Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Games/Infobox

{{Infobox Game
| title =
| subtitle = 
| image_link = 
| image_caption = 
| designer = 
| illustrator = 
| publisher = 
| players = 
| ages = 
| setup_time = 
| playing_time = 
| random_chance = 
| skills = 
| footnotes =
| bggid = 
| bggxrefs = 
}}

[edit] Syntax

Here is the current syntax for using this template:

1. Insert this starting as the first line of the article.
2. If no information is available, leave it blank (ex. "quote= ").
   • Don't wiki-link the subject_name parameter.
   • Do wiki-link the others parameters as needed.

Parameters in green are required fields.

[edit] Example

Example from Monopoly:

{{Infobox Game
| title = Monopoly
| subtitle = 
| image_link = [[Image:German Monopoly board in the middle of a game.jpg|300px]]
| image_caption = Players make their way around the Monopoly board, such as this [[Germany|German]] one.
| designer = 
| illustrator = 
| publisher = [[Parker Brothers]]
| players = 2–8
| ages = 
| setup_time = 5–15 minutes
| playing_time = 1.5–6 hours
| complexity = Medium
| strategy = High
| random_chance = Medium ([[Dice|dice rolling]], card drawing, luck)
| skills = [[Dice|Dice rolling]]<br>[[Mathematics|Counting]]<br>[[Social interaction|Social skills]]
| footnotes =
| bggid = 1406
| bggxrefs = 
}}

Suggestions for taxobox entries:

[edit] Suggestion #1 (Netoholic)

(see Don't Break the Ice (game) for an example)

• Name - official name of the game (not the exact article name)
• Category - right now, linking the [[Category:Section]] (can easily be boilerplated)
• # of Players - straight from game's rules (how to handle team games?)
• Age range - recommendation... usually will be "# +" (change to "Minimum Age"?)
• Setup time - < 5 minutes, ... estimated time in 5-minute increments ..., > one hour
• Playing time - < 5 minutes, ... estimated time in 5-minute increments ..., > one hour
• Difficulty level - (measure of rules comprehension needed) Easy, Average, Hard (or Novice, Intermediate, Expert)
• Strategy level - Low, Medium, High
• Random chance - (what impact random chance has on the game) None, Some,
• Skills required - (some examples... Manual dexterity, Strategic thought, Dice rolling, Memory, Team play) We'd need to build a standard list.

[edit] Discussion

Here's my two cents' worth.

• Name - good as stated.
• Category - good as stated.
• Number of players - also good.
• Age range - This should only be stated explicitly for explicitly juvenile games. Games for adults usually don't have an age requirement other than the minimum intelligence demanded by the difficulty and strategy level.

Many games come with recommendations like "Ages 3-6". These are usually learning games which tend to bore older children and adults, although those ages could play technically play it. People will know this, so I don't think we need to say it explicitly. I'd say keep this for all games, adult and juvenile alike. The idea would be to mimic the stated age guidelines (if any) or to designate a reasonable minumum age. -- Netoholic 21:39, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Setup time - good as stated.
• Playing time - We should have a timescale with markers increasing at a roughly exponential rate, viz.: <5 min, 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 hr, 2 hr, 3 hr, 4 hr, 5 hr, >5 hr. Each game's duration should be stated as an interval from one marker to another, viz.: <5 min to 15 min, 30 min to 1 hr.

I don't like interval time because its often too hard to judge. Modifying my original proposal, I'd prefer less granularity in favor of a general scale, something like <5 min, 10 min, 20 min, 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, >1 hr. Games that take over one hour are very hard to narrow down to a specific range, and the distinction will often not matter. -- Netoholic 21:39, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Okay, but maybe ditch the 45 min classification. --Smack 18:30, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Difficulty level - Fine, but call this rules complexity.

Good suggestion. -- Netoholic 21:39, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Strategy level - This should be called strategy depth, and based on the following sole parameter: the number of layers of tactic and countertactic that the game affords. The scale should be something like this: None (there's only one right way to do this), Shallow (you can scheme a bit to improve your chances, but the other players can't do anything about it), Substantial, Profound.

