Game reference list (style guide)

This style guide is about a game reference list as a whole. There are two main issues:

• Which order should the list be in? Alphabetic by title, alphabetic by author, chronological, or reverse chronological?
• What presentation to use? A bulleted list, a numbered list, or a table?

(For how to format the game references themselves, see Game reference (style guide).)

The current prefered format for game reference lists is, in summary:

• Author Credits sections on pages for individual people should be a bulleted list in chronological order.
• Competition pages that ranked their games should use a numbered list in the ranking order. (In some rare circumstances, a table might be prefered instead of a list, but the ranking order should still be used when known.)
• The Current events page uses bulleted reverse chronological lists for its Games Released section; see Current events (style guide).
• The default format— which is explicitly used for Game Released pages—is a bulleted list in alphabetical order by title.

Alphabetical order

This section is under construction.

When ordering a game reference list into alphabetical order by title, please use the following guidelines:

• Make no distinction between upper and lowercase letters. "HOUSE" and "house" should sort into the same place.
• House of Doom goes before Housekeeper because space is less than K.
• If the first word is a definite or indefinite article, ignore it. Examples:
  • The House goes under H for "house".
  • A Day for Soft Food goes under D for "day for soft food".
• Treat underscores as spaces.
• Ignore embedded periods and apostrophes. For example, A.S.D.F.A. is sorted as if it were ASDFA.
• Digits are treated as their own characters which sort before the alphabet. Do not spell out the number. K9 Patrol goes before Kallisti.
• In German titles, "ö" should be treated as "oe", "ü" should be treated as "ue", and "ß" should be treated as "ss".
• All other accented letters should be treated as if they did not have accents.
• If titles are completely identical except one has a leading article, then that one goes second. For example, Tomb of Death goes before The Tomb of Death.

Chronological order

This section is under construction.

Platform links

In most lists of game references, several games might be made for the same platform. For example, you might have several games that target the Z-code platform. But only the first reference in the list needs to be a wiki link. All subsequent platform references in the same list should be left as plain text, unlinked.

This is a change from how we used to originally do it. But really, we don't need multiple identical links to the same platform in any given list. And isn't it cleaner to just link the first one?