Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20140402/Report

Report: Featured and Good articles by genre

Submitted by Torchiest

WP:VG is one of the biggest groups in all of Wikipedia, and collectively, we're getting close to the 1000 article mark for reviewed high quality work. To commemorate the first decade of the WikiProject, we've compiled a list of all our best video game articles by genre. These lists exclude articles that are about video game systems, genres, characters, or other related articles. We're focused on just the games themselves.

By far the best-represented genres among both featured and good articles are action-adventure and role-playing games. In the case of action-adventure, the reason is obvious, as it is possibly the broadest genre in all of video gaming, a giant catchall into which a huge swath of games fall at least partially. Role-playing games get boosted by the number of Japanese RPGs that make the cut.

Following behind them are adventure games and first-person shooters, which seem over and under represented, respectively, compared to the genres' overall popularity. A possible reason for this is that adventure game fans tend to be more interested in the written word, as the genre's roots are in interactive fiction, and thus those fans are more likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Platform games are also well represented, probably due to their being one of the oldest and most storied console genres.

All other genres receive a scattering of representation that is mostly in line with their popularity. Arcade games in particular, though once the dominant form in the late 1970s and early 1980s, have few quality articles compared to their quantity. We can guess this is almost certainly due to the dearth of easy-to-find coverage on older games. As more and more print content moves online, and video game retrospectives continue to be written, however, older games should be easier to cover moving forward.

Featured articles by genre tally

See the full list of featured articles by genre here.

• Action adventure: 31
• Role-playing: 28
• Adventure: 19
• First-person shooter: 14
• Platform: 10
• Real-time strategy: 7
• Arcade: 4
• Sports: 4
• Third person shooter: 4
• Fighting: 3
• Puzzle: 3
• Racing: 3
• Action: 2
• Music: 2
• Shoot em up: 2
• Simulation: 2

Video game good articles by genre tally

See the full list of good articles by genre here.

• Role-playing: 84
• Action-adventure: 66
• Platform: 66
• Adventure: 44
• First-person shooter: 23
• Racing: 20
• Puzzle: 15
• Shoot em up: 15
• Fighting: 14
• Music: 14
• Real-time strategy: 12
• Sport: 11
• Arcade: 10
• Third-person shooter: 11
• Turn-based strategy: 8
• Action: 8
• Party: 5
• Space combat simulator: 4
• Turn-based tactics: 3
• Flight simulator: 3
• Simulation: 2
• Other: 9