I don't think people could gauge the levels based on your chosen words. Prefer something a bit more relatable. Perhaps a simple scale of 1-5 for all these "level" definitions? -- Netoholic 21:39, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

1 to 5 could be done, but I think that if we adopt any arbitrary classifications at all, we'll need a sort of glossary page in the Wikipedia namespace, regardless of how we do them. --Smack 18:29, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Random chance - good as stated.
• Skills required - also good as stated. --Smack 20:02, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Has it been decided what the titles of the various levels of strategy, difficulty, etc. are? Or are the ones that have been chosen for the infobox'd games pretty arbitrary? 209.114.249.74 19:51, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion #2 ()

[edit] Discussion

[edit] May I...

May I use this Infobox as a starting point for my own infobox?

Sure, go ahead. :-) — Frecklefoot | Talk 19:03, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] My $.02...

I know this isn't the best place to discuss this, but I didn't see a talk page. I just saw this infobox on the Cluedo page and, may I say, it's incredibly drab. Hues of gray? Games are supposed to be fun! Please see my Infobox for Arcade games as an example of something more colorful. Please come up with a different color scheme, but don't be afraid to use colors! :-)

Also, I'd like to suggest an additional item: Alternate names. This particularly would be useful for Cluedo, where it is known as "Clue" in North America. Most North Americans have never heard of a game called "Cluedo" and only know it by the shorter name. If a game has no "alternate name," the field can be left out (just like the image entry is). Thoughts? — Frecklefoot | Talk 19:03, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Margin-bottom

The infobox hits the category box on short pages like Java (board game) so I've added 0.5em to the bottom margin.

[edit] Design and illustration credits

As a game designer and illustrator, don't we think it's important who designed and illustrated these things. (I do! ;-) ) I would think that would be a valuable bit of information to put in an infobox. --Yekrats 16:45, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Would we be able to provide that information for every game? (not being sarcastic, I just really wouldn't know where to look for that) If the information were already part of the articles, your idea might be a possibility. -- Netoholic @ 17:06, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)

I love giving credit where it is due (for example, I hate it when mags don't credit people for illustrations), but I doubt this information is readily available. Also, most art for arcade games was produced by a group of people or a department, and most were not credited in the game. Unfortunately, their names are just lost.

Therefore, I don't think it's a good idea to add this to the infobox. The number of games for which we could find the artists is diminishingly small. :-( For the few games we can find this info, it should just be noted in the article text. — Frecklefoot | Talk 17:41, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

The website BoardGameGeek (http://boardgamegeek.com) has information on just about any game, with designer credits for about every game under the sun. (Some, naturally are listed as "uncredited" but most have been tracked down.) Designer credit is extremely important, can be easily tracked down in most cases. For example, see the BGG entry on Java.

I concede that illustration credit would be somewhat harder to track down, but I've found many at Funagain, an online game retailer. (According to the Funagain site, Java was illustrated by Franz Vohwinkel, a prolific game illustrator. --Yekrats 6 July 2005 02:32 (UTC)

I second the move to include designer in the info box. It is basic info that should be available for most games. --Millsdavid 05:32, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Me too, only I would call it Creator since it's a more generic term - that would allow you to state "Persians" in the case of chess. (I think design hadn't been "invented" back then.) -- Tintazul 17:13, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Agree — Designer (or creator) should be added to the infobox. Val42 20:42, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Using syntax I borrowed from {{otheruses4}}, I've been able to add "publisher" and "designer" as optional parameters, as well as making "ages" and "image_caption" optional. Percy Snoodle 08:52, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Age range

For commercially produced, proprietary games, one can put in the age range that is printed on the box. But who decides the age range of a classic board game such as chess, or a playground game such as Chinese whispers? For example, at the moment chess is "Recommended for 8 years or older". Recommended by whom? On the other hand, xiangqi has "Any" down here. It would seem that this attribute is largely, if not completely, a matter of opinion. -- Smjg 12:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] bggid

User:AmbientArchitecture recently added a bggid parameter. I'm uneasy about this for a few reasons:

• It's a duplication of effort, given the {{bgg}} family of templates.
• It's inflexible; many games have different BGG IDs for the different editions, and some articles cover families of games rather than the games themselves.
• There are a few wikipedians who regard BGG links as linkspam - see Wikipedia talk:Counter Vandalism Unit/Archive 3#HELP!. I'm not one of them, and I for the moment the consensus is against them, but promoting the BGG links outside the external link section might fuel their arguments.

