The bulk update request #982 is active.

Reason: This has been brought up in so many threads, so putting it to a vote has been a long time coming. No other similar tag plays by the same rules as video games: anime and cartoon are invalid, movie is disambiguated (with the disclaimer that If a character or scene from a movie is depicted add the appropriate copyright tag instead.), book is only used for books that are physically depicted in the post, television show is so woefully undertagged that it can't reasonably be used as an example, and so on. visual novel exists, but that's a type of video game too, so it's getting the same treatment here.

There's no reason for video game franchises to imply video games, not on a site that enforces tagging what you see. If you don't see a video game, video game should not be tagged.

(this BUR wouldn't have been possible without BitWolfy's Alias Reverser tool)

EDIT: The bulk update request #982 (forum #311372) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

Incidentally, game_freak and gamefreak are alaised to video games... for some reason? I didn't want to add another potential debate into this BUR, but I'd be interested in examining this later.

strikerman said:
Incidentally, game_freak and gamefreak are alaised to video games... for some reason? I didn't want to add another potential debate into this BUR, but I'd be interested in examining this later.

Either it was a mistake and they should've been implicated, or perhaps because Pokemon implicates Nintendo as the "owner" of the franchise, while GameFreak is a developer of a subset of the games. But to avoid people tagging GameFreak on everything Pokemon regardless if it's a game GF made or not, and to avoid an implication web (Pokemon is technically co-owned by Nintendo, GameFreak, and Creatures Inc, while the "stewards" of the franchise is The Pokemon Company, which is comprised of those three companies, and Nintendo has a stake in Creatures; it's all very complicated and unclear who's in control of what), GameFreak was aliased away and Nintendo is tagged for Pokemon content to keep it simple. But it does leave GameFreak hanging for non-Pokemon content (e.g. Little Town Hero).

strikerman said:
No other similar tag plays by the same rules as video games

Well, there's webcomic. Though I always found that tag bad, so I suppose it's not a good counterpoint. Unrelated content lumped into one tag simply because they happen to be from a web comic. The tag's about as nonsensical as a newspaper tag being used for strips posted in newspaper. (Let's imply garfield_(series) to newspaper?)

genjar said:
Well, there's webcomic.

Ah, forgot about that one.

Well, that's next >:D

genjar said:
Well, there's webcomic.

That was even worse. The webcomic tag originally was meant for posts with a webcomic character. For example, a post with flora_(twokinds) should've had the webcomic tag even if the image is not part of any comic. This was recently "fixed" with BUR #340, where webcomic characters were moved to the webcomic_character tag and webcomic was left to be for the comics themselves. Not to mention, the webcomic tag further confuses things since e6 doesn't allow "webcomics" to be posted here, with the definition of a "webcomic" being a comic hosted exclusively on a specialized hosting site where the author makes money on it, but the webcomic tag doesn't follow that definition and is tagged on comics that come from FA or DA or whatever regardless.

There's also the comic tag, though that at least makes sense as it indicates an image depicting an event or sequence of events that visually tells a story.

-1

I do not believe we should dismantle a subject that we went through so much trouble to build up. I feel we should be building on concepts and making them better, not tearing them down. I don't see any constructive purpose to this BUR, so it wont have my support.

thevileone said:
I do not believe we should dismantle a subject that we went through so much trouble to build up. I feel we should be building on concepts and making them better, not tearing them down. I don't see any constructive purpose to this BUR, so it wont have my support.

Are you able to discuss how it can be fixed/improved/"built up"? As it is, it's a fairly useless tag that covers distinctly separate topics (the actual physical games and depictions of games, vs non-game representations of characters or settings that appeared in a game), and seemingly arbitrarily applied (e.g. any depiction of a pokemon gets tagged video games, even though the Pokemon franchise has grown far beyond games, the games aren't even the biggest revenue source anymore, and the actual art isn't depicting a game-like setting; it's equal to images tagged because of a random character playing Pokemon Red on a Gameboy, or a poster advertising Pokemon plushies or a TCG tournament).

The tag isn't being deleted/invalidated, but it's being tightened up and clarified to refer specifically to video games and depictions of video games, rather than anything that may be distantly related to a video game somewhere. This is making it better.

watsit said:
The tag isn't being deleted/invalidated, but it's being tightened up and clarified to refer specifically to video games and depictions of video games, rather than anything that may be distantly related to a video game somewhere. This is making it better.

^

thevileone said:
I do not believe we should dismantle a subject that we went through so much trouble to build up. I feel we should be building on concepts and making them better, not tearing them down. I don't see any constructive purpose to this BUR, so it wont have my support.

I do not believe that a conceptually bad tag is worth keeping just because a lot of effort was put into making it this bad.

I like having this around, but I have no strong reason to keep it.

This sort of shit is the cause of so many blacklist woes. Well, the alias end of this bullshit anyway. Nuke it from orbit. As far as I'm concerned, even in the proper context it's as useful for searching as "grass" or "bedsheet".

I've been on the fence about doing this myself for a while but always thought it'd be too controversial. I'd even be down for invalidating it - other tags like playing_video_games provide a better description of its usage.

faucet said:
I've been on the fence about doing this myself for a while but always thought it'd be too controversial. I'd even be down for invalidating it - other tags like playing_video_games provide a better description of its usage.

That might've been a bit too controversial, at least for this BUR. I do think there's value to having the independent video games tag and tightening it up to only be used with physical depictions of games (similar to book).

As I've said before, as currently applied, video_games usually violates TWYS. It should only be tagged when there is an actual video game appearing in the post, not whenever a character associated with a video game appears in the picture. It's similar logic to why we don't imply characters to species. Just as a character can be shown as another species or be cosplayed by a character of another species, so can a character be shown in some medium other than a video game or even outside of one altogether.

furrin_gok said:
I like having this around, but I have no strong reason to keep it.

I notice I never clarified my stance here very well. There's a range of what can be considered:

• playing video games
• Friday Night Funkin', which at the moment is purely video game.
• Mario Bros, which is almost purely video games.
• Sonic the Hedgehog, which has a large number of comics and cartoons

Personally, I like the idea of the tag sticking around for everything, but it at least should cover the first three still. Sure, it's a lore topic, not something about tagging what you know, but finding things that originated from a video game concept is still an idea.

furrin_gok said:
Personally, I like the idea of the tag sticking around for everything, but it at least should cover the first three still.

I don't think we need a single tag covering all three or four of those disparate things. Playing video games already has its own tag, and the depiction of a game can still fall under video games. I don't see the point in having one tag covering both of those separate things as well as anything else with some relation to a video game, like someone's own character being a species that started out in a video game but has moved onto many other media platforms (and more generally into the public sphere completely divorced from its video game beginnings). It seems useless to have a single tag covering Princess Zelda, Lucario, Rathalos, and more that have no relation to each other, except each have appeared in a video game. Or at least have a form that appeared in a video game, because there are depictions that are specifically referencing non-game incarnations that are getting the tag all the same. And if an implication would sometimes cause a bad tag, it's a bad implication, and there's plenty here when it comes to the video_games tag. As it is, there's still a bunch of Sally Acorn posts tagged with video games, despite her only appearing in cartoons and comics, because Sonic implies Sega, which used to imply video games until two years ago.

Honestly, if/when this BUR goes through, I think there needs to be a mass cleanout/deletion of the video_games tag and basically start over with it. Nintendo alone accounts for 361k posts with the tag, and Pokemon (which implicates Nintendo) being 264k of that, the vast majority of which would likely not remain valid. To say nothing of other companies. I don't see any way a manual cleanup could hope to dent it before the heat death of the universe (if invalid_tag is anything to go by, with how slow it's taking to get cleaned up manually).

watsit said:
It seems useless to have a single tag covering Princess Zelda, Lucario, Rathalos, and more that have no relation to each other, except each have appeared in a video game.

By that logic, Nintendo, Sega, and Rareware are useless tags as well. Some crossover games are debatable as well, at least characters interact with each other in those games, but they aren't official products of each characters' series. Smash Bros at least has its own characters like Galeem and Dharkon, but what about others, like Playstation All-stars?
Even ignoring the video game portion, what connection to Mario, Link, and Samus have? Mario resides in the Mushroom Kingdom universe, Link in the Hyrule universe, and Samus in the Metroid universe. Those short crossovers are the only times they interact in the same world.

As it is, there's still a bunch of Sally Acorn posts tagged with video games, despite her only appearing in cartoons and comics, because Sonic implies Sega, which used to imply video games until two years ago.

I could see throwing the implication to characters instead of franchises over this. Sonic is a video game character, but Sally is not.

furrin_gok said:
I could see throwing the implication to characters instead of franchises over this. Sonic is a video game character, but Sally is not.

But Sonic's also appeared in movies and cartoons and comics and plenty of other media. I'd argue some people (particularly comic fans) wouldn't recognize him has a video game character.

furrin_gok said:
By that logic, Nintendo, Sega, and Rareware are useless tags as well.

