Board Thread:Projects/@comment-30128802-20170725074359/@comment-30128802-20180104075426

This is to report that the standard "biography" section (with no game/book tiles) has been implemented for all characters in the DXMD characters list. Actually, the articles for all characters other than Adam Jensen were updated months ago, but I didn't get around to the Jensen article until last week.

The standardized "biography" sections look pretty nice for purposes of consistency of format. Having the first section be consistent, I think, is important to the overall feel of the Wiki, even if the remaining sections aren't nearly as standardized.

Still, I think there are some issues that deserve further thought.

One issue is whether optional/conditional sidequest content should really go into "biography" or somewhere else. For major characters like Jensen, the "biography" section is strictly canonical. However, many minor characters appear only in sidequests, and sidequests are not necessarily canonical and may have variable endings. As noted in my post above, for the Richard article, sidequest information in "biography" have been described using optional/conditional wording (e.g., "If Adam Jensen meets Viznik in the sewers...If Jensen follows through with the task")." In retrospect, I don't think this is necessarily the best way to handle things, because such optional/condition descriptions (using "if", "may", etc.) aren't truly consistent with the concept that "biography" refers to canonical information.

I think a possible solution might be to use an additional section like "Interactions," "Gameplay interactions", "Interactions with the player character," "Game apperances", etc. where sidequest and other open-ended content can be discussed in greater detail. This section would include "mission appearances" as a sub-section, but would be more generic and encompassing. Under this approach, the line between gameplay information and canonical information would be more clearly drawn, although a potential issue is to avoid redundancy between "biography" and the gameplay section.

Some of these headings already exist in certain articles (see Michael Berry, Tomas Romanek). The Romanek article is an example of where gameplay information is much more prominent than "biography." The Romanek article is also a good example of why "mission appearances" doesn't always work, since the character is part of the open-world interaction, and not necessarily part of any mission.

Personally, I think the nature of the game and story of the series should play a large role in how articles are laid out. Mechemik mentioned Assassin's Creed earlier. Assassin's Creed games, however, have closed-ended storylines. Since the events depicted in AC are the memories of ancestors, it is clear that everything depicted in the game actually occurred, canonically speaking. Thus, in AC, you only need a "Biography" and nothing else, as far as gameplay interactions go. Bioshock also falls into the same category.

The polar opposite on the spectrum would be Fallout and Elder Scrolls, whose games are open-ended stories (with lots of sidequests). For this reason, Fallout/Elder Scrolls character articles focus heavily on gameplay "interactions" and do not use "biography" at all. The Elder Scrolls wiki has separate articles for different game appearances of the same character. Mass Effect and Dragon Age probably fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and their wiki layouts somewhat reflect this.

Therefore, the style we used here should reflect the type of storylines presented in the Deus Ex series. DXMD is certainly very sidequest-heavy and is more open-world than some of the previous titles. Thus, I think DXMD has nudged the classification a bit away from close-ended-storyline franchises like Assassin's Creed. For this reason, I think it's worth looking into using a section that is more suitable for gameplay information of characters.

Personally, I'm also curious as to what Mechemik thinks about this, given that Mechemic is an admin on the Witcher wiki and recently posted a character layout guide.