I haven't reverted the edits; instead I've matched the style against the equivalent IMDB ID section from {{Infobox film}}, whose existence is probably the best argument in favour of the parameter. However, I thought it best to discuss it here to gain consensus about whether we really want this parameter in the template. Percy Snoodle 09:02, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

What's the reasoning behind the 'sup' change, whatever that is? This again seems to radically decrease usefuless. AmbientArchitecture 14:31, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

It's to cover articles on multiple games, or games with lots of spinoffs. In those cases, set bggid to "template" and it'll take you to the bgg template in the exlinks. If there's just the one exlink, set bggid numerically as before, and it will work as it did before. No decrease in usefulness, just another mode of use. Percy Snoodle 15:00, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I see, now what you did originally -- and your arguments about "inflexibility" and "duplication" -- makes more sense to me. It's not really a different mode of use, but different functionality altogether. What your doing is more akin to citations or a jump to a list of references, while what I was trying to do was simply to provide the BGG ID for the game specified in the title of the article, along with a like to the corresponding article on BGG as a convenience. You should continue to evolve the latter as you wish (as bggxrefs), I've reinstated the former (as bggid) as I originally intended it. I've also reduced the importance of both by making them smaller and putting them at the end with footnotes, which seems more in keeping with some of the issues you brought up initially. (See Carcassonne for an example of both in use.) AmbientArchitecture 17:50, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Although I disagree with splitting them up (I understand why you did it, I just disagree) I've left them split; Either you or Grimhelm had restyled it so it no longer matched the IMDB style, and inserted whitespace that broke it on every game article; I've fixed both those issues. Percy Snoodle 09:26, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Why does it have to match the IMDB style? What's a "profile"? I'm really not following the motivations for your changes: they seem not to be guided by the desire to convey information. I made the BGG ID visible because it represents useful information about the game, but you've hidden it behind the word "profile"; my changes in formatting were intended to produce a result that was attractive and readable, yours seem motivated by the desire to match the IMDB style. If there's a reason that this has to follow the IMDB style, I'll leave it as is. Otherwise I'd like to restore the "= <bggid>" form that I had earlier. I'll still leave the formatting as is for the time being though to see how it works. But my feeling is that this organization of information (driven by the IMDB style) is inferior: keeping footnotes, external database IDs, and links to internal references all together "below the line" makes sense to me (though I can be talked out of that).

The reason I've gone for "profile" over some arbitrary number is that the BGG ID itself conveys no information - it's just the order in which the game was added to BGG, and is otherwise meaningless. As regards the rest, I think we've reached a compromise in the current version of the template. Percy Snoodle 10:06, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

That makes sense, though the number is still useful. I'll think about it. But something other that "profile" would be better. Profiles are for people, aren't they? Perhaps "BGG entry" or "On BGG" or something along those lines? AmbientArchitecture 11:47, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Profile isn't person-specific, and I dispute that the number is useful; I wouldn't object to "entry", though. Percy Snoodle 13:26, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Done! AmbientArchitecture 15:12, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent edits

Down10 has recently been making some edits which Aldaron has brought to my attention as they break the look of the template in various ways for him. I have reverted some of these changes, though not all - some of them have been great edits, such as adding the template to the Game templates category. I think it would be a good idea for the two of you to discuss what you think should be done here, before more changes are made to the article. Percy Snoodle 08:51, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Percy's recent edits address most of my concerns. One concern that remains is that Down10's changes have introduced padding around the infobox image that creates too much whitespace, which is not only unappealing, but prevents that image from lining up vertically with same-sized thumbnails farther down the page on the right. AmbientArchitecture 12:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Complexity and depth

Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Board and table games#how is rules complexity and strategy depth calculated? Percy Snoodle 13:24, 14 December 2006 (UTC)