jotaroraido wrote:One problem that immediately jumps out to me for including credit screenshots with normal screenshots is image quality. Personally, most of my credits are for games I don't own and have never played, where I've used a Let's Play or other similar video on, say, Youtube, World of Longplays, or Nico Nico Douga to source screenshots of the end credits. Good enough to extract the data, but almost certainly not to display alongside direct-capture, emulator, or in-game screenshots, as they tend to be rather blurry and full of compression artifacts.
Having them directly attached to a credits listing -- say, a "source images" button at the bottom of the listing, which would presumably display a gallery similar to the screenshot gallery -- would make the most sense to me. It would also prevent any confusion as to what images go with what listings, and also account for, for example, manual or box scans, or screenshots of a hex editor for extracted credits.
I had to spend a little time thinking about this, since of course you're right--the issue is a bit complex.
My guiding principle was that we should leverage the tools we're already building wherever possible. If screenshots of the game are useful as verification of details about the game, I don't think that it's unreasonable to store them right alongside the other screenshots. Perhaps someone will find them useful who wouldn't have encountered them if they'd been only in the source information section for the credits, or whatever. Similarly, if we're storing box scans anyway, and if a box scan is the source of some data, we might as well simply link to our copy of the box scan, rather than storing another copy.
But, you're right, too, that in the case of low-quality screenshots or videos we might not really want to store them with regular screenshots, even if they are useful for verification. I'm not sure what the right balance will be, myself.
There is one issue. We've all generally agreed (I think?) that we should be very upfront about the sources of our information, so that people can judge whether it is reliable, as well as for purely academic-integrity-related reasons. How do we envision doing this? Because just a 'source images' section won't really be enough.
An anecdote: for some open source game (Neverball, perhaps?), I contributed information about its release dates, or patches, or something (don't have a copy of my own submission comments, so please forgive my vagueness) which I got by looking through its SVN history to see when the different releases were tagged. It's a pretty straightforward process, but I think that it probably wants a little bit more explanation than just a screenshot of a console window with 'svn log' run in it.
Similarly, I think that your example of using a hex editor to find credits will probably deserve more than just a screenshot of a hex editor, too.
So, however we deal with sources, we should certainly have at least the ability to write some text about them. In that case, I don't think it would be wrong to write something like: "These credits are taken from the staff roll displayed upon completing the game. A (low-resolution) video of the staff roll is available
here." In that case, the actual source of the credits is clearly described, so that even if the video goes offline, we will still know where they came from, and the link is provided as a convenience. Ideally, of course, we should provide the most durable possible links. Honestly, I believe that even if we're very successful, something like the Internet Archive is likely to be more durable than Oregami (and they do, in fact,
host longplays).
This discussion about sources is complex enough that it probably deserves its own thread. If someone has better ideas than me about how to do sources, I'd love to hear them.
