Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20080409

Project at a Glance

As of 2008-04-07, the project has:

Featured Articles, Lists, and Topics Candidates and Reviews

Changes to Featured and Good articles, lists, and topics in March

News

Current proposals and discussions

• Well, gee, thanks 1up!
  1UP.com has recently changed their rating scale. A list of affected articles can be found here. See discussion for details.
• Inactive project cleanup
  Proposal to consolidate inactive projects and taskforces. Project page can be found here.

Feature

The Importance of the Lead

The lead is one of the most important parts of any Wikipedia article; its job to summarize the article in 2 to 3 paragraphs in order to familiarize the reader with the structure of the content that you will providing them as well as to give a quick one-minute overview of the topic. Many articles that are processed through Good Article or Featured Article assessments will be heavily scrutinized for a poor lead section.

For articles dealing with video games, a common practice has developed for leads, being a 3-paragraph discussion.

First paragraph

The first paragraph should state the name of the game (using both bold (to identify the article's name) and italics as per the manual of style), along with any other alternate names the game may go by. The genre of the game should be clearly identified as well as the developer and the publisher. If a notable person has been cited by the game as having worked on the game's development (such as Tim Schafer or David Jaffe), this should also be noted. Release dates should be given, along with the release of any ports, remakes, or sequels.

Second paragraph

The second paragraph should summarize the plot briefly in one or two sentences; a high level overview is only needed to set the stage for further discussion. One or two sentences should be included to discuss the gameplay, including any notable features of the game.

Third paragraph

The third paragraph should cover the reception of the game, citing its general critical reaction and any significantly notable successful or failing elements in the game. If the game has won awards, this aspect can be noted, but specific mention of any award is discouraged.

This approach should help you to write a good lead for nearly any game, though this may need to be altered for other games. If there's not a lot of reception information for a game, it may be worthwhile to combine the listed first and third paragraphs into one paragraph. There may be need to talk more about an aspect not normally covered in video game articles (such as with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)) which should be noted in the lead.

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