Except they're the legal owners of various IPs. Just as we tag the artist of the image, we tag the legal copyright owners of the characters/things depicted.

furrin_gok said:
Some crossover games are debatable as well, at least characters interact with each other in those games, but they aren't official products of each characters' series. Smash Bros at least has its own characters like Galeem and Dharkon, but what about others, like Playstation All-stars?

I'm not sure what you mean here?

furrin_gok said:
Even ignoring the video game portion, what connection to Mario, Link, and Samus have? Mario resides in the Mushroom Kingdom universe, Link in the Hyrule universe, and Samus in the Metroid universe. Those short crossovers are the only times they interact in the same world.

They're characters owned by Nintendo, so we tag Nintendo as having the Copyright on the characters like we tag the artist as being the Artist of the image.

watsit said:
I'm not sure what you mean here?

How do you handle cross-over games, if the characters don't come from said game? Mario's from Mario Bros, but if he's standing on a battlefield fighting Samus, is that enough to be Smash Bros?

They're characters owned by Nintendo, so we tag Nintendo as having the Copyright on the characters like we tag the artist as being the Artist of the image.

They're also characters originating from Video Games, so they've been tagged with Video Games. "Video game" is more of a concept than a publisher, owner, etc, but it's just as relevant as Nintendo.

furrin_gok said:
How do you handle cross-over games, if the characters don't come from said game? Mario's from Mario Bros, but if he's standing on a battlefield fighting Samus, is that enough to be Smash Bros?

If the battlefield is designed as it appeared in one of the Smash Bros games, sure. Otherwise, if it's just Mario and Samus facing off with no direct reference to Smash Bros, I'd say no.

furrin_gok said:
They're also characters originating from Video Games, so they've been tagged with Video Games. "Video game" is more of a concept than a publisher, owner, etc, but it's just as relevant as Nintendo.

I disagree. Tagging Nintendo as the owner is providing proper copyright attribution, which is a legal requirement in some places, and in other places is still a good thing to do to help keep your nose clean. It also at least says something about the character, in as much as Nintendo is willing to associate their name with it (if not were directly responsible for their design/creation). Which, granted, doesn't say a ton, but "video games" is even more nebulous, telling you even less than that.

The great thing about a "nebulous tag" like this, it's a dead end tag. You can completely ignore it if you don't like it, but that doesn't mean it's entirely useless to everybody else. The only tag being implied is video games, there's no further chain beyond that to things you might want to blacklist or search without getting mixed results.

I probably should disclaimer that I'm For this BUR before nosediving into semantics, on the grounds that specific companies aren't firmly rooted in the one thing
This poster features every Nintendo product made at the time it was printed, the beginning of 1890.

watsit said:
Tagging Nintendo as the owner is providing proper copyright attribution, which is a legal requirement in some places, and in other places is still a good thing to do to help keep your nose clean.

Feels like I'm butting into the middle of something but I find the common-use terminology counterintuitive when copyright applies only to specific depictions. In that context copyright attribution is most closely fulfilled with artist tags, or often if the piece itself is official_art, the copyright: tag for the owning entity.
Nintendo might claim to automatically own copyright to fanart, but in actuality they'd have to sue to obtain it, and they're less likely to push through with that than mailing out scare-takedowns. ^{(Not to say that yiffartist69 should take the opportunity to square off against Nintendo's Elite Task Force of Hypercorporate Lawyers}

What's more the question is what the site's obligation for trademark (the connected defining features of a character or IP element) attribution and protection is.
But this is all off-topic for the thread and already moot as e621 policy is to process takedowns before reaching even the level of DMCA claims regardless of definitive legal Copyright or Trademark status.

I browse the "Video games" tag every single day :/

sexygriffon said:
I browse the "Video games" tag every single day :/

Well, if you were to look at the front page right now, you would see results for pokémon, animal_crossing, monster_hunter, warframe, fortnite, tokyo_afterschool_summoners, dragon_quest, night_in_the_woods, conker's_bad_fur_day, warcraft, mario_bros, rayman_(series), five_nights_at_freddy's, undertale, the_elder_scrolls, far_beyond_the_world_(series), star_fox, freedom_planet, genshin_impact, sonic_the_hedgehog_(series), the_legend_of_zelda, deltarune, four pictures of OCs playing game consoles without any game characters present, and in the time it took me to compile that list a final_fantasy picture was posted.

So you're saying you're a fan of all of those things at once? And yet you do not also want to see any of the far greater number of characters who have not appeared in at least one video game?

wat8548 said:
Well, if you were to look at the front page right now, you would see results for pokémon, animal_crossing, monster_hunter, warframe, fortnite, tokyo_afterschool_summoners, dragon_quest, night_in_the_woods, conker's_bad_fur_day, warcraft, mario_bros, rayman_(series), five_nights_at_freddy's, undertale, the_elder_scrolls, far_beyond_the_world_(series), star_fox, freedom_planet, genshin_impact, sonic_the_hedgehog_(series), the_legend_of_zelda, deltarune, four pictures of OCs playing game consoles without any game characters present, and in the time it took me to compile that list a final_fantasy picture was posted.

So you're saying you're a fan of all of those things at once? And yet you do not also want to see any of the far greater number of characters who have not appeared in at least one video game?

To be more specific, I look through the Nintendo tag and the Sonic_(series) tags first, then the Video Games tag while excluding those two.

Now instead, I'm going to have to also manually browse the Undertale tag, the FNAF tag, the Deltarune tag, the Conker tag, the Final Fantasy tag, the Monster Hunter tag, the Freedom Planet tag, the Crash Bandicoot tag, the Spyro tag, the Khajit tag, the Sly Cooper tag, the Pandaren tag, the Ratchet & Clank tag, the Banjo-Kazooie tag, the Jak & Daxter tag...

I would go on, but this is already taking longer than it would for me to just browse the Video Games tag in a night. Sorry, TLDR what exactly is this fixing while inconveniencing people's searches?

Also in regards to "Video Games" breaking TWYS, then in that regard tags like "Nintendo" would also break TWYS. You've got a picture of Yoshi, where do you "see" the Nintendo? Nowhere. He doesn't have Nintendo's seal of approval stamped on his ass. We tag it because Yoshi is a Nintendo character. Just like Yoshi is a Video Game character.

sexygriffon said:
Now instead, I'm going to have to also manually browse the Undertale tag, the FNAF tag, the Deltarune tag, the Conker tag, the Final Fantasy tag, the Monster Hunter tag, the Freedom Planet tag, the Crash Bandicoot tag, the Spyro tag, the Khajit tag, the Sly Cooper tag, the Pandaren tag, the Ratchet & Clank tag, the Banjo-Kazooie tag, the Jak & Daxter tag...

So, like the rest of us then? Broad tastes require broad searches. We don't have a movies tag to cover the entire incredible spectrum of furry and furry-adjacent cinema over the last hundred years, and there are definitely a lot of people who came into the fandom via that route.

Checking the wiki, it appears movies has been aliased to movie_theater, which is one possible future for the video_games tag. I don't like it myself because movies could also apply to a character holding a DVD of a movie, or even just watching netflix. Similarly, video_games can appear in catridge or disc form with no console visible, or some posts are framed by a (real or fake) game UI, which is why my preferred solution is complete invalidation.

sexygriffon said:
Also in regards to "Video Games" breaking TWYS, then in that regard tags like "Nintendo" would also break TWYS. You've got a picture of Yoshi, where do you "see" the Nintendo? Nowhere. He doesn't have Nintendo's seal of approval stamped on his ass. We tag it because Yoshi is a Nintendo character. Just like Yoshi is a Video Game character.

That's an argument against tagging characters in general. (Also tagging species a lot of the time. No better example of that than Sonic himself.)

sexygriffon said:
Now instead, I'm going to have to also manually browse the Undertale tag, the FNAF tag, the Deltarune tag, the Conker tag, the Final Fantasy tag, the Monster Hunter tag, the Freedom Planet tag, the Crash Bandicoot tag, the Spyro tag, the Khajit tag, the Sly Cooper tag, the Pandaren tag, the Ratchet & Clank tag, the Banjo-Kazooie tag, the Jak & Daxter tag...

-nintendo -sonic_the_hedgehog_(series) ~undertale ~five_nights_at_freddy's ~deltarune ~conker's_bad_fur_day ~final_fantasy ~monster_hunter ~freedom_planet ~crash_bandicoot_(series) ~spyro_the_dragon ~khajiit ~sly_cooper_(series) ~pandaren ~ratchet_and_clank ~banjo-kazooie ~jak_and_daxter (cluttered as heck but if you can deal with bookmarks or a notepad you only have to type it once)

I'm not quite sure I get what makes people be near exclusively into mass-media properties. ^{I say with a Zootopia fanart avatar..}
I didn't realise until yesterday that if the top page of copyright: tagholders asked politely all at once, over a third of the site vanishes. and given Nintendo's rep I'm genuinely surprised they haven't already done that

Why don't move the tag category to lore category instead of unimplying? Isn't that for things that break TWYS but have relevant info for the viewer?

notmenotyou said:
Lore Tags!

