Feature: Shove It in a Table: How to Write Featured Lists of Video Games
editFeatured lists are a topic that have come up a few times in the WP:VG newsletter—it's a topic that a lot of editors in the project don't have much experience with, even very prolific ones, while a few editors have written a bunch. Previous features have talked about what is appropriate for a list, and given a general guide to making any given list featured. For this article, I'm going to get down to the details for a specific case: how do you go about physically creating a list of video games with some criteria, and then take it to the top? It's easier than you'd think, if you know where to start. Hopefully, this guide should clear it up a bit. It's something that I know quite a bit about: at the time of this writing, I've written 46 featured lists, the 9th-most of anyone; of those, 14 are video game related, and 10 of those are specifically lists of video games (as opposed to books or albums). WP:VG as a whole has 67 featured lists, of which 39 are lists of video games like we're discussing here. You can see all these lists at WP:VG/FC, and I'll be linking a lot of the more recent ones as examples.
The first thing to know about video game lists is: there's no set format, beyond that they are generally composed of a lead and one or more tables. What those tables are, what templates they use, how they're broken up: all up to you. So, we need to get some idea of what we're trying to accomplish, and then choose the format that works best for that.
How should I structure my list?
editFeel free to ignore this whole section and just pick the template that you think is prettiest. I won't judge. Well, not much, anyway.
Before we get going, let me introduce the usual templates that get involved in these lists. I'll put how you actually build the wikicode down at the bottom of this article. Each template has different pros and cons.
- First off, we have the standard wikitable, like at List of Square Enix mobile games.
| Title | System | Release date | Developer(s) | JP | NA | PAL | Ref(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dragon Quest Monsters i | Mobile phones | January 28, 2002 | Armor Project | Yes | [1] | ||
| The Portopia Serial Murder Case | Mobile phones | April 3, 2003 | Chunsoft | Yes | [2] |
- Second, the {{Video game table}} template, as seen at List of Mystery Dungeon video games.
| Title | Original release date | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
Japan |
North America |
PAL region | |
| Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon | September 19, 1993[3] | none | none |
Notes:
| |||
- Third, the {{Video game titles}} template, found at List of Final Fantasy video games.
| Title | Details |
|---|---|
Original release dates: |
Release years by system: 1987 – Nintendo Entertainment System[5] 1989 – MSX[8] 2003 – PlayStation[9] |
Notes:
|
- And fourth, the {{ListEntry/VG}} template, like at List of The Elder Scrolls video games.
| Title | Release details | Platform(s) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | Sony | Other | ||
| The Elder Scrolls: Arena[13] |
|
DOS | ||
Keep in mind these four options as we go forward; you're welcome to create your own template (ListEntry/VG was created specifically by an editor who didn't think the other three options met his list's criteria), but that's a bit out of scope of this article. Just know that as long as it presents the information clearly, no one will have a problem with it—there's no rules as to what templates are allowed.
The first thing to do is decide what genre of list you're making—which you've likely already done. A quick peek at the video games featured content page gives us an idea at the divisions: is it going to be a list of games in a particular series? A list of games by a particular company? All the games for one console? All of these lists tend to be slightly different.[1] Lets take them one by one.
Games by series
editGames by series tend to be the most diverse, structurally. This is due to an obvious fact: every series is different. A series of 14 main games and dozens of spinoffs has different requirements than a series of 10 sequels. Lets go through a few different questions and answers; keep in mind that as every series is different, sometimes the answers might not be a perfect fit for your list.
- Q) Is your series one big series, or multiple distinct sub-series?
- A) If it's one series, we're talking a single table here. If it's multiple, well, you could note the sub-series in each game's row, but a) that gets repetitive and b) sub-series is a pretty important fact to the reader! We should call it out, and split each sub-series into it's own section. For example: List of Mystery Dungeon video games. In this case, it doesn't make sense to put all four sub-series together: they're very different, and logically fall into groups. A simple section break, and it is clear to the reader what groups there are.
- Q) What details matter to this series? Specifically: Do international release dates matter? Console releases? Both?
