Game Article Starter

Genre Icons (for ideas, see IFWiki:Genre)

Award Icons (for ideas, see IFWiki:Competition icons)

PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS PAGE DIRECTLY UNLESS THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES TO THE STYLE RECOMMENDATIONS.
Just copy and paste into the game page you are adding. You can copy the entire page by using the "edit" tab at the top of the page instead of the edit links by each section.

Title
Subtitle, if any

This restatement of the title is only needed if the game title is too long to use as the page title. See the Games (style guide) page for other suggested uses of the "first paragraph" section, and for guidance on style for game articles in general. Remember to use crosslinks to other articles (for the Author, System, etc.) whenever possible. Example crosslinks have been omitted in most parts of this blank in order to avoid creating redlink pages for nonsense entries or adding nonsense links to real pages.

Commonly Known Title
Author(s)	Author Crosslink
Publisher(s)
Release date(s)	Year
Authoring system	System Crosslink (with version number)
Platform(s)	Platform Crosslink (with version number)
Language(s)
License(s)
Multimedia
Color effects
Graphics
Sound/Music
Ratings
Cruelty scale	Cruelty to be determined

How It Begins

This section should contain a short description of how the game begins. Avoid spoilers and do not simply provide a textdump or screenshot from the game. See the relevant section of the Games (style guide) for detailed specifications for this section.

Notable Features

This section is a stub. You can help by adding to it.

This optional section may be used to list ways in which this game does things differently from the normal IF game. Think about all the features of the game, including the game mechanics and game display.

Trivia and Comments

This section is a stub. You can help by adding to it.

Optional section for miscellaneous stuff we want to say about the game that doesn't easily fit into any of the other sections. In a bulleted list, please.

Author's Comments

Completely optional; this section should only be completed by (or at the request of) the game's author(s). Please avoid spoilers and secrets.

Versions

This section is a stub. You can help by adding to it.

Version Name

• Game Title (authors/porters/etc; release date; platform; language if not English).
  • Additional credits, e.g: Illustrator or Musician, if any.
  • Testers: List of credited beta-testers, if any.
  • Release 1 / Serial number 060718 / Inform 7 build 3T38 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/10N)
  • {{babel|ifid=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}}
  • Competition: Where it placed (out of X games), and which awards it received.
  • Download 69105Keys.zblorb from the IF Archive
  • Files: List of filenames (filesize; optional short description; download links).
  • Format used on other entries:Download Alabaster.zip

Additional notes about this version can appear after the formal bulleted list.

Versions should be listed in chronological order, oldest version first.

Further reading

Optional section for a bulleted list of off-line references to the game.

Links

General Information

• Homepage of the game. This link, if available, should go first.
• Author's Notes page, if any, and if different from the homepage.

• Links to database sites and other wikis. IFWiki provides a handful of templates for adding the appropriate links (enter links in bulleted lists, table is just for clarity of examples):

This template...	renders like this.
{{baf game|Adventure|1}}	Adventure (archived) - at Baf's Guide
{{baf wanted}}	Baf's Guide line wanted. (Please replace this line with a baf game template.)
{{ifdb game|Jigsaw|28uhmejlntcbccqm}}	Jigsaw - at IFDB
{{TUID wanted}}	TUID wanted. (Please replace this line with a ifdb game template.)
{{ifwizz|Klub Karisma|klub-karisma-(2008-de)}}	Klub Karisma - at ifwizz interactive fiction (in German)
{{hotud game|Galatea|21951}}	Galatea - at Home of the Underdogs
{{WoS game|The Jade Necklace|0006500}}	The Jade Necklace - at World of Spectrum

• Wikipedia listing of the game, if applicable
• Feelies page, if applicable.
• other similar links

Reviews

• Links to other reviews about this game. Don't re-include links to Baf's Guide or IFDB a second time; those belong in the General info subsection. The preferred order of this section is by the reviewer's surname.
• IF Ratings listing of the game. Suggestion: use the ifratings game template to insert the link to a game,
  eg: {{ifratings game|Adventure|1}} will turn into:
  • Adventure - at IF Ratings
• Links to r*if threads about this game.
• Optional shoutout. At the top of the reviews list, it is permissible to use the shoutout template to quote a single sentence from one of the reviews listed. The shoutout should also name the quote's author. Shoutouts should be used sparingly, not include spoilers, and help whet the reader's appetite to read one of the listed reviews.

• Reviews on other sites should be entered in the form "Review - by Author." with the author cross-linked to their IFWiki page if they have one. Make the link as specific as possible- it should take the reader directly to the relevant review, if possible, or to a page containing an obvious link to the review itself.

Spoilers

• The spoiler page for this game, if any.
• Links to hints, solutions, and walkthroughs, labeled as to their type.

