franchise) has actually been the subject of a lot of coverage, in the gaming press and even in the pool press, so OR can likely be repaired without too much difficulty. The main catch will be that the pool mags are not available for free online, so that material (which is more relevant perhaps for critical reception – pro pool players reviewed the game's simulation accuracy). It's been my experience that many OR-laden statements can actually be fixed by trimming and re-wording, though I don't know which ones you have in mind, and I haven't done a top-to-bottom "focus on this article's wording and sources for an entire hour" spree. As a general matter, some OR problems are inherent in the entire nature of what's being said, while some is just a problem of how it's worded and arranged (e.g. leading the reader to a conclusion, or reading between the lines to draw inferences that are novel).
5. WP:VG/GL is probably not a guideline, despite someone putting that template it on it. It's clearly a WP:PROJPAGE. Virtually every time one of those things is RfC'ed about whether it should have a guideline tag or a wikiproject advice essay tag on it, the latter is the result, because virtually none of these things ever went through a WP:PROPOSAL process. The very fact that it's trying to be a content guideline, an MoS page, a naming convention, a notability/inclusion/sourcing guideline, etc., all at once is a dead giveaway that it's not really a guideline, because those should all be separate pages and would have been done that way if this has been subjected to broad community input. That said, it has a lot of good points in it and much of it seems reasonable, and probably actually reflects practice; it seems to genuinely be trying to apply site-wide rules to the topic rather than create variant rules, though it does have a few issues, as almost all such pages do.

I will look over the WP:VG/LRS stuff, since I don't presently have access to my pool magazine collection (in boxes in storage), and I don't buy gamer mags. PS: I appreciate you taking the time to provide a detailed response on this instead of revert-warring (not that you would!). I agree that the material is imperfect, I just think much of it is salvageable in some form, and it's easier to do that by working up the material than by doing a WP:TNT in a case like this. WP:NODEADLINE applies, too; this stuff has been in the state it's in for years, and no one cared, so there's no fix-it-right-this-second-or-nuke-it-all urgency, though I guess trying to nuke it has provoked some attention toward fixing it.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  23:48, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: The four video game reviews already-not-cited evidence at least passing notability if not flying-colors notability. Sports video games are generally a dime a dozen (how many times can you re-release NFL Madden?) so I can understand the "they're probably not notable" against which you might have needed to defend, but in this case, we're good. (And even if not notability for VP3, there's most likely notability for the series as a whole.)

Perhaps you need some background so you can understand the rationale of why there are somewhat more-strict guidelines in place for video games. For better or worse, video game articles and related content were considered (and still are to many!--while I won't dispute Jane Austen is probably going to difficult to write, it also has the benefit of scholarship and authoritative works on its side, unlike most of pop culture) some of the easiest to write, and clearly the least-valuable on Wikipedia. This love of fiction in the early days lead to cruft every-which-way, which spawned the fiction decimation of the 2006-2008 era. Since, the video games project has tried its best to hew to the vision that we are a generalist encyclopedia dedicated to principles of NPOV, V, NOT, N, RS, and so forth; while perhaps this might see some content deleted even though you or I wouldn't challenge it, that's to the better of the encyclopedia. (As it happens, I edit within these bounds, whatever my personal opinion of those bounds). Those bounds are still encroached upon from the other side by fan editors who either a) don't know the history; b) don't care about the core content policies; or c) think X random source is Good Enough (categorically, they demonstrate the opposite).

1. Gameplay has been and will be challenged at GA/FA because gameplay is not immediately obvious or intuitive to many outside a certain generation of people (notably the digital generation). While I'm not shooting for those quality levels with any given article I happen to touch (nor, I would guess, a good chunk of the video games editors), WP:TNT often is the best remedy (there's an essay around which is basically broken windows theory). I tend to take a harsh touch to uncited content as it doesn't provide us the quality content we need to demonstrate that we're here to show how the video game in question is worth talking about.