Lore tags will be made into their own category, and contain all information that might be relevant to the viewer, but can't be seen inside the image. This will include things like relationship status of the characters, canon gender (if differing from visible), transgender identity, incest related tags, and possibly more.

https://e621.net/forum_topics/22799?page=1#post-283534

sexygriffon said:
Now instead, I'm going to have to also manually browse the Undertale tag, the FNAF tag, the Deltarune tag, the Conker tag, the Final Fantasy tag, the Monster Hunter tag, the Freedom Planet tag, the Crash Bandicoot tag, the Spyro tag, the Khajit tag, the Sly Cooper tag, the Pandaren tag, the Ratchet & Clank tag, the Banjo-Kazooie tag, the Jak & Daxter tag...

So you want to search for a whole bunch of separate things in images that may or may not depict video games with the video_games tag? I mean, I like browsing the pokemon tag, transformation, dragons, kemono, etc... doesn't mean there should be a single tag that covers all I want to see together just because I happen to like them all, let alone using a misnomer tag.

sexygriffon said:
Sorry, TLDR what exactly is this fixing while inconveniencing people's searches?

It's fixing the fact that video_games is getting special treatment, when similar tags like books, comics, movies, etc, aren't allowed. You can tag book when you see a book, but not books when there's a depiction of something with some relation to a book series. You can tag comic when you see (or something is) a comic, but not comics when there's a depiction of something with some relation to a comic series. With movie specifically, it's disambiguated with a wiki stating:

If a character or scene from a movie is depicted add the appropriate copyright tag instead.

So why should video games be treated special? Especially if it means not being able to search for images with video games depicted in it because you'd get flooded with pokemon, star fox, spyro, undertale, etc, fan art.

But with being left as-is, it creates severe and significant problem edge cases. Sonic, for instance, being initially and primarily a video game series, that got spun off into comics that became popular (and got characters/places unique to the non-game incarnations that artists depict). That only got partially fixed by unimplicating video_games from Sega... partially, because many posts are still erroneously tagged as a result of the implication existing in the first place. Or Pokemon, being initially and primarily a video game series, but is a highly successful cartoon and movie series, with several comics, along with a non-video game TCG that's been going for decades (and also has characters/places unique to non-game incarnations that artists depict). Though Nintendo still implicates video games, so that problem is far worse than Sonic and only getting worse. When a series starts as a video game, but then branches out to other media where it's highly successful and you have people who are into the series through those non-video game mediums, and artists are creating art clearly based on non-video game depictions (or in some cases at least not obviously video game depictions), how much will you let video_games be misapplied before doing something about it?

mapachito said:
Why don't move the tag category to lore category instead of unimplying? Isn't that for things that break TWYS but have relevant info for the viewer?

Lore tags are for Tag What You Know, based on artist intent of what the image is meant to depict (but can't otherwise be visually verified). If the artist doesn't say, it can't be tagged that way, and consequently such a tag couldn't be implied by anything.

wat8548 said:
That's an argument against tagging characters in general. (Also tagging species a lot of the time. No better example of that than Sonic himself.)

Also as noted it's important for takedown/legal reasons ^{disregarding that technically to file a valid DMCA claim, the rightsholder would have to link precisely to every individual IP infraction they wish to remove} to have distinct IPs grouped. though I still have gripes regarding the specific chaining of rightsholder implications and the userbase's understanding of who is owned by whom, legally speaking. It's like a reminder the site doesn't have to do any of this, or it would have to do it all properly in the first place

Clearly nobody's going to change anybody's mind, and for certain people this is going to make their browsing much more cumbersome and take much longer, while nobody is going to see any tangible benefit from this, but do what you have to do I guess.

This is exactly what software companies do all the time. They remove a feature they think nobody cares about, which improves the product for nobody but inconveniences anyone who is actually using it.

I gotta say, Griffon's put good argument to our side. The argument against this is that sometimes characters show up in magazines or cartoons. They're still from video games. Characters in Smash Bros show up in Smash Bros, but they're still implicated to their original series. Umimplying them from video games is like unimplying Mario from Mario Bros and instead implying smash bros. Or denying both implications because "Sometimes he might still be in the Mario Bros setting".

Characters that come from Mario Bros should still imply it. Characters that come from Video Games should likewise still imply it.

I feel like I have to fork this back into the overall thread topic

If it's determined that video_games is here to stay, as-is, that doesn't change that there are corporate bodies within this BUR which have published-or have the capacity to publish-content with no origin in video games. Here is an e621-valid manga cover falling under copyright of Square Enix
It may be that individual franchises with origin in video gaming retain their implications, but videogame-publishing corporations are not definitively restricted to their existing videogame franchises if they choose to produce other content.

furrin_gok said:
Characters that come from Mario Bros should still imply it.

again, comics and cartoons

sexygriffon said:
They remove a feature they think nobody cares about, which improves the product for nobody but inconveniences anyone who is actually using it.

Or we're trying to fix a tag that we want to be useful, and which is currently broken by design. I'd like to be able to search for video game content, but searching video games gives a bunch of irrelevant results for things that don't look anything like video games, if not are explicitly not video games.

The question I have for anyone that wants to keep the tag as is, where's the line for what qualifies? The wiki definition is overly broad:

any image or animation which shows a video game, hardware related to operating a video game, or a character, species, or item that relates to a video game copyright or franchise

with the vague relates to a video game copyright or franchise, so the question is more "what doesn't this apply to?" more than "what does this apply to?". Should the Sonic comics (and related characters like Sally) be tagged video_games because Sonic is "related to a video game copyright/franchise", as is Sega who owns Sonic? Was the sega->video_games deimplication bad?

Taken at face value, the DuckTales video game means Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and many of the rest of the gang, are "characters(s) ... that relates to a video game copyright" (the game was successful back in the day, the nostalgia of which was enough to get it a remake in 2013, also positively received, a couple years before the animated series got a modern revival). But surely you wouldn't suggest that the DuckTales gang should imply video games. Yet, things like Pokemon do, where the video games are only a part of the franchise as a whole, and even official promo art of the TCG and movies, very much not targeting the video game incarnations, are tagged video games (and fun fact: there are more theatrical Pokemon movies than main line games, including the remakes, and excluding the alt versions that are just glorified DLC; to say nothing of the comics and anime, which has been going with new episodes for 24 years straight, plus all the merchandising and fan works that are very much not video games). Just how loose is the definition supposed to be, and where's the line?

And if it really is that useful, will you advocate for de-aliasing books, movies, comics, and get tv_shows rolling, so we can properly categorize copyrights and franchises from these other mediums, so as to not let video games be an outlier? And if so, what to do with cross-media franchises, of which their "main" or "primary" medium is debatable?

magnuseffect said:
I feel like I have to fork this back into the overall thread topic

If it's determined that video_games is here to stay, as-is, that doesn't change that there are corporate bodies within this BUR which have published-or have the capacity to publish-content with no origin in video games. Here is an e621-valid manga cover falling under copyright of Square Enix
It may be that individual franchises with origin in video gaming retain their implications, but videogame-publishing corporations are not definitively restricted to their existing videogame franchises if they choose to produce other content.

Yes, characters. Not franchises.

strikerman said:
again, comics and cartoons

This is why characters should imply the video games tag, not the franchise. Mario is a video game character, even if it's the Super Show version of him, while the Quirks, are not video game characters. Even if they got added to the games, they originated from the cartoon.

watsit said:
Taken at face value, the DuckTales video game means Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and many of the rest of the gang, are "characters(s) ... that relates to a video game copyright" (the game was successful back in the day, the nostalgia of which was enough to get it a remake in 2013, also positively received, a couple years before the animated series got a modern revival). But surely you wouldn't suggest that the DuckTales gang should imply video games. Yet, things like Pokemon do, where the video games are only a part of the franchise as a whole, and even official promo art of the TCG and movies, very much not targeting the video game incarnations, are tagged video games (and fun fact: there are more theatrical Pokemon movies than main line games, including the remakes, and excluding the alt versions that are just glorified DLC; to say nothing of the comics and anime, which has been going with new episodes for 24 years straight, plus all the merchandising and fan works that are very much not video games). Just how loose is the definition supposed to be, and where's the line?

Duck Tales, no. Pokemon, though... That's open for debate. I'm thinking pokemon_(species) could imply video games, and the various human characters will depend on if they're game other media. Ash Ketchum and Gary Oak are not from the video games, Red_(pokemon) and Blue_(pokemon) are.

