Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Role-playing shooter (2nd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. Because it's unclear whether Looter shooter or action role-playing game would be the correct target AND because, as DF pointed out, we have an unattributed copy issue as well. Any editor is welcome to create a redirect Star Mississippi 15:07, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Role-playing shooter

AfDs for this article:

• Articles for deletion/Role-playing shooter
• Articles for deletion/Role-playing shooter (2nd nomination)

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Role-playing shooter (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Insufficent notability from its parent genre. Could also merge some of the the content to its subgenre under action role-playing game. Its loose and occasional use as a genre term was more widely used fifteen years ago but no longer. The use of the specific term had some minor currency as a self-promoted term with the Borderlands series, but this has not been a consistent and enduring trend. The article is a laundry list of games where a source has remarked that it is a "role-playing shooter" or there are elements of both genres in the game.

Firstly, there is no commentary on what criteria or elements identify a role-playing shooter, so it's by extension a term where the developer has called it that (as in Borderlands) or a source has noted the two genres happen to converge. The article has a flavor of original research to it, given that not all games are unanimously or clearly identified as such - I go more into that below. I cannot find evidence of source analysis of the genre beyond the label, which indicates it could easily be merged as a subcategory of the action role-playing game genre. So even if it is a term with some meaning, it's not substantial enough to justify an article if the article is currently serving as a glorified list.

Secondly, a source analysis of the article shows pages and citations rarely and inconsistently use the term. The only wikilinked articles to independently describe the game as a “role-playing shooter” are the articles for ‘’Mass Effect’’ and ‘’The 3rd Birthday’’. For the cited sources, the ones that do use the term mostly use it in reference to ‘’Borderlands’’: [1][2] and one for ‘’The 3rd Birthday’’: [3]. The ‘’Inside Mac Games’’ article clearly is following the ‘’Borderlands’’ developer’s self-description. Some other citations don’t use the term, but the page author has assumed they meant a role-playing shooter because they described the game as being in the role-playing genre and shooter genre: [4][5][6]. Otherwise, the remaining citations don’t use the term. Broader sources do use the term, but not as widely as expected. A WP:BEFORE finds a few loose use of terms for various games, but not consistently and widely in a way that inspires confidence. The best shot is a listicle-type article from TheGamer which is a good start but generally provides no guidance on the genre: [7]. The listicle type seems to lend itself to cramming as many games that seem to fit in the genre as possible to meet the brief - even acknowledging for one item that the game doesn't really have that much in the way of role-playing mechanics. As mentioned earlier, the term originates from self-description from Gearbox developers for ‘’Borderlands’’: [8][9]. Other scarce examples of the term from online news searches include describing ‘’The Outer Worlds’’, [10], ‘’Mass Effect 3’’ [11], and something called ‘’Slayer Shock’’ [12]. Searches on Archive for the term are limited. Once you remove false hits for lists of genres listing ‘role-playing’ and ‘shooter’ together, there are a few dozen hits, but again they are skewed towards the era of ‘’Borderlands’’: the term was in vogue during the time of ‘’Bioshock’’ and ‘’Mass Effect’’, and occasionally earlier, but generally not any more.

Thirdly, there's a previous successful AfD, so people have been dubious for a while.

Sorry for the essay! I just want to be thorough on this one. As ever, I'm happy to be proven wrong. ＶＲＸＣＥＳ (talk) 08:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Video games-related deletion discussions. ＶＲＸＣＥＳ (talk) 08:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Merge with either Shooter or Action role-playing game. This article hasn't really demonstrated why Role-playing shooter is a distinct enough concept from its parent genres to warrant its own article. A Role-playing shooter is really just another flavour of shooter game or another flavour of action RPG, depending on how you look at it. The history section is also essentially just a list of games that fit the genre, while ideally a proper history section should inform the reader about how the genre came to be and how it has evolved or developed over time.

Personally, I don't think that this warrants its own article, but the fact that some shooter games have RPG elements (and vice versa) and could be considered their own sub-genre could be talked about under the respective articles insteadd. Currently there is already a section for this in the Action role-playing game article, and everything notable enough about this topic for an encyclopedia can likely be condensed down into a short paragraph and placed there, perhaps with a few of the most notable examples listed in this article. It's a sub-genre anyways, so I think using the article of one of the main genres as a starting point would be a more appropriate way to handle the topic. If it turns out that in future, players and the industry start to widely consider role-playing shooters a distinct genre of its own, then it may be more reasonable to spin off the section into a separate page.

I also agree with V R X C E S about the use of the terminology not being consistent. If someone says 'Role-playing shooter' you'll know what they mean, since the term is pretty self explanatory, but I don't think it's a term that's used industry-wide or even widely used among players. Combustible Vulpex (talk) 10:30, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• Delete Or just restore to the redirect and lock it. On 5 November 2023 CoolingGibbon made an edit with the summary "Creating article by merging content from the action RPG and looter shooter articles." Then someone removed the looter shooter content. So this is just a copy and paste bit from another article it seems. Dream Focus 12:29, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
• Delete The proper genre would be looter shooter, for which an article already exists. Role-playing shooter is not the common name, nor is a duplicate article needed for it. The creation of this was really random and unnecessary. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 13:37, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.