- A) This is what really splits up which template you want to use. Compare Video game table with Video game titles. "Video game table" makes it very clear which titles were released in which region, and on which dates. It does not highlight which consoles they came out on—that's presented in one of several bullets inside the game's row. It's therefore best used when your series has spotty releases in English-speaking countries (i.e. it's a Japanese series) where the games generally don't get released on multiple systems or ported very often. "Video game titles", on the other hand, gives console releases a bit more prominence, and while it lists the release dates they're no longer as obvious—this is better for series where it can almost be assumed that the titles all came out in NA/EU, but which had multiple console releases. Of course, maybe you don't care at all about which countries the games came out in, and only which consoles: that's what ListEntry/VG is for, which buries the idea of release dates altogether in favor of making the console (or at least console manufacturer) blindingly obvious.[2]
- Q) What about wikitables?
- A) For this type of list, try to avoid them. They're useful/necessary if you have a hundred items and your page would be a mile long if you gave each game it's own big row, but you lose the ability to actually give detailed information for each game. You gain sortability, but you don't really need that for game series lists: you're not going to have 100 games in a series, and most series have a distinct order. Final Fantasy did without, and your series is smaller, I guarantee it.
- Q) Okay, I've picked a template. But what information goes in those bullet points?
- A) Depends on the series, but here's a general guideline. Bullet 1: developer/publisher. Feel free to drop one or both if it's the same for all of the games. Bullet 2: if you're using Video game table, the console the game was released for. Bullet 3: Translate the title if it's not in English. Bullet 4: The genre, if it's not the same for the whole series. Bullet 5+: Interesting fact about the game. Continue if there's a few. Whatever short facts you think are interesting. Bullet the last: if you're using Video game table, what ports the game came out for, or description of the differences between the versions.[3]
Games by console
editYou don't have quite as much flexibility for these lists as you do in by-series lists, and that's for one specific reason: these lists are long. There's just no way around it; pretty much every console/computer system has had hundreds of games made for it. You might even need to split your list into subarticles because it's so long. This means that you can't be giving every game half an inch of space—your list would be a mile long, and never load on dial-up. So, wikitables.
This is not, actually, a bad thing: you'd probably want wikitables regardless, because people read console lists differently than series lists. With a series, there's an obvious order to the games, whereas for console lists, it's just a pile of different games by a lot of developers and publishers, and in a lot of genres. What order should they be in—alphabetical? Date order? Grouped by developer/publisher/origin region/genre? Wikitables dodge the whole problem by making the list sortable, so that the reader can choose for themselves. For the default ordering, I'd pick date order or alphabetical—whichever makes the most sense for your console.
The only thing left to pick, then, is what columns you have. You need the big three, of course: title, developer, publisher. Then you'll almost certainly need columns on which regions it was released for: List of Nintendo 64 games sticks them in one column, but that makes it essentially unsortable, so I'd go with three colored columns—List of Sega Genesis games adds a fourth for "other", but that's not super-relevant to all consoles and is a massive pain to source. Then, you'll need a "first released" date column, or at least a year. Optionally, you can, like the N64 list, add rating, number of players, or genre columns, but you certainly don't need to. It might be a good idea to add the table of contents header that those two lists do as well—you can break it up by year if you set it up in date order. See those lists for how to make the jump points for when you click on the table of contents.
Games by company
editFor real though, don't arbitrarily split up your wikitable. It's the worst of all possible options.
This really depends on how big your company is, and you end up just following either the series or the console rules. Small company? List of Looking Glass Studios video games is basically a series list, with the games ordered chronologically. Country releases are not highlighted since Looking Glass is an NA company, and consoles are not called out since they're not that systematic or important. Giant company? Square Enix has so many games that it actually has two lists, and List of Square Enix mobile games follows the console style (as does the non-mobile list, and the Square list). One point of order, though: a lot of the larger non-featured company lists split up the table into sections by console, like this old version of List of Square Enix video games. Please don't try to do this; not only does it completely break the point of sorting, but it doesn't work at all for multi-platform games. Want to know what consoles game X came out for? Then instead of sorting the list by name and looking, you have to search 3-10 lists individually to see. Want to know what the general date order of the company's releases were? You'll need to calculate it manually, jumping back and forth between tables. Just... don't.