And if it really is that useful, will you advocate for de-aliasing books, movies, comics, and get tv_shows rolling, so we can properly categorize copyrights and franchises from these other mediums, so as to not let video games be an outlier? And if so, what to do with cross-media franchises, of which their "main" or "primary" medium is debatable?

Doesn't sound like it would hurt.
If you want to go by "Main" or "Primary," then situations where both are major will be based on which came first. If that is tied, then both.

watsit said:
Or we're trying to fix a tag that we want to be useful, and which is currently broken by design. I'd like to be able to search for video game content, but searching video games gives a bunch of irrelevant results for things that don't look anything like video games, if not are explicitly not video games.

If you want to tag a physical video game system, why don't you tag it "Video_Game_System"?

You can spin it however you want, to say that you're making things make more sense or more consistent, but at the end of the day you're going to be taking a tag with a ton of images in it that a nonzero amount of people likely search for and browse through, and removing 90% of the tag's functionality. I'm just lucky I happened to spot this tiny thread on a tiny forum that's discussing a huge overhaul to an aspect of the site's tagging system, I could have easily missed it completely and then wondered why the hell my search wasn't working properly anymore. There's more users out there that are going to fall into the latter category...

This hardly does anything to improve practical usage of the site, but will hinder the usage for users like me. If it's not causing a direct issue, don't try to fix it if it isn't broken. Basically, I understand your intent and think you've got some good brain juices working in regards to it, but the outcome is what's more concerning to me.

Personally, I don't see any problem with other tags that will do the same thing as the video_games tag currently does.

I can sympathize with both sides of the issue here. Something does need to be done about the video_games tag since, as it stands, it's a mess. However, I think it may still be a useful tag. Is it possible we can find some kind of compromise? In order to attempt that, I've listed the most concerning issues with it currently, as I see it:

- Art depicting a character from a video game and art depicting the act of playing video games are two totally different things, yet they use the same tag.
- There are many, many images with this tag that apparently have nothing to do with video games, such as the aforementioned Sally_Acorn example, due to erroneous implications.
- In many cases, it violates TWYS.

However, I can easily believe that many people would wish to search for this tag. Many of the contents may have nothing obviously in common with each other, yet they may share a surprisingly large fanbase. For example, what do Undertale and Metal_Gear have in common? Besides both being video games, nothing at all. And yet, there are a surprising number of crossover images between these two games: undertale metal_gear. Though it may not be a surprise that avid gamers are interested in video game-related media much more than other forms of media, so many completely unrelated games may have a surprisingly large overlap in their fanbases. Many gamers would recognize pretty much any gaming-related image on this site, even some really obscure ones. I've noticed the same trend with comic book fans, movie buffs, weebs, etc. So if someone wants to see a bunch of stuff related to their particular interest, whether it be video games in general, comics, anime, or whatever, these tags could be useful.

So I've been pondering this, and I think I've come up with some kind of solution. It goes as follows:

- Go ahead and unimplicate everything, for the aforementioned reasons.
- Write a new wiki page describing the appropriate use of the video_games tag. I think it ought to just be applied to "art related to the video game fandom" or something like that. This is, after all, the only reason I could imagine the tag being useful: for gamers to find things relating to their very broad and popular interest.
- Start using different tags for the actual depiction of video games in an image: playing_videogame, game_console, etc. These should not implicate video_games, since since it might not necessarily be a gaming-related image. If there's a console in the background of a bedroom scene, for example, the image may still not have any relevance to a gamer looking for gaming-related art. Or, you know, there are plenty of images of characters using console controllers as vibrators. That sort of thing. But perhaps a new umbrella tag can be used for these things instead; gaming_equipment may work for that purpose, as I imagine any depiction of actual video games, whether being played or simply sitting in the background must have some kind of equipment visible in the image, whether it's a console, computer, mouse, controller, or even if the border of the image appears to be a monitor or display of some kind. I'm not sure yet what to do about gameplay_mechanics, but I'd imagine implicating video_games is fine in that case since it's obviously depicting something that would be relevant to gamers.
- Only implicate video_games from tags that are themselves individual video games (or maybe also gameplay_mechanics as mentioned above). Not franchises, and not characters, as these things may appear outside of games and may be seen in non-gaming-related contexts. For example, Skyrim can implicate video_games, but The_Elder_Scrolls (and by extension, Bethesda_Softworks) cannot. Even though TES is currently a game-only franchise, it's not impossible that there could one day be a TES live-action movie or something (I pray to the Nine that never happens, because they'd undoubtedly ruin it, but it's still possible). I think characters can implicate an individual game, which in turn implicates video_games, but only if they don't appear prominently in other media. Sonic_The_Hedgehog can't implicate any individual Sonic games since he's also a comic book character, but Toriel can since she's only really seen in Undertale.
- Clarify, via wiki descriptions, that individual games and franchises are not to be tagged when the game's logo or likeness appears within an image that is not directly related to that game; for example, a Skyrim game disk or box or poster on the wall or loading screen displayed on a monitor in the background should not implicate Skyrim. That game should only be tagged when the art itself is related to the game itself, such as art depicting Dovahkiin or Alduin or Deeja, or if the background depicts a location within the game, or whatever. Those characters can also implicate Skyrim (Alduin already does), because they are only really present in that game, but if they ever feature as prominent characters in other games in the series, they'd have to implicate the franchise instead.
- Since this all still violates TWYS to some extent, we can make video_games, anime, comics, etc. into lore tags. Although this seems to be somewhat different from what lore tags were meant for, so I have a different solution that I personally would prefer. A new tag category, perhaps just called "category" or "topic." A small number of different tags that attempt to categorize most fanart-related posts into one of a few different categories based on which fandom they belong to. Video games, film, comics, anime, literature, whatever. And though implications may not always be possible due to overlap (Pokémon (or Nintendo) can't implicate video_games since, for example, it may be an image of Ashchu, which is specific only to the Pokémon anime, even though Ashchu implicates Pikachu which implicates pokémon_(species) which implicates Pokémon, which implicates Nintendo, which implicates... video_games), remember that anything which does appear to be related specifically to video games can just get the video_games tag by itself, or the anime tag if it has more to do with that, or whatever. That being said, I find this to be the less likely solution as it involves creating a whole new tag category, so at the very least we can make them lore tags.
- Once this is done, we can go ahead and do the same thing for anime and comics and all the others. I mean, I know some people who would love to be able to search exclusively for anime-related art, and who have seen basically every anime ever made, so they'd probably recognize every result in the search. Same for comics and films, too. Though it did just occur to me that it may be very difficult to distinguish between anime and manga, since most anime is based on manga, and so there will be a very considerable overlap between the two. I have heard the term "animanga" used as a blanket term for both anime and manga (also because there is a significant overlap between the two fandoms), which we could probably use instead, and just alias both anime and manga to animanga. The same may be true of movies and TV, since it's become quite popular for big film franchises to also get spin-off TV shows and vice-versa, and I would assume there is also a much greater overlap in the fanbases of TV and film than there is between, say, film and video games or film and manga. So we could have a TV_&_Film tag instead, perhaps? Though I think we ought to put animated stuff in its own category, regardless of it being a TV show or a film, the same way an anime movie wouldn't get the TV_&_Film tag, since that also generally seems to be treated as its own category. This part of my proposal will have to be hashed out a bit more.

So, uh... thoughts?

scaliespe said:
However, I can easily believe that many people would wish to search for this tag. Many of the contents may have nothing obviously in common with each other, yet they may share a surprisingly large fanbase. For example, what do Undertale and Metal_Gear have in common? Besides both being video games, nothing at all. And yet, there are a surprising number of crossover images between these two games: undertale metal_gear. Though it may not be a surprise that avid gamers are interested in video game-related media much more than other forms of media, so many completely unrelated games may have a surprisingly large overlap in their fanbases. Many gamers would recognize pretty much any gaming-related image on this site, even some really obscure ones. I've noticed the same trend with comic book fans, movie buffs, weebs, etc. So if someone wants to see a bunch of stuff related to their particular interest, whether it be video games in general, comics, anime, or whatever, these tags could be useful.

Even when you just boil it down to the porn side, people are attracted to what they like. I like video games, I like video game porn. Doesn't matter a whole lot what video game it comes from, if it's furry as well then I'm into it. It's not unimaginable that someone would want to browse through whatever new "video game porn" has shown up today. True it does give images I'm not particularly into, but a little bit of scrolling is a lot easier and more convenient than having to perform 50+ searches so I only see the specific franchises I'm interested in...and sometimes I come across franchises I'd never heard of before but like what I see! It's how I discovered Fidget.

sexygriffon said:
Even when you just boil it down to the porn side, people are attracted to what they like. I like video games, I like video game porn. Doesn't matter a whole lot what video game it comes from, if it's furry as well then I'm into it. It's not unimaginable that someone would want to browse through whatever new "video game porn" has shown up today. True it does give images I'm not particularly into, but a little bit of scrolling is a lot easier and more convenient than having to perform 50+ searches so I only see the specific franchises I'm interested in...and sometimes I come across franchises I'd never heard of before but like what I see! It's how I discovered Fidget.

