User:KieferSkunk/Interview with Edge Magazine

Following is a copy of the email-based interview I had with an editor at Edge Magazine, which recently printed an article about Wikipedia and other websites that catalog video game information. This is not a copy of the article itself - the article can be found in Issue 199 of Edge, and an abridged version is available online here.

Email Transcript
Edge Staff wrote:

> Thanks for your speedy reply, and agreeing to talk to me.

No problem!

> The MUD community has been critical of the Wikipedia entry on MUDs > (notably, without taking steps to improve it themselves), but there's no > useful alternative on their sites. A detailed and documented history is > nowhere to be found. The reason? No-one can categorise and verify that > history when MUDs are now, in terms of bald numbers of people playing, > more niche than ever. They've never got the coverage in the mainstream > media one might have expected (oh sweet hindsight), and have never been > particularly successful at attracting media attention in general. > > So what happens? I don't know. I'm talking to Richard Bartle, the guy > who co-created MUDs, next week, and he suggested he wanted a MUD archive > set up. Any kind of community effort in this direction would be awesome, > of course, and much better late than never. But I wonder whether it's > too late for several MUDs we'll never hear about, and whether the idea > of an "archive" has anything more behind it than good intentions.

Well, I'm not sure I'd be much help on the MUD front myself - was never really that much into them. I did spend some time on social MUCKs for a while (mostly furry-related ones), but they were much more about social networking and chatting than about roleplaying, which most MUDs are oriented around. So I don't have much exposure to the history of MUDs and what not.

I do agree they're pretty important in the grand scheme of things, but as more of an example of the underground nature of large portions of the Internet community as it was first hitting the mainstream. You'll probably find with a lot of online communities in general that the earlier ones are harder to document simply because of their non-mainstream nature - when the Internet was first coming into mainstream use, you basically had to be a geek to know how to get into these cool communities, whereas nowadays you don't need any special skills whatsoever to do just about anything online.

The side effect of that, of course, is that those who regarded their communities as a sort of an exclusive club were less likely to document their clubs for fear of them being discovered and inundated with newbies and people who didn't fit into their culture. That's been my experience, anyway.

> Anyway, enough MUD. If you look across the net's resources, there are so > many sources of information: useful things said by developers, whether on > blogs or forums, fanatics that collect every game ever released for a > system and photocopy their manuals, and those forums themselves -- all of > these things are of potential historical interest, and the industry as a > whole has no position on it. There's a gigantically huge amount of chaff, > a miniscule bit of wheat, and no mechanism for distinguishing between the > two. There aren't any plucky amateurs attempting some sort of structured > archiving. Indeed, it would need a professional organisation to preserve a > quantity of information of this scale in a meaningful way.

Well, I do think that Wikipedia in general is trying to become that sort of repository, but its main problem is a "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome - you have recognized and highly qualified industry experts working alongside fans and novice editors who often have completely different views on what constitutes a good article. This lack of agreement is the biggest reason that Wikipedia in general is not taken seriously.

> Even if Wikipedia's around in its current form in ten years, which I'm > unsure of, it will still not ever serve as an effective or comprehensive > structure for this kind of data. It's just not what it's for. Wikis > might be a possibility. But currently, they exist only for really notable > things (like WOW or Pokemon).

I think in a more general sense, the community wikis (many of which are hosted on wikia.com) are for things of community interest, but of course the ones that actually get attention are the ones that cater to more popular subjects. I'm personally starting a Wikia site on The Red Green Show, one of my favorite comedy sketch shows, but so far haven't been very successful attracting people to help work on it.

> (1)  When did you start contributing to Wikipedia, and what led you to > become a very active member of the communities around videogame entries?

Well, I've been contributing to the video game community in a broader sense for more than 10 years. Before I discovered and became interested in Wikipedia, I had been writing community reviews for the emulation community, providing commentary on several sites, and even helping to write code and design simulations for the pinball simulation community. Most of my contributions can be seen at http://www.emuviews.com, where I wrote game reviews under the names Dorsola and KieferSkunk.

I'm what you might consider a second-generation video gamer - the popular systems in my childhood were the Intellivision and Coleco Vision, and my father was a game designer, so I had a lot of exposure to not just the games and systems themselves, but also a lot of the inner workings of the industry and a lot of its history. As such, I've considered myself somewhat of a secondary expert on a lot of this, though certainly not to the extent that someone like Marty Goldberg (Wikipedia user Wgungfu) is.

I first started contributing to Wikipedia in 2005, and like most new editors, I wanted to impart as much of my knowledge as I could to the rest of the community. This meant fleshing out the articles as much as possible, organizing information into easy-to-read tables, adding to character histories and in-universe storylines, even adding some of the more notable strategies. And at first, I was a bit offended when my new edits were deleted as being too detailed, trivial and/or against consensus. It took me a bit of time to get the hang of this consensus idea, but once I understood how the rest of the editing community there worked, the reasons for limiting the amount of information on Wikipedia actually made a lot of sense, and I've been much happier with my experience there ever since.

> (2)  Could you, as an administrator, give an example of an ideal > videogame entry on Wikipedia, and why you admire it?

First off, I'd like to point out that my being an admin on Wikipedia has nothing to do with the quality of articles or any value judgements I may make. I have no more authority over any of this content than a non-admin - I just hold a mop and bucket to perform cleanup tasks (like deleting pages and blocking users), following a fairly strict set of policies. Otherwise, I don't sit on any committees to approve content or what not.

