[arg_discuss] Giving credit where credit is due (ARGdb credits)

[Adam Martin]

2009/4/9 Brooke Thompson <brooke at mirlandano.com>:

> One of the great things about ARGdb is that it's a place to list credits for

> the various games. Now, of course, many are unpublished and may never be

> published, but it sure is nice to get credit for your work and this might

> encourage more campaigns to publish such things or, at least, send them to

> us. However, as there have been no standards for this stuff, I'm finding it

> to be quite a challenge (and opportunity!).

>

> For practical purposes (ie a tangle of relational databases), we need to

> have some sort of standardized system and I'm looking for your thoughts and

> suggestions. My current idea is to group them by a basic type and then let

> the actual titles be flexible. So, it might look something like this:


As Brian points out, official titles is an issue I think it's best to
avoid. My impression was that there are already many
fundamentally-different organizational structures for groups that make
ARGs. Your "created/produced/written/desgined/actor/internet/video/etc"
doesn't fit for ones that I can think of off the top of my head.

To illustrate how bad this is, I've seen cases where two people had
identical job titles at different companies but completely different
jobs on the actual project. How do you deal with that? :(

As an aside, for mainstream games, IIRC we're just about at the point
where you can confidently say:

the individual was a: "Programmer, Artist, Designer, Producer, or 'other'"

and

the company they worked for was a: "Development Studio, Publisher, or 'other'"

...and beyond that it breaks down into chaos, even within (!)
companies, let alone looking across companies, let alone looking
across genres.

(note: the above 4-way and 3-way splits aren't even agreed upon, they
have serious issues (e.g. 3d modellers don't like being lumped with
concept art teams who never work on the game, writers do not see
themselves as designers, programmers dismiss out of hand the
core-technology teams, and where does QA sit?))

c.f. the Credit Standards Committee from the IGDA that's been working
on this issue for a while now - but last time I looked, they ended up
having an overload of titles with no way to work out equivalence. I
don't think you can do much better without causing many extra
problems.

Adam