This, but you can also simply blacklist or add a - modifier to your search to filter out things that you don't want within the video_games tag. From an ease-of-use perspective, it seems quite reasonable to assume that some people would like to search for video_games minus a few franchises they don't like, as opposed to searching for all the ones they do like individually. But this is also why I think anime and comics and so on should get the same treatment.

watsit said:
And there's characters like Serena (pokemon), technically the female protagonist from the XY games, but her popularity and the vast majority of her depictions come from her anime incarnation where she was Ash's companion and love interest, with her own personality not based on the games.

There can be some debate before that's determined. Do we go by the origin or what's more popular? There's sense to the latter, though it may mean we need to change things from time to time. That's not all that different from some other tags, though.

Pokemon_(species) definitely should not implicate video games, if you really want that "characters should imply the video games tag". A pokemon species, being a species, is not an individual character. Tinsel (wanderlust) is a character from a webcomic, with their own personality, behavioral quirks, and history, but being a pokemon species, would get tagged video games despite the character definitely not appearing in any video game. There are also official characters and species that appeared initially or exclusively in the show/movies. If species implicated video_games, then some characters that are from elsewhere would be tagged video_games, against your own statement. And if we're going to recognize non-game pokemon characters, why assume unnamed pokemon are video game characters?

There may be some non-video game characters among the species, but the species was made for the games. It's still a "Video game species." The tag isn't video_game_character after all.

The question then arises when it would be considered "major". Some hold that Pokemon is still primarily a video game franchise, and others don't. Some hold that Sonic is still primarily a video game franchise, and others don't. How do you determine that it is or not? And if it's based on degree, how many posts need to be badly tagged before undoing the implication and getting a cleanup? Normally, just one post getting a bad tag as a result of an implication means the implication is bad and should be removed.

This is why I was arguing to have it "What it was originally" over what's more popular, but both fields can be combined. Sonic started as a game so as long as the games are popular, the characters that came from the games will be considered video game.

furrin_gok said:
There may be some non-video game characters among the species, but the species was made for the games. It's still a "Video game species."

Lugia definitely wasn't. It's become more widely known in recent years in the English-speaking Pokemon community that Lugia was made specifically for the movie. After the huge success of the first movie, they were given more leeway with the second movie and the head writer, Takeshi Shudo, was allowed to create a new Pokemon for the movie. He created Lugia for the sole purpose of being in the movie, and was caught by surprise when he saw Lugia appear in the games. This also explains why Lugia has very close ties to water and looks more like a sea creature than a bird, since that's what he was designed for in the movie, yet when being paired with Ho-Oh in the games, it's not a water type and is a flying type despite being more of a swimmer and having the title "the guardian of the seas".

Aside from Lugia, there's also ones like Togepi, who was added to the anime a year ahead of its game debut. Ho-Oh actually had a cameo in the very first episode of the anime, more than two years before the games. Latios and Latias appeared in a movie some months ahead of their game debut, and Lucario (with some others) appeared in a movie more than a year ahead of the games. For a more recent example, we can look at Zarude , a new mythical who was promoted for the games and new movie simultaneously (and the movie was supposed to come out before the game event it was released in, but the movie was delayed because of covid-19 which pushed it to after the start of the game event). Who can say if it was designed for the movie first and then included in the games, or was made for both from the get-go.

So following the success of Gen 1, they were allowing Pokemon to be "made for" things other than the games, even if the games would ultimately include them. We're not TPC insiders to know which Pokemon were made for what.

furrin_gok said:
The tag isn't video_game_character after all.

That runs against what you said before:

This is why characters should imply the video games tag, not the franchise. Mario is a video game character, even if it's the Super Show version of him, while the Quirks , are not video game characters. Even if they got added to the games, they originated from the cartoon.

So if a character originated from the cartoon, they would not be tagged video_games even if they're added later. There are many identifiable Pokemon characters, both human and non, that appeared in the anime or movies first, some of whom were added to or referenced in the games later, so should not be tagged video_games according to this. A number of species appeared in the anime or movies first, appearing in the games later.

watsit said:

furrin_gok said:
The tag isn't video_game_character after all.

That runs against what you said before:

This is why characters should imply the video games tag, not the franchise. Mario is a video game character, even if it's the Super Show version of him, while the Quirks, are not video game characters. Even if they got added to the games, they originated from the cartoon.

Care to read that again? I never said "the tag is or should be video_game_character", because, as I did say, "The tag isn't video_game_character after all." You're getting hung up on the wrong words. I never said only characters should imply video games, just not the franchise. Characters should imply video game, yes, but that doesn't mean species cannot do so as well.

Lugia definitely wasn't. It's become more widely known in recent years in the English-speaking Pokemon community that Lugia was made specifically for the movie. After the huge success of the first movie, they were given more leeway with the second movie and the head writer, Takeshi Shudo, was allowed to create a new Pokemon for the movie. He created Lugia for the sole purpose of being in the movie, and was caught by surprise when he saw Lugia appear in the games. This also explains why Lugia has very close ties to water and looks more like a sea creature than a bird, since that's what he was designed for in the movie, yet when being paired with Ho-Oh in the games, it's not a water type and is a flying type despite being more of a swimmer and having the title "the guardian of the seas".

Aside from Lugia, there's also ones like Togepi, who was added to the anime a year ahead of its game debut. Ho-Oh actually had a cameo in the very first episode of the anime, more than two years before the games. Latios and Latias appeared in a movie some months ahead of their game debut, and Lucario (with some others) appeared in a movie more than a year ahead of the games. For a more recent example, we can look at Zarude , a new mythical who was promoted for the games and new movie simultaneously (and the movie was supposed to come out before the game event it was released in, but the movie was delayed because of covid-19 which pushed it to after the start of the game event). Who can say if it was designed for the movie first and then included in the games, or was made for both from the get-go.

So following the success of Gen 1, they were allowing Pokemon to be "made for" things other than the games, even if the games would ultimately include them. We're not TPC insiders to know which Pokemon were made for what.

I had forgotten about Togepi, but I didn't know about the others at all. If we make an exception for those pokemon, that's hundreds of implications where it could just be one. That's troubling, maybe you're right and it should be if it's popular in games instead of which it originated from.

furrin_gok said:
Care to read that again? I never said "the tag is or should be video_game_character", because, as I did say, "The tag isn't video_game_character after all." You're getting hung up on the wrong words. I never said only characters should imply video games, just not the franchise. Characters should imply video game, yes, but that doesn't mean species cannot do so as well.

I had forgotten about Togepi, but I didn't know about the others at all. If we make an exception for those pokemon, that's hundreds of implications where it could just be one. That's troubling, maybe you're right and it should be if it's popular in games instead of which it originated from.

This honestly sounds worse. If a character appeared in a video game, it would be tagged video_games, and if it appeared in a movie or comic... it could still be tagged video_games if it's a particular species associated with some game. That's a small step away from 'and if the species is from some movie or comic, it could still be tagged video_games if it's part of a series associated with some game', which is the current situation. But on top of that, you're basing 'associated with' with 'popular in'. Some consider Pokemon to be more popular in the movies and anime than the games, and some consider Sonic to be more popular in the comics than games. Who's measure of popularity do we use? When do we know to change it as its popularity shifts, and how do we deal with the resulting bad tags?

And that's not even considering if we also bring back the movies, comics, books, etc, tags in this vein. A character that only appeared in comics, of a species most popular in movies, of a series most popular in video games... it all looks very messy what you'd find under what tags.

Again, this may be why we’d have to implicate video_games from actual games only - not characters, not franchises. Skyrim can implicate video_games as opposed to The_Elder_Scrolls or Bethesda_Softworks, for example. Like, Prequel should probably not imply video_games since it’s a comic. For games like Pokémon that have countless releases that are all profoundly similar, it might be better to have an umbrella Pokémon_(game) tag that implicates both video_games and Pokémon just to keep the two separate. Then it’ll just be up to the people tagging the image to appropriately tag it with the game or the name of the anime or movie, depending what the image is supposed to be from or related to.

scaliespe said:
Skyrim can implicate video_games as opposed to The_Elder_Scrolls or Bethesda_Softworks, for example. Like, Prequel should probably not imply video_games since it’s a comic.

I don't know enough about Prequel to properly weigh in, but there are many posts tagged with both prequel and oblivion.

prequel oblivion

strikerman said:
I don't know enough about Prequel to properly weigh in, but there are many posts tagged with both prequel and oblivion.

prequel oblivion

Prequel heavily uses trademark from Oblivion including character identity, location identity, and specific recognisable imagery. That shouldn't be a universal implication but for example quill-weave (along with almost everyone who is not Katia herself or a presumed-deceased-by-the-game's-time Kvatch resident/nameless filler character) is an in-game Oblivion character.

