Credit categories? Director, Writer/Localization

Hey, I've been having a bit of trouble properly categorizing certain credit roles.

I've been putting directors in the "design" category because they seem directly involved in creative decisions from my understanding as opposed to producers.

Now, where do I put someone with a writing credit? The last one, I put under design as well since writing scenarios often feels directly connected to the game's design. However, I feel this should be its own category.

Related to this are localization credits. Their importance varies from game to game. Almost all games can be localized but different games have different importance placed on their localization. For something like Animal Crossing, it's a very big part of the creative decisions that are being made. So is this a design credit?

What I don't like doing is putting them under "unclassified."

Why do we not have a "writing" category? Or even a few more categories in general. I'm not saying have 100 categories for every different position but at least a few more that make it easier to categorize credits. Also, how about adding a few example credits next to the categories?

Like: "Design (Level Designer, Creative Director, etc.)"

This would help people associated the right credit with the right category.

I would assume that the site was rebuilt to be a bit more flexible in that regard that adding something is impossible again, right? At least it really should have after how limited the original wiki was.

This is a known issue. There is apparently a decent chunk of engineering time this year set aside to work on the wiki, and Jeff is currently in the process of putting together a big list of things to fix/change.

Yeah, we need example credits and stuff to better account for the cases you're mentioning here and help people categorize stuff. The list of disciplines is based on GDC's different tracks. GDC may not have a writing track, now that I think about it, so it might be worth adding that to the list. But for our purposes, at the moment, those are Design roles.

Director positions could potentially go under Design or Business, really. Different studios treat those roles differently. I'll consult some actual directors during GDC and make a call on that. "Director of Engineering" would obviously be a Programming role, though.

Localization is Business.

I think the credits pages have deeper issues than that - they're not really suited to modern crew sizes at all. Everything within one category just becomes a big, unsorted blob, and the more you add, the less readable they are. What the wiki needs is some sort of index for profession names, so it can automatically sort and group them and emphasize the more important ones.

Also adding credit entries to the form one at a time, and then copying and pasting in one item into them at a time, is incredibly slow and inefficient. Not to mention the form gives you no indication what that existing persons' credits are, so you then have to manually look all of them up in a separate tab to ensure it's not someone completely different who just happens to have the same name. What I'd really like is a way to submit a plain-text block of credits in a specified format and then have them be validated prepared for submission all in one go.

Also companies need to be able to be credited for more than just Publisher and Developer. There are non developer companies that frequently show up in credits like localization companies and voice over/sound recoding studios. There are "idea" companies like Comcept that would be better credited as Producer since they just supervise and don't actually have any internal development resources. And there are companies that do contract work on specific of a game, where listing them as developers just muddies the water and doesn't help inform users what work the company actually did.

So, uh, yeah, sorry for the rant. Just had to get it of my chest since apparently the powers that be are watching.

Another thing I have always wondered about is when entities like bands are credited? Do we put in the band members, or if they are not specifically mentioned do we just not include them at all?

Never. Unless a person is credited specifically for work on that game, they aren't included. Licensing your music to a game isn't a "credit." Same goes for people who have a likeness appear in a game. Except in exceedingly rare cases, unless they're specificlally credited in the game's credits, they don't get a page/credit.

@jeff: Also, what do we do with credits that don't use peoples real names? A lot of Japanese releases do this.