I think my favorite example is the article on the "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" (Super Famicom for you UK folks), which became a Featured Article and made the front page of Wikipedia a while back. I helped with that one, mainly in copyediting and proofreading, but it was already in excellent shape when I came across it. It's a very comprehensive article, discussing not only the physical system itself, but its development history, notable points in Nintendo's advertising campaign against Sega, its notable games and accessories, and how it still has a loyal fan following today. It is well-sourced and points the reader to numerous articles all over the Net, as well as in print sources, where they can find more detailed and useful information to continue researching the topic.

> (3)  What proportion of Wikipedia's entries on videogames do you estimate > would get close to this quality bar?

I think a fairly large proportion (maybe 4 in 5 articles) have the chance to hit this level of quality. The problem isn't so much availability of information, but rather trying to get all the contributors on the same page as to what information is essential to understanding the subject. The SNES article works well because it's a rich and complex topic with a broad general interest. But there are many articles on specific video games where the games don't stand on their own in the same light, and not as much can be said about them without delving pretty deep into either game strategy or trivia.

> (4)  Is it appropriate to think of Wikipedia as a potential repository > for all corners of videogame history?

I think it depends on how detailed a history you're interested in. Wikipedia at one point was in "repository" mode, where any and all information was openly welcomed. Then it swung perhaps a bit too far to the other side of the spectrum, where most of the chaff (but also some of the real useful information) was deleted in favor of making the articles simple frameworks for cited information.

Overall, Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopedia, and as such, its purpose is to summarize a topic so the average layman can understand it, and to provide links to further resources so they can get more information if they so desire. A general decision was made some time back to limit the amount of information in a typical video game article because the average reader would not find button combinations or character biographies particularly interesting. They should be given the basic jist of the game, the cultural impact of the game, and any significant development history, and more detailed info should be relegated to gaming-specific wikis.

That said, I do think that all parts of video game history, from the obvious and mundane to the obscure, have a place on Wikipedia. If it's sourced and verifiable, it should be documented.

> (5)  Do you have a professional interest in videogames?

Definitely. I'm not currently working in the industry, but I do have some industry experience (I worked on "Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge" for the Xbox, and have had credits in several other games as well), and I have a long-standing interest in getting into full-on game development at some point. I am also an avid retro-gaming fan and very much enjoy exposing newer gamers to the things that I found fun when I was growing up.

> (6)  The contemporary material that surrounds videogames includes > developer interviews, fan reactions, internet ad campaigns, and dedicated > websites. > Do you think they're of any historic importance?

Absolutely! All of these pieces of information reflect not just on the games themselves, but the community they're made for and even today's culture in general. Much of today's culture was shaped by the games (and the technological innovations behind them), so it's important to show this impact from multiple points of view.

> (7)  Alternatively, in this context do you think "historically > important" is even an appropriate concept?

Yes. "Historically important", in my opinion, is another term for "notable".

> (8)  Do you think there's ever likely to be a centralised, > contribution-driven and authoritative internet source for games and their > history? If so, do you think the wiki will be the building block?

I think time will tell on that one. There are a number of sites already trying to fill this niche, but they only do so with limited success because of either the scope of their information or the reliability of their sources (actual or perceived). Wikipedia is probably the closest general-purpose site we have to this sort of thing right now, but as I mentioned earlier, it's suffering a bit from "too many cooks in the kitchen".

I think that wiki software is a very convenient and accessible engine to create such a resource, but I think that in order for a site to become truly authoritative and to be taken seriously, it would need to be organized more like a traditional information site, where information is published by an established group of people through a review process, rather than being open to the general public to edit. The exact means of publishing is secondary to the overall makeup of the site's contributors.

> (9)  Regardless of your answer to the above, if such a thing existed do > you consider the videogame community at large capable of contributing to > such a project or simply destroying it after a few years in a merry- > go-round of flame wars, reverts and disputed information?

Well, I think you pretty much nailed the current situation on Wikipedia, frankly. I certainly hold no particular allegiance to Wikipedia, and I've said for some time now that I think it's an interesting social experiment, and one that will very likely fail to become the authoritative source it wants to be, entirely because of such community bickering. The project is already heavily weighed down by frequent disagreements and flame wars that sometimes span dozens of pages.

I think the gaming community is capable of putting together a comprehensive archive of information, but frankly, it needs to do some growing up before it'll achieve that goal. There are a lot of industry veterans working alongside newer, younger fans who not only have different ideas on what's important, but also different values, ways of doing things, etc., and the two groups tend to clash a lot. I think when the younger generation matures a bit and starts seeing their own history in the same light as that of the older generation, the two groups will be able to collaborate on such a project much more easily.

In the meantime, we'll probably have to be content with the middle-ground we have now - myriads of specialized history sites developed and maintained by individuals and groups to whom the history is important, and Wikipedia as both a melting pot and a battleground for consolidating that information.

> (10) Is there anything obvious I've overlooked, or that you'd like to > add?

I think that's good for me for now. :) If I think of anything else, I'll be sure to send it your way.

> Obviously feel free to write as much as you want, particularly with the > latter questions, but please be aware that I'm only likely to quote two > or three lines of any given answer. So two or three lines is probably a > good answer length. I don't want you to spend ages writing something > awesome I'll only use a smidgen of it.

That's all right - I like writing about this stuff. And I figure if you have a lot of source material to choose from, you're more likely to find something that works for your article.

(Note: Some bits were snipped at the beginning and end of the email - these are just headers and administrative stuff, and do not pertain to the interview.)

&mdash; KieferSkunk (talk) &mdash; 23:10, 9 March 2009 (UTC)