Reminder though that katia_managan gets her video_games implication through her species being a bethesda_softworks trademark, and cannot be de-implicated from videogames until rightsholding-corporations are.
(Similarly prequel has its video_games implication through ->the_elder_scrolls->bethesda_softworks)

Right. I hadn’t ever really looked at Prequel, so I didn’t know that. Though if there’s a clear connection to Oblivion specifically, the video_games tag probably won’t be an issue there, though an image of a Prequel character not seen in the game without, say, a specifically oblivion-related background maybe should not get that tag? But that of course would require that Bethesda_Softworks doesn’t imply video_games, and only the individual games do, which I think would be ideal for a number of reasons. That way, Oblivion can be tagged when the image seems related to the game itself, and thus would qualify as a video game-related image.

scaliespe said:
Again, this may be why we’d have to implicate video_games from actual games only - not characters, not franchises. Skyrim can implicate video_games as opposed to The_Elder_Scrolls or Bethesda_Softworks, for example. Like, Prequel should probably not imply video_games since it’s a comic. For games like Pokémon that have countless releases that are all profoundly similar, it might be better to have an umbrella Pokémon_(game) tag that implicates both video_games and Pokémon just to keep the two separate. Then it’ll just be up to the people tagging the image to appropriately tag it with the game or the name of the anime or movie, depending what the image is supposed to be from or related to.

That's its own little can of worms. What happens to all the images of pokemon that aren't any particular character? Just nuked from orbit?
A lot of our tags have been aliased to a single tag to avoid tag bloat, but this solution would need those to be removed, so that the games can alias to something more along the lines of sonic_the_hedgehog_(games) which then implies sonic_the_hedgehog and video_games. We'd have to work back to add the tags into all these images that once upon a time had the video games tag, and still deserve it.
I can deal with it if the pokemon tags get nuked, but it may be better to "update" a lot of tags to a new _(games) tag and manually erase instances rather than needing to manually add it in.

That’s along the lines of what I was thinking for the images that already exist. I was speaking more about what to do to imply video_games on future posts. But as for the existing images, it may be easier to just remove the video_games tag on any Pokémon images that contain non-game characters like Ash, and leave the rest.

scaliespe said:
But as for the existing images, it may be easier to just remove the video_games tag on any Pokémon images that contain non-game characters like Ash, and leave the rest.

That is what I most disagree with. We shouldn't be tagging what kind of media a character come from, let alone what kind of media a character is indirectly related to through the franchise its species comes from having a branch in that kind of media, as that severely violates TWYS (and lore tags aren't a silver bullet solution to every non-TWYS problem; it would cause its own problems in this case). The vast majority of Pokemon images have no direct references to games, if anything they more often just have references the general world or lore which is shared by the games, anime, and comics, and there's plenty that are working in their own "world", so to speak. I see no reason for this or this or this to be tagged video_games since there's no video game content visible, just as there's no reason for this to be tagged comics since there's no comic content visible. The excessive proliferation of the video_games tag on all this non-video_game-y stuff is what I'm wanting to get cleaned up, so that it can be used to find actual video game related content.

That was my suggestion to remove the video_games tag from Pokémon images that are almost certainly not related to the games, without saying anything about what to do with the rest of them that may or may not be game-related. The only other feasible solution, I think, would be to remove video_games from all Pokémon images and only add them back in via implication from a game-specific Pokémon tag, or via something like gameplay_mechanics.

I've read ~half of this thread and skimmed over the rest and I'd like to offer another possible (compromise) solution:

1. Remove the video_games tag altogether. This thread contains many good reasons why it's far too broad in its current form. And I don't see any way how it can be fixed in a useful way. A reason I haven't seen is that video game companies/publishers/copyright holders aren't actually video games - so why should they implicate video_games?

2. have the following tags under TWYS rules instead (must be visible in the image):
a) video_game_running if it's just running in the background on a display/screen/TV (PC, console, smartphone, etc).
b) video_game_played if characters in the image are currently playing (a game is being played). This might conflict with a more general but currently not existing playing_game tag for playing any type of game.
c) video_game_system if an actual console is visible (and maybe delete the NES tag because it's overly specific?! or have tags for all consoles implicating vgs).
d) video_game_controller.
e) video_game_physical_copy for actual game storage devices (cartridge, floppy, CD, DVD, ...). Don't like the "physical_copy" part but just "video_game" isn't enough in this tagging system.
Or just storage_medium plus copyright franchise/series/??? tag?
f) maybe video_game_merchandise for posters, clothes, figurines, boxes of video games and what not?
g) video_game_object for non-character objects from within video games used (out of context) in the image like Portal turrets. The weighted companion cube would both be a character tag and implicate video_game_object?! ;-).
h) video_game_scene (/setting/background) when an image contains neither game characters nor objects but still clearly something from a specific game.

I wouldn't have any implications between a)-h). Not even b) would implicate a) because there could be images where characters are clearly playing with game controllers but the screen they're looking at is not in the image (or at least not visible to us).
And all start with video_game_ so you get to see all auto-complete options when you start typing when tagging (I do like structured tags eg. like background_simple and background_detailed instead of the currently existing tags. eyes_<color> instead of <color>_eyes FTW!).
Of course currently existing tags like playing videogame, game_console/controller/screen and so on would need to be aliased.

3. have all video_game_... tags from 2. implicating a video_game_(umbrella) meta-tag. This tag should not be usable directly - just via the defined implications.

4. for those who like the current umbrella function of video_games - create tags in the character category like character_from/in_xxx with xxx:={movie, anime, comic, webcomic, cartoon, TV(-series), video_game, tabletop_game, card_game...} which only apply when true for the official character, not fan works.
With all those tags implicating official_character (doesn't currently exist) as an opposite to fan_character. But this might get blurry down the lines: When does a fan_character in a long running webcomic become an official character_from/in_webcomic?
Instead maybe let only official character tags directly implicate official_character, not the broader character_from/in_xxx tags.
Judy Hopps for example would implicate official_character, ..._movie and ..._comic but the latter only because official comics exist, not because of fan made comics.

This way the current function of video_games would be covered with video_game_(umbrella) character_from/in_video_game while still nicely dividing everything up.

Maybe mix and mangle this with scaliespe's #forum_post_313647 as I forgot game_mechanics (should implicate video_game_(umbrella)) and when/if copyright tags apply or not. And what about VR gaming stuff?

Btw. I stumbled over this thread because the species tags keidran and basitin both implicate the copyright tag twokinds but eg. the keidran (I think) fan_character bilberryfryst has nothing to do with twokinds itself.
-> anybody know a thread were this "imaginary species tags" implicating their originating copyright tag is discussed? I'm strongly against this general implication. It's the same with all Pokemon (sub-)species indirectly implicating the pokemon copyright tag. Why should a random non-official Pokemon-like character get the copyright tag? It should get tagged with the species and maybe pokemon_species but not pokemon.

Well, I don’t see the point of using video_game_(umbrella) if you want to get rid of video_games entirely. For your proposal, it seems perfectly reasonable to use the video_games tag for that, as the (umbrella) suffix is not standard nomenclature on this site, and it doesn’t stand to do anything but make the tag longer.

kalider said:
2. have the following tags under TWYS rules instead (must be visible in the image):

That is way too specific. We don't want to be creating tags where taggers won't clearly understand the difference if they even realize the relevant tag exists. There's already playing_videogame, the various console tags, and game_mechanics/gui tags, so allowing video_games to cover those relevant posts, rather than anything with the slightest relation to a video game somewhere, would be good enough, IMO.

as someone who mostly jerks to o.c. content and has been relying on the video_games tag for a lazy way to mass blacklist stuff i don't wanna see yiffed for years: I AM SWEATING BULLETS reading this thread

dripen_arn said:
as someone who mostly jerks to o.c. content and has been relying on the video_games tag for a lazy way to mass blacklist stuff i don't wanna see yiffed for years: I AM SWEATING BULLETS reading this thread

There is the fan_character tag for non-OC characters. And since there's plenty of non-OC stuff that isn't video game related (e.g. from movies and TV shows), you're better off blacklisting the franchises themselves that you keep running into.

this BUR's been around so long, two unactivated users have voted on it

strikerman said:
this BUR's been around so long, two unactivated users have voted on it

Good. It shouldn't be resolved lightly, for either side.

furrin_gok said:
Good. It shouldn't be resolved lightly, for either side.

and now it's three unactivated users

At this point, is it really being 'resolved' throughout all this time? Or just kicked down the road?

Excuse update

bitwolfy said:
Accepting the former would potentially mean somehow removing a tag from almost 672,000 posts.
I'm still not entirely sure how feasible that is from a technical perspective. Same goes with aliasing it to something. It might even require some site downtime.