What if you have more than just games?
editOkay, what do you do if your series is made up of 10 games and 4 books? Where do the books go, if you want to include them? It's an easy three-step process. Step 1: make a new section, titled "Books". Step 2: make a new table in whatever format you need, using the same rules as before—List of Dragon Quest media uses "Video game titles", since all the non-game media basically never left Japan, while List of Final Fantasy media uses "Video game table", since most of it did. Step 3: rename your article from "List of (series) video games" to "List of (series) media". That's it! You can have as many different sections as you need: Dragon Quest has Television and film, Books and manga, and Music and soundtracks (with a wikitable for that last), while List of Mass Effect media has Printed media (subdivided into Books and Comics), Film, and Soundtracks. List of Front Mission media even throws in a prose section for toys, since they don't fit in a table very well. The bullets change slightly for these new sections—books need the writer and ISBN, comics need writer, artist, and ISBN, and both probably need position in the chronology—but the general idea is the same.
Okay, I have my table filled out. Now what?
editNow's the fun bit! For varying values of fun. You need two things. One: a lead, which puts the article in context. This is basically the only prose in the article, so it explains what the series/company/console is, mentions why it matters (series sold a lot/company made a lot of games/console was the highest-selling in the generation), summarizes the table, and links you to some other nice lists that are related, if applicable. List leads are not quite the same thing as article leads: you can put in information that doesn't reappear in the rest of the article (since there's no other prose, really), and you can put all the cites you want, for the same reason. Two: References. Tons, and tons, of references. You need a cite for every release date, every console release, every developer, and every publisher—and ideally one for pretty much every bullet point that's not obvious from the game itself. These cites are often going to be the same! If you have a good reference to draw from, you can get all the cites for a single game from one source. If not, have fun with Google. List of Sega Genesis games manages to source hundreds of games with a couple dozen sources; List of Square Enix mobile games needed 150+ to do the same thing. I promise it's doable—I've sourced Japanese-only Square computer games from the 80s using only online sources. Either stick the reference after the thing it's citing or, in a wikitable, stick it in it's own column. Caveats: you can't use GameSpot game information pages as sources, because the database is taken from GameFAQs user-generated stuff. Unless you're super-lucky and can get an archived version from before May 2003, when they merged.[4] Also, you can source the game itself for dev/publisher/console, but it doesn't fly for dates and you should try to avoid it anyway.
My list is an awe-inspiring thing of beauty. What now?
editEvery time you nominate a list without reviewing someone else's, an angel loses its wings.
WP:FLC, that's what! Featured List Candidates is the listy sibling to Featured Article Candidates, but much, much easier to get through—primarily because you don't have as much prose to trip over. Follow the instructions there to nominate your list! The guidelines to get promoted are pretty straight-forward: you need three supports, and the FLC director that promotes the list can't see any obvious flaws that were missed. That's it—no finicky source reviews or in-depth prose analysis! There are a few tricky bits that you get to skip with this guide—they're big on WP:ACCESS there, but the templates mentioned here take care of it for you.[5] Do note that FLC frowns on lists with less than 10 items; if your entire media franchise is smaller than that... consider just making it an article instead. There is one big red flag, though: FLC is currently massively under-staffed with reviewers, so it can take a month or two to get your list all the way through; you also can't nominate more than one list at a time. To that end, for every list you nominate, make sure you do at least three reviews—they're shorter than GAN/FAC reviews, so it's not a big hardship. Feel free to ask them to consider giving you a review back in return. Every area of Wikipedia has entirely different list styles, so don't worry about your review being up to snuff or about knowing enough about the topic/lists—if you make a good-faith effort, it will be just as good as anyone else's.[6]
A bot stuck a star on my list. What next?
editWell, maintain your list, of course, and update WP:VG/FC. Other than that, bask in the glow of knowing that you've now personally contributed over 2% of all the featured lists of video games on Wikipedia!