   As for plot, we source plot because, whereas I can identify a specific plot point in a book or a film or a TV show or a comic book within minutes or seconds (under the same restrictions as a video game; notably that you have a copy and the werewithal to do so), you cannot do the same for video games. Some games require literal hours of playthrough for verifiability of a plot, which can and has also been challenged in the quality processes.

2. I suspected as much.

3. Stuff about competitions, esports, tables, and such. If you don't have a reliable secondary source about the competition to demonstrate notedness (thanks EEng), the weight of the content is wrong. That's one of the many dimensions that is a constant fight (I use that term mindful of NOTBATTLEGROUND) with newbies on Wikipedia, even for more impactful video game series such as Super Smash Bros. or Counter-Strike, which have had fairly-undocumented competitive scenes since their series-spawning incarnations. In this regard, I would cut the table. The content can't be substantiated by anything to either your or my hand at this time with any reliability, which we both agree is missing (whether within or without the gaming industry, all we've got is a bunch of citations to a database—and while the sports editors [not the esports ones, though they have similar issues because they take the sports ones as model wikicitizenry] might consider that sufficient for their goals, I aspire to greater). Such databases can barely be considered tertiary sources; no transformation, analysis, or thought of what those statistics mean. I am not alone in this regard; in other words, they are not so apt.

4. I think you might have caught some of the more outlandish claims on your review, as the article reads decently now on this point.
5. I'm glad you agree that VG/GL is mostly where it needs to be. I suspect if we were to RFC it, it would be split along the lines you suggest it would split along, and abhorrently-variant rules ejected, reasonably-variant rules left alone for domain specificity, or not-video-game-specific rules incorporated into the wider-known guidelines, as applicable. I've had it in mind to see it split but that's an undertaking (which would fruitfully lead into reworking our guidelines on fictional content, which we've talked about prior).

I will look to see what I can improve (and when), since it interests me that there are non-video game sources talking about the game. --Izno (talk) 03:50, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I hope this doesn't come of as just argument for its own sake in parts. :-) I understand the history, and have been around long enough to have experienced some of it directly. I do agree that the game is clearly notable (despite the sorry state of this article, it's probably the most notable pool simulator of all time). There's a lot written about it, even if peeps have not cited much of it yet. I have concerns about other pool sims, especially if someone comes along and tries to denude them of all basic gameplay details, on the weak basis that they didn't come from a secondary source, when policy doesn't actually require that.

1. What GAN/FAC want to require as a local consensus to get the shiny GA/FA award isn't the same thing as policy compliance. They're very different animals. It takes much less time to verify something in this game than it does in a huge novel, and verifying a plot point in a long film will also take hours. It's not even required that the work be easily available; this is a central WP:V fact that many people forget. It's perfectly legit to primary-source from a work, for the things policy permits primary sourcing for, even if the work costs US$2394 and has to be shipped in a crate [8] in order for someone to read it. "It's hard" isn't, by itself, a rationale. I can understand the argument you're making (or at least describing) when it comes to, say, minor plot points in a "choose your own adventure" game like Morrowind, which can actually take several months play even if you play it every single day, and which is so complex that any of literally thousands of choices can change what happens (including events and dialogue, i.e. plot) in mostly minor ways; the only encyclopedically sourceable plot summary of that game will be its Main Quest, and some overview on major lines of side quests; those are mostly fixed series of sequential events. Thus, our plot section on Morrowind is in broad strokes, and relies on RSS like strategy guides (to avoid the OR of trying to decide what is and isn't part of the Main Quest, though this can also be verified by using the Construction Set application it comes with to look up quest codes). But for a game like this particular pool one, many of the gameplay aspects are immediately verifiable by starting the game one time and trying it out for a few minutes.

   I'm not sure how much we need, mind you, but it actually is important to include which cue sports are simulated in VP3, for example. That's even a factor in how this article is categorized on Wikipedia (e.g., it's also a snooker simulator).