If this BUR had been accepted at the same minute it was proposed, there would be 165,507 fewer posts tagged video_games today.

(For future reference, it was posted in between post #2783503 and post #2783504.)

Last I heard of the administrative stance on video_games (from the Discord server), they seemed to like a suggestion I proposed, which was roughly as follows:

Remove the video_games implications from all publishers, developers, and other copyright holders - also, remove the implication from all series or franchises, even currently game-only franchises due to the possibility of non-game offshoots and spin-offs (like the recent Halo TV series). Only imply video_games from the actual video games themselves, ie. undertale and deltarune can imply video_games, but not undertale_(series) due to the possibility of some non-video game Undertale-related media (this one already has the correct implications in place, actually).

This solution would:
• avoid having to literally shut down the entire site to nuke this tag
• allow the tag to continue existing with its original purpose for those who actually do use it
• solve the issue of non-game content such as the Sonic comics and Pokémon anime being tagged with video_games
• significantly cut down on how often this tag is added by implication
• narrow the scope of the tag to only content that is recognizably video game-related, thus better complying with the TWYS policy
• would not require a massive tag cleanup
• would actually improve the usability of the tag itself

scaliespe said:
Only imply video_games from the actual video games themselves, ie. undertale and deltarune can imply video_games, but not undertale_(series) due to the possibility of some non-video game Undertale-related media (this one already has the correct implications in place, actually).

That sounds like a problem since the site is quite inconsistent with when individual games are or aren't aliased away to a main series/franchise (e.g. Pokemon games are all aliased to Pokémon, but Zelda games aren't aliased to The Legend of Zelda). And in some cases even a single series may have some games aliased away but not others (e.g. the core Monster Hunter games are all aliased away, but the individual Monster Hunter Stories games are left separate). Also sometimes characters or species implicate a specific game because that's where they first appeared, but then appear in later games or other media, but still implicate that first game they appeared in (e.g. Midna implies Twilight Princess because that's where she first appeared, but later also appears in Hyrule Warriors; meanwhile Link (wolf form) doesn't imply Twilight Princess even though that's where he first appeared, but is also in Breath of the Wild).

This also seems unnecessarily messy, since something can come out that's only a game and thus everything in the game implicates video_games, but then later have a non-game piece of media that shares the same stuff, invalidating the implication and creating confusion as to whether those things should still be tagged for video_games (requiring more tag deimplications and cleanup). e.g. Monster Hunter Stories was originally just a game, but later on got an anime adaption.

In this day and age, it's also not unusual even for small game releases to have a comic/manga or animated special or some other non-game extra that can easily fly under the radar for the larger fanbase.

These issues would make the tag use very inconsistent and not usable, requiring constant fixing and cleanup even after this main unimplication. IMO, it's still best to only use the tag when you can actually see a video game or console, something that won't change in the future, not merely a depiction of something that was in a video game since it can become non-exclusive to a game at any time.

watsit said:
That sounds like a problem since the site is quite inconsistent with when individual games are or aren't aliased away to a main series/franchise (e.g. Pokemon games are all aliased to Pokémon, but Zelda games aren't aliased to The Legend of Zelda). And in some cases even a single series may have some games aliased away but not others (e.g. the core Monster Hunter games are all aliased away, but the individual Monster Hunter Stories games are left separate). Also sometimes characters or species implicate a specific game because that's where they first appeared, but then appear in later games or other media, but still implicate that first game they appeared in (e.g. Midna implies Twilight Princess because that's where she first appeared, but later also appears in Hyrule Warriors; meanwhile Link (wolf form) doesn't imply Twilight Princess even though that's where he first appeared, but is also in Breath of the Wild).

These are issues that would need to be resolved regardless of what happens with the video_games tag. Ideally, I think most games should be implications rather than aliases as there is usually some recognizable content distinguishing each entry in a series that could ideally be searched for with those individual tags. It’s quite rare to have a series where each entry is such a carbon-copy of one another that you couldn’t distinguish them in at least some cases.

This also seems unnecessarily messy, since something can come out that's only a game and thus everything in the game implicates video_games, but then later have a non-game piece of media that shares the same stuff, invalidating the implication and creating confusion as to whether those things should still be tagged for video_games (requiring more tag deimplications and cleanup). e.g. Monster Hunter Stories was originally just a game, but later on got an anime adaption.

In this day and age, it's also not unusual even for small game releases to have a comic/manga or animated special or some other non-game extra that can easily fly under the radar for the larger fanbase.

These issues would make the tag use very inconsistent and not usable, requiring constant fixing and cleanup even after this main unimplication. IMO, it's still best to only use the tag when you can actually see a video game or console, something that won't change in the future, not merely a depiction of something that was in a video game since it can become non-exclusive to a game at any time.

Alternatively, we could have characters only imply the series rather than the individual games, avoiding the need for future cleanup altogether… perhaps with possible exceptions for really minor characters that we can be fairly certain will never appear elsewhere. At least if video_games is only added when the game itself is tagged, and the game itself is not implied by any characters or species that may appear elsewhere, we can be relatively certain that any usage of the tag was intended to be specific to the game.

If you ask me, the confusion over this tag is just another example of why e621's tagging system is completely broken on a fundamental level.

I'm also going to point out that some of the things that imply this tag were never video games at all, or had a couple licensed games at most. (Neopets, for example.)

scaliespe said:
These are issues that would need to be resolved regardless of what happens with the video_games tag.

Unless nothing implies it at all, as proposed.

It's not just a matter of there being "too many" video_games posts or the tag being "too broad". Both the current setup and your proposal are not compliant with TWYS, unless you're also proposing to change its category to meta. You can't tell, by looking at any given character, whether they appeared in a video game (exclusively or otherwise), so all the implications are invalid. There is no reason for this one medium to receive special treatment, not when anime is invalid despite arguably having a better case.

If people decide they want to keep the current functionality of the tag, a good compromise might be to split it into two tags:

Something like video_game could be used for a game actually depicted in the image. Then, something like video_games_(copyright) could serve the function that it has right now, indicating that some IP in the image came from a video game, and would also be changed to a purple copyright tag.

lendrimujina said:
is just another example of why e621's tagging system is completely broken on a fundamental level.

lol. I have no words for this... Try searching for male/female and exclude all other genders on FA. good luck

Edit, to stay on-topic: I like scaliespe's suggestion

hurr_durr said:
Something like video_game could be used for a game actually depicted in the image. Then, something like video_games_(copyright) could serve the function that it has right now, indicating that some IP in the image came from a video game, and would also be changed to a purple copyright tag.

The problem is having a tag like it currently is now, and renaming it doesn't fix it. We don't have a movies tag for anything that is remotely associated with a movie, or a comics tag for anything remotely associated with a comic, so it doesn't make sense to have a tag like video_games for things remotely related to a video game (especially as video games are more malleable of a medium, ranging from visual novels, first-person, third-person, god-sim, and FMV games). It's on nearly a million posts, and describes nothing of what you can see in the image. And even what it attempts to do (indicate something in the image has some loose connection to a video game somewhere) it does half-heartedly, including things that aren't from video games and excluding things that are, since it's on a franchise/series level.

scaliespe said:
These are issues that would need to be resolved regardless of what happens with the video_games tag.

Sure, but given that they are issues, a video_games tag is just making an additional mess on top of it. It's like saying the oil is an issue that needs to be resolved regardless of what we do with the fire. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to put out the fire because there's oil that needs to be taken care of.

scaliespe said:
Ideally, I think most games should be implications rather than aliases as there is usually some recognizable content distinguishing each entry in a series that could ideally be searched for with those individual tags.

Not really. Sure, there are some games like that (e.g. Final Fantasy), but many game series share a lot of elements with other entries in the series; that's part of what makes a series, after all, rather than unrelated titles. Longer on-going series also tend to introduce something in a new game, making it unique to that game... until a following entry when it shows up again. Might be the next game, a later update/DLC to that game, or the game after that, or maybe a later movie, or in an on-going tv show, etc. There's no telling when something recognizably unique to a particular entry will show up elsewhere, making it no longer unique to it.

scaliespe said:
It’s quite rare to have a series where each entry is such a carbon-copy of one another that you couldn’t distinguish them in at least some cases.

When it comes to artwork, games don't need to be a carbon-copy of each other to have depictions that are vague or unclear about what entry it belongs to. Just peruse Monster Hunter or Pokémon and see how many images clearly establish a particular entry in the series/franchise, despite the games not being carbon-copies of others in their respective series. Even with The Legend of Zelda, the ability to really distinguish some of the games comes from the more visually distinct entries like the Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild, but even then you have titles that are visually similar, like Spirit Tracks and Age of Calamity. Then there's remakes, debates about when something counts as a remake (a new game styled after an old one) or a remaster (the same game but better)... You'd end up needing fanboy-level knowledge to know whether some depiction is actually unique to a particular game in a series or not, which again is ever-changing. It's just more work to keep on top of, more messes to clean up when it changes...

scaliespe said:
Alternatively, we could have characters only imply the series rather than the individual games, avoiding the need for future cleanup altogether… perhaps with possible exceptions for really minor characters that we can be fairly certain will never appear elsewhere. At least if video_games is only added when the game itself is tagged, and the game itself is not implied by any characters or species that may appear elsewhere, we can be relatively certain that any usage of the tag was intended to be specific to the game.