Series Box

Most games aren't part of a series or set. However, if a game does belong to a series, an appropriate series box template should be inserted after the Links section. A series box should be a table centered horizontally on the page, contain the name of the series, contain a link to each game in the series, and, y'know, look nice. Here's an example of a series box, specified via {{Earth and Sky series}}:

Earth and Sky series by Paul O'Brian
Earth and Sky (2001)	Another Earth, Another Sky (2002)	Luminous Horizon (2004)

Such templates should also belong to the Game series templates category; see that category for more examples.

Stub Template

If you are not filling out all the core information for this game, use the Game Stub template to indicate the sections that are empty, and to add the article to the Game Stubs category. Remove the "nowiki" commands before and after the template below to activate it, and edit it to indicate which sections are still missing. Delete this paragraph and the section heading- they are just to call this out from the section above. If you are filling in all four of these sections completely, the article is not a stub, and you can delete the template as well.

{{game stub|Genres, How It Begins, Notable Features, full version info}}

Categories

(In the actual page, there is no need to have a section header for this- you can delete the one above, along with all the guidance info below. All you should end up with is a single line of categories within their brackets, with spaces between categories.)

• First, all games should be listed in Games.
• NO Games by author or publisher: In general, there is no need to create category pages like "Douglas Adams games" or "Level 9 games" since those games should already be listed on the author's or publisher's page as appropriate.
  • However, there is Co-written games for games by two or more authors.
• Games by year: Add games to the appropriate "Games in year" category, where year is the year when the game was originally released. For example: Games in 2006.
• Games by authoring system: Add games to the appropriate "Authoring system games" category(ies), where authoring system is an IF authoring system. For example: ADRIFT 4 games. We will distinguish between Inform 6 games and Inform 7 games.
  • Also, if a game was ported from one authoring system to another, add the game to Ported games.
• Commercial games is for any commercial or former commercial game.
• Games by platform: Add games to appropriate "Platform games" category(ies), where platform is a major IF platform. For example: Z-code games. When the authoring system and the platform are the same, eg: TADS 2 games, then you only have to add it the once; there will be overlap.
• Games by language: Add games to appropriate "Language games" category(ies) where language is any human language except English. For example: Italian games.
  • Also, if a game was translated from one language to another, add the game to Translated games.
• Games by competition: This refers to games from recurring competitions, eg: IF Comp games, IF Art Show games, Speed-IF games, etc. There may also be award categories, eg: XYZZY Award winning games as appropriate. Do not make categories for one-time competitions; that just duplicates info from an existing page.
  • This rule used to be more restrictive to just a couple comps, but it made no sense to be that restrictive when we're being so much more lenient with authoring system and platform categories.
• Games by genre: If you've used the genre icons at the top, the page will be added to the appropriate genre categories automatically. However, if the game begins with an article, you'll have to add them to the appropriate genre categories manually, eg: Drama or One-room.

How should articles sort within a category?

• For the majority of pages about games, no special action is needed to make the game page name appear correctly within a category page.
• If the game's title begins with an article like "A", "An", "The", "La", "Le", "Les", etc., we want the page sorted as if the leading article wasn't there. For example, we want "The Moonlit Tower" to sort as if it were called "Moonlit Tower" so it sorts under M, not T.
  • EXCEPTION: There seems to be some confusion with titles that begin with an Olde-English "Ye" or a faux-article like the Franglais "Ze". Because of this confusion, and because many people do not seem to consider "Ye" or "Ze" to be an article like "The", we'll pretend such words are adjectives and rule that games beginning with "Ye" should be sorted under Y and games beginning with "Ze" be sorted under Z.
• If a game's title uses words in all-capital letters, we prefer that it sort as if the title were in title-case. That means we want "TRUDGE" to sort as "Trudge", we want "DEATH DEATH DEATH DEATH" to sort as "Death Death Death Death", and so on.
• Same deal if the game's title is all-lowercase. We want "an apple from nowhere" to sort as "Apple From Nowhere".
• Furthermore, accented letters ought to sort as their unaccented equivalents. For example, "La bête du Gévaudan" should sort as "Bete Du Gevaudan"; "Möbius" should sort as "Moebius".
• If a game is untitled, we don't want its page sorting under "U" or ("u") for "untitled". Instead, to force untitled games to list first, we want it sorted under the space character. So we want "untitled (speed.gam)" should sort as if it were " untitled (speed.gam)"

Fine. I know how I want the page sorted. How do I specify the new name to sort by?

By using MediaWiki's clever magic word DEFAULTSORT, for example:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Moonlit Tower}}

CAREFUL! That's not a template. {{DEFAULTSORT:sortname}} is a magic word recognized by the MediaWiki software. And note that there's a colon, not a pipe-character between the DEFAULTSORT and the sortname.

If you need to override the sorting for a particular category for some reason, you can still specify the sortname within a Category tag as usual. For example:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Moonlit Tower}}

[[Category:Games]]

[[Category:Games by true name|The Moonlit Tower}}