2. The game's own box cover blurb can probably be used as the source for the "plot", i.e. you work way through various venues and eventually get to shoot it out with a sim of a real World Nine-ball Champion. I think I even know where my box cover is.
3. I remain skeptical, in part. Weight would be an issue, with regard to organized competition being included at all, if there were multiple championships and we only listed one series of them. Weight is arguably an issue with a huge table full of pseudonymous gamers, though. The more I look at that, the more I want to strip it to a list of years and disciplines covered. WP:N is specifically targeted at what can have its own article; we intentionally want people to cover "related stuff" that's not quite notable inside articles on things that are notable. Despite many efforts to create P&G on "trivia", "importance", "fame", "cruft", "relevance", etc., all such efforts have been rejected, and all we have is WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE policy. I don't see how the key facts about the virtual world championships stuff could be considered indiscriminate inside this article, unless there was evidence that the tournament series was just a hoax or something, which seems, um, unlikely for something running that long.
4. LOL. I hadn't really been trying much yet.
5. Please ping me when you get into that work. If I have anything on WP, it's an F-load of experience dealing with WP P&G policy analysis and crafting, including how to tease apart MoS and NC and editing guideline material, and resolve guidance PoV forks. In a few cases we end up with a single page with multiple kinds of guideline tag on it in different sections (e.g. WP:SAL) but most often they can be separated cleanly. The important part is to separate and arrange the rules logically (and establish that they are actually rules and do not conflict with other rules); whether they're literally in separate pages is very secondary,. Also agree some stuff needs to move up a level. I've had it in mind to generalize some of the stuff from MOS:CUE into broader sports pages, along with other material from NC and MOS pages on various specific sports, since we lack a lot of consistent guidance. But it'll be a lot of work, and there's a lot of territoriality to overcome. I suspect VG/GL will be a similar "political" endeavor to clean up.

On non-VG sources, I'm pretty sure one or more of Billiards Digest, Pool & Billiard Magazine, and/or InsidePool had reviews of the game, with commentary on the high quality of the physics simulation. I remember reading one, in which it was concluded that the physics flaws were only something a pro would notice, and were obscure, like exact results of a particular kind of jump shot. But I read that in the early 2000s, and don't remember in which mag. These are the three main professionally produced cue sports publications (aside from some snooker-only ones in the UK). (There are also regional mags like The Break, Stroke and Rackem; not sure if they do reviews of such things.) InsidePoolMag.com (which seems to be distinct from the paper version) has a couple of hits for VP4, but they are press-release regurgitation. Doesn't go back far enough for VP3. Issu.com has 49 back issues of the paper IP [9] apparently for free, but they're all 2008–2013, so will probably not have anything on VP3, though maybe VP4. Not searchable. :-( P&B's website (PoolMag.com) doesn't have anything. No online issue archives I can find. Same story with BilliardsDigest.com. Teh Interwebs are not always a big help.

However, critical reception info is easy to find from "the usual suspects" like IGN, GameSpot, GameFAQs, and so on [10], also at MetaCritic. Also, VP3 is still available from Celeris and was re-released as Virtual Pool 3 DL (not sure if "DL" stands for "download" or "deluxe" or what, but it's the only version for which later patches were made; doesn't seem to have been updated since Windows 7). It provides 21 different pool games, plus 2 carom billiards games, and snooker, which seems to mean 24 disciplines total. Has the "Career Mode" (plot) and the rest, including the online play. Honestly, the dearth of on-the-Web material is pretty disappointing. Likely just due to age. I may have to dig around on forums to find stuff; way back in the day, that's how I first found out pro players had reviewed its physics.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:42, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Virtual Pool 4

Moved to Talk:Virtual Pool (series)

VP 4 was released August 15, 2012. Probably needs an article. At very least the "Sequel" section in this article needs an update. I may get around to it, but I'm trying to minimize the time I spend here on pop-culture topics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:24, 2 October 2017 (UTC)