I don't see the point at that point, as the tag will be rarely used since individual games aren't tagged nearly as often as the franchise. But even when a specific game is tagged, I find it's usually due to the tagger thinking or intending the image to take place in that game's "canon", or because they associate some character with that game since they first appeared there, without anything visually identifying that game in particular. Leaving the video_games implications from specific games then would just cause extra mess when those tags are incorrectly used, while not adding anything worthwhile itself, as it doesn't actually indicate what's in the image and the difference between it showing up on a post or not will be due to obscure information most people don't know of. Best to just get rid of all implications to it from any particular game/series/franchise, leaving it only for game-related paraphernalia (consoles, controllers, etc), or an actual depiction of a game, things you can actually see in the image.

wat8548 said:
Unless nothing implies it at all, as proposed.

It's not just a matter of there being "too many" video_games posts or the tag being "too broad".

I think you misread my post. The fact that, for example, Midna implies a specific Zelda game despite being a recurring character is a problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what happens with the video_games tag. Even if you nuke the tag, that has no impact whatsoever on the fact that Midna implies a specific game in the franchise that the character is not specific to.

Both the current setup and your proposal are not compliant with TWYS, unless you're also proposing to change its category to meta. You can't tell, by looking at any given character, whether they appeared in a video game (exclusively or otherwise), so all the implications are invalid.

That’s an overly strict interpretation of TWYS. If you can recognize any particular content from a game, you can tag the game. If you know that a character is from a game, and you see the character, you can tag the game. It’s like saying you can’t tell that a character is a lizard just by looking at the character. Unless, of course, you know what a lizard looks like and are able to recognize the species. It’s the same thing for recognizing game characters. If not, your statement would imply that not only video_games is invalid, but all franchise tags, and even calls into question the validity of character tags. The “requires outside knowledge” bit in the tagging guidelines does not apply to recognizing things in the image, because then you wouldn’t be able to tag anything. It means that if you know a character is male or female, you can’t tag them as male or female if they appear ambiguous_gender instead. That is outside information. But recognizing content that belongs to a video game and thus tagging video_games does not remotely violate TWYS.

There is no reason for this one medium to receive special treatment, not when anime is invalid despite arguably having a better case.

I’d be in favor of an anime tag. I don’t see why anime fans shouldn’t have an easy way to search all anime content without having to use a ton of ~ operators to search through all the animes they like.

I mean, if we’re going to keep this tag at all (as the admins have stated they most likely intend to), it would make sense to have at least a couple other “genre” tags like this so that it isn’t just a weird one-off thing, but an expected component of our tagging system. I’d propose one for anime/manga (in the same tag, as they overlap very strongly) and another for western animation/cartoons at the very least. Given how much furry content is specific to anime and cartoons, I think both would be useful for their respective fandoms - more useful than video_games, even, as those mediums tend to be less diverse in their content.

Also, we do have a webcomic tag, which is pretty much the same thing already. It’s a genre, and it is implied by a ton of unrelated webcomics. And no, it’s not even for the comics themselves, which, if posted to the site, would get the comic tag. Even fan drawings of webcomic characters get the webcomics tag by implication.

watsit said:
The problem is having a tag like it currently is now, and renaming it doesn't fix it. We don't have a movies tag for anything that is remotely associated with a movie, or a comics tag for anything remotely associated with a comic, so it doesn't make sense to have a tag like video_games for things remotely related to a video game (especially as video games are more malleable of a medium, ranging from visual novels, first-person, third-person, god-sim, and FMV games). It's on nearly a million posts, and describes nothing of what you can see in the image. And even what it attempts to do (indicate something in the image has some loose connection to a video game somewhere) it does half-heartedly, including things that aren't from video games and excluding things that are, since it's on a franchise/series level.

As above, we do have a webcomics tag for that. Unless you mean specifically the old-school print comics, but a tag specifically for that would probably not cover much because most of the notable ones have been adapted into movies by now.

Sure, but given that they are issues, a video_games tag is just making an additional mess on top of it. It's like saying the oil is an issue that needs to be resolved regardless of what we do with the fire. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to put out the fire because there's oil that needs to be taken care of.

I’m not sure it’s an a related mess, though. The fire burns because of the oil, but the analogy implies that the problem with video_games exists or is somehow worsened by the fact that there are some incorrect implications, like Midna implying the wrong tag. I’d say they’re rather unrelated issues in this case, except for the fact that both have something to do with video games in general.

Not really. Sure, there are some games like that (e.g. Final Fantasy), but many game series share a lot of elements with other entries in the series; that's part of what makes a series, after all, rather than unrelated titles. Longer on-going series also tend to introduce something in a new game, making it unique to that game... until a following entry when it shows up again. Might be the next game, a later update/DLC to that game, or the game after that, or maybe a later movie, or in an on-going tv show, etc. There's no telling when something recognizably unique to a particular entry will show up elsewhere, making it no longer unique to it.

If you mean specific characters or the like, sure, those can reappear in a series. Hence why I think implying the franchise would be preferable. But as far as game content itself goes, I think there are plenty of cases where a specific entry in a franchise can be identified by visual elements alone, such as the art style in the game being replicated by the artist, or the hud or a logo specific to that game being featured, and so on.

Even so, perhaps some franchises can be lumped under a tag specifically for the games if they really are that undifferentiated, and only distinguish between the games in general and the other media in general. That could possibly work for something like Sonic, where many of the games are very similar (with perhaps a few standouts that can get their own tag), but they all look very different from the comics. And again, the base franchise tag still exists (and would be the one implied by the major characters) for those cases where a given artwork isn’t specific to any part of the franchise, such as a Sonic drawing in the artist’s own style with no specific gameplay elements or comic references in the image.

When it comes to artwork, games don't need to be a carbon-copy of each other to have depictions that are vague or unclear about what entry it belongs to. Just peruse Monster Hunter or Pokémon and see how many images clearly establish a particular entry in the series/franchise, despite the games not being carbon-copies of others in their respective series. Even with The Legend of Zelda, the ability to really distinguish some of the games comes from the more visually distinct entries like the Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild, but even then you have titles that are visually similar, like Spirit Tracks and Age of Calamity. Then there's remakes, debates about when something counts as a remake (a new game styled after an old one) or a remaster (the same game but better)... You'd end up needing fanboy-level knowledge to know whether some depiction is actually unique to a particular game in a series or not, which again is ever-changing. It's just more work to keep on top of, more messes to clean up when it changes...

Well, we have plenty of fanboys for almost every conceivable franchise here somewhere, so that’s probably not unreasonable.

Things like Pokémon probably don’t need specific game tags in the vast majority of cases, especially considering a large part of the franchise is from the anime. However, I do think Pokémon fans would appreciate the ability to search for, for example, Pokémon Sun/Moon specifically and to find those posts that specifically make reference to the game in one way or another. Most posts would still just get the generic franchise copyright tag, though, and that’s fine.

I don't see the point at that point, as the tag will be rarely used since individual games aren't tagged nearly as often as the franchise. But even when a specific game is tagged, I find it's usually due to the tagger thinking or intending the image to take place in that game's "canon", or because they associate some character with that game since they first appeared there, without anything visually identifying that game in particular. Leaving the video_games implications from specific games then would just cause extra mess when those tags are incorrectly used, while not adding anything worthwhile itself, as it doesn't actually indicate what's in the image and the difference between it showing up on a post or not will be due to obscure information most people don't know of. Best to just get rid of all implications to it from any particular game/series/franchise, leaving it only for game-related paraphernalia (consoles, controllers, etc), or an actual depiction of a game, things you can actually see in the image.

I think it would be tagged more than you think - having looked through the destiny 2 tag, as someone familiar with the game, I could tell that most of them actually were specific to D2 despite the sequel having plenty of overlap with the first game. Very few actual mistags in the sense that it was generic Destiny content that didn’t reference the second game specifically - and I removed the tag from the few that I saw.

At any rate, my proposal is, above all else, meant to create a workable solution that accords with the admins’ desire to not have to nuke the tag. It’s not perfect, but I think this is the most feasible solution that avoids mistags as much as possible.

can we just nuke the tag

scaliespe said:
I’d be in favor of an anime tag. I don’t see why anime fans shouldn’t have an easy way to search all anime content without having to use a ton of ~ operators to search through all the animes they like.

How do you plan to deal with distinction between things that originated as their anime, and things that started as something else and were adapted to anime?