Comments on Tablut

# 7 Comments. # Don't bury the lede! Consider moving the animation on this page (and other pages that have animations) up top, to grab the attention of a casual browser.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-25 20:36 UTC

I personally prefer "standard" semantically structured individual game pages. How many casual browsers are there on the individual game pages? Do you think I should also put on top the example game page the PortablePiecepackNotation for the example game next to the animation OR should I split those semantically linked elements apart OR do I put the animation in twice (on top and later next to PPN in an example game section)?

-- TrevorLDavis 2021-01-27 02:25 UTC

Who created the standard? What was their motivation?

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-28 00:35 UTC

I don't know how the GameTemplate "standard" arose and how it should evolve in the future. If you think it should evolve so there is a fancy eye-popping graphic on the top (photo like in SharkTank or animation like in Relativity) then should we duplicate animations that article-wise should maybe appear in an "Example Game" section later on in the article especially if there is also PortablePiecepackNotation so players can walk through the a (possibly annotated) game one move at a time and verify they haven't made a mistake? Any reason not to duplicate (or move) other article pictures (like game starting states) to page top for game articles without a photo on top?

-- TrevorLDavis 2021-01-28 01:04 UTC

I didn't realize you were talking about GameTemplate. I guess that is the closest thing we have to a standard for describing games. It looks like IainCheyne may have had something do do with it back in 2004; at least, that's the earliest edit we have on record.

I wouldn't say that anything about the template should be rigid, except maybe the metadata, which is useful for parsing by regex and so on. However, I think duplicating graphics on a page is a bad idea. If I saw that, I'd ask myself why the people duplicating them were doing so. Trying to fill too much space with too little content? Poor QA? Almost anything I can think of is bad. In any case, I don't think the template specifies where to put illustrations and animations. I like putting them up top because I imagine they're that much more likely to grab someone's attention there.

In the case of Tablut, I'd suggest maybe the static starting position should go below with the PortablePiecepackNotation, unless the animation is actually of the PPN, in which case, I agree, we should keep them together.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-28 06:41 UTC

The Tablut animation matches the PPN (rendered via a call to animate_game()). In this case the PPN for the entire game was pretty concise.

-- TrevorLDavis 2021-01-28 07:01 UTC

Then I agree you are correct. 🙂

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-28 07:21 UTC