peterx (376) on 6/6/2023 12:28 PM · Permalink · Report

I think with thousands of new games coming out each year, it's almost impossible to expect every game should have an user created description :( Even "quick" approvals take months and years now, imagine now that only user created description gets accepted... and there are very few people who would take the time and write these too. Also if I'm correct, MobyGames uses some scrapper tools that automatically adds games to database including it's description.

Cavalary (11446) on 6/6/2023 12:32 PM · Permalink · Report

Hear, hear. It was a big part of what made MobyGames notable, and the game entries here worth checking out, original content submitted by users and not found everywhere else. But then the scrapers came along and this was the result...

A middle ground would be to always have the (user-written) description field at the top, and where there is none have a text under the header stating that the game has no description and a link to submit one if you think you can improve on the official one, and then the official description below, so it's always clear that the user-written description is preferred and asked for and clearly visible when it doesn't exist.

Alaka (106537) on 6/6/2023 4:43 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

That Japanese ad blurb has an English translation. I'm pretty certain Giant Bomb has stub entries also.

Nothing's stopping you from writing descriptions. Be the change you want to see, butane.

Koterminus (252357) on 6/6/2023 7:07 PM · Permalink · Report

I disagree that unofficial English translations of ad blurbs should be placed in the same field as an official description (please tell me that's not Google Translate), but if we must have them, the English translation should be above the Japanese text, so that anyone looking at the entry would see the English text first.

j.raido 【雷堂嬢太朗】 (98933) on 6/6/2023 11:43 PM · Permalink · Report

Gonna respond to several comments here in a single reply since several are about the translated Japanese ad blurbs I've been submitting.

Some of them aren't even in English, i've seen some copy pasted from official japanese websites which surely isn't helpful to most users of mobygames

These aren't copy-pasted, they're manually transcribed from the back of the box and translated by me specifically to help out those who don't speak the language.

A middle ground would be to always have the (user-written) description field at the top, and where there is none have a text under the header stating that the game has no description and a link to submit one if you think you can improve on the official one, and then the official description below, so it's always clear that the user-written description is preferred and asked for and clearly visible when it doesn't exist.

I for one love this idea. I'm terrible at writing original descriptions (and they also take me forever to write), but giving proper incentive to add them would hopefully get some more users to start backfilling them on entries that only have blurbs.

But an unofficial translation, unless signed off on by the developer/publisher, is not an official description, and thus should not be considered an ad blurb.

Surely having a translation of the text is of more use to the average user than just a block of foreign characters that most here can't read? Though I agree they should definitely be marked as "unofficial" translations for sure. That's something I didn't even consider as I thought it to be self-evident, but on reflection I suppose it isn't.

I mentioned this on the Discord, but it may be worth adding a function to the site to support translations for ad blurbs and other text fields where it might be useful. Review abstracts definitely come to mind here as another possible candidate, and I'm sure there are others as well.

And if you're taking the time to translate an ad blurb, you might as well just write it into an actual description by that point.

Translating a blurb might only take me 5-10 minutes, whereas writing it into a full description might take me 45 minutes to an hour or more and involve a lot of extra research. Doing it the way I am now is simply a means to an end so I can get a stub entry into the database and add the credits, which is generally what I personally care most about as a user and contributor. Forcing me to write full descriptions means I'm less inclined to spend time doing the part I care about and am actually good at, and the beauty of a collaborative project like MobyGames is that we all have different areas of expertise to build a more complete encyclopedia of game information.