I need some details on how to actually build these tables
editMainly, you want to copy-paste from an article that uses them, but in short:
- {{Video game table}} creates a table header; for each row in the table you put in {{Video game table item}} inside that template. Just fill out the fields for the item template—it's pretty straight forward, and notes is just a bulleted list.
- {{Video game titles}} and {{Video game titles/item}} work the exact same way, though there's a few things you can play with to adjust the formatting. The documentation at Video game titles lets you know what they are and gives examples, like changing the wording for cancelled games, making it "release dates" instead of "release date", etc.
- ListEntry is a bit different, in that you create a standard table header and then put {{ListEntry/VG/A1}} for each row. See List of The Elder Scrolls video games for specifics on the header code. This one isn't well-documented, and you need a slightly different template for different consoles: /A1 lets you choose from Microsoft, Sony, and Other, while /A2 is Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Other. If you want other options you'll need to make your own variant. See Hahc21 if you need other styles, as he made the template(s) (though he seems to have left since I started writing this, so maybe ask for help at WT:VG as well).
- If you're using a wikitable, see List of Sega Genesis games for how to set up the header—the scope="col" and scope="row" is important for FLC (it lets screen reader software parse the table correctly) and it shows you how to make some columns not sortable (like references)
- How do you make things sort correctly when they won't on their own? You generally use the {{sort}} template. {{sort|game name|the game name}} lets the cell be sort by "game name" while still displaying "the game name"; don't bother with "game name, the", that's just nonsense. If you have a column of dates, just use the {{dts}} template like "{{dts|December 21, 1997}}" and it will sort fine, and if you add 'data-sort-type="number"' into a column header you can let numbers sort correctly as well. While we're on the subject, {{sortname|firstname|lastname|optional wikiarticle if different}} exists for people.
- Finally: to make the list title partially italic, since you don't have an infobox to do it for you, stick the displaytitle template at the top, like {{DISPLAYTITLE:List of ''Final Fantasy'' video games}}.
Rambling asides
editIt just didn't feel right to have a page, even an essay, without footnotes.
- ^ We'll set aside for now the groupings that don't have an FL yet, such as all games in a particular genre. Hopefully the kinds of questions that this guide asks will lead you to a good format for what information you need to give.
- ^ If I must be honest, I don't much care for ListEntry/VG—I think it looks strange, and puts way too much emphasis on what console line (PS/PS2/PS3, etc.) a game came out for over all the other details. That said, it's a perfectly valid format, and I've seen people complain about the aesthetics of both Video game titles and Video game table, so it's not like any of the options are universally loved. In the end, even if this guide leads you to a specific template, if you don't think it's as pretty as another one feel free to use that instead. This guide is not meant to be the end of the discussion on the matter.
- ^ Please note that if your bullets are not complete sentences, you don't put a period at the end. This is a list, not a paragraph. I recommend non-sentences: instead of "*It was developed by XYZ.", just put "*Developed by XYZ". Too much extra text makes the tables really crowded and harder to read.
- ^ This really hurts: the GameSpot/GameFAQs database is the most complete one out there, especially for Japanese release dates for older games. Their newest format change seems to have hidden a lot of the information, which helps with not succumbing to temptation: I've had an FLC get smashed apart once for relying on GameSpot, leaving me scrambling to find new sources. Also note this is just the "game information" pages; their regular articles are good to go.
- ^ WP:ACCESS is the biggest barrier to writing your own templates, after, you know, being able to write template code in the first place. It basically mandates that your ending wikitext is still recognizably a table, with rows and columns, and that you tag them as such in the code. If you can't do that, then screen reader software for people with vision problems (including just poor eyesight) just straight up returns garbage when it tries to read your table—I've seen sample outputs, and its completely unintelligible. This in turn restricts just how fancily you can stick boxes together to make a template row. If you have a good idea, though, feel free to try it out anyway—I'm available for consults, as are the ACCESS guys.
- ^ Seriously, only like, music, movies, and certain sports have a standard format for lists, and those formats are pretty simple; everyone else just kind of wings it with whatever format seems to work for their area. Which means there's not really any domain-specific knowledge you're missing, so your review will be just fine.