When is it appropriate to close a lore question as "not addressed directly through in-universe sources"?

Question

This is the text for one of our off-topic close reasons.

However, I feel we've got a pretty serious problem with this close reason. This is popularly interpreted as "If the game (or series) doesn't tell you the answer, then the the question is off-topic."

This is problematic, in my opinion, as it requires knowledge of the answer to determine whether or not the question itself is on-topic.

Take, for example, the latest instance of this: What is the population of the city in Grand Theft Auto 5?

This is certainly a lore question, which we have deemed to be on topic. However, we had further discussion about what kind of lore is or is not okay, resulting in the decision that extracanonical questions are not on-topic. I believe that's what drove the wording of the current close reason, and I believe probably why this question was voted to be closed. However, are those 5 people who close-voted really sure there's not an answer in-game? There are numerous radio stations in the game with hours of audio... perhaps one mentions the population. Maybe somewhere on the outskirts of the city there is a population sign. Maybe there's a game manual with a blurb of flavor text that mentions it. I'm not trying to get down on the people who close voted here... I'm trying to point out that there's a lot of effort involved in proving the negative, and it's not something I think we should be basing our close policy around.

I think it's worth some extra discussion about what we really intend to exclude when we talk about "extracanonical" lore questions, and whether or not a policy based around knowledge of the answer is a wise course.

Answer 1

It is never okay to vote to close a question because it is “not addressed directly through in-universe sources”, due to the inherent problems of needing to know the answer to the question (or at least that it does or does not exists) before voting to close. I made a similar argument here, in that among other things, it turns close votes into super downvotes where you're telling the user you know what the answer to their question is, and it's that one doesn't exist. Upvotes and downvotes are meant to measure an answer's accuracy, not close votes. The only way to disagree with people in such a case is to cast a re-open vote. And what if the 5 close voters are just kind of sure that there's no answer, but one guy has definitive proof that there is an answer? He's now got to get 4 other people to back him up and vote to reopen. This is not how the system should work.

Moreover, it is my belief that the text of that close reason doesn't fit the type of lore question we actually intended to protect against. I think we accidentally created a new rule that was never discussed and not particularly enforceable when we set that particular text on the close reason. We should change the text of that close reason, or remove it entirely.

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In short, I propose that the resolution of this particular issue, in the short term, is to remove "as well as lore questions not addressed directly through in-universe sources" text from the close reason, and stop voting to close lore questions based on whether or not an answer exists.

In the long term, I've asked this separate question about whether or not all lore questions should be banned, so that it isn't conflated with the current issue.

Answer 2

Yes, you do have to know what you are talking about before you vote to close.

The only people who have the global power to vote to close on the network are community managers and developers. They're like the exception handlers' exception handlers: they act when shit really does hit the fan. Their power is extraordinary as they can close questions without understanding what the question is talking about — because you don't do that.

Why do we close questions to begin with? We are very picky with our questions because we are very picky with our answers: we want answers, not blog posts or opinion pieces or "me too"s or "thanks!" or follow-up questions or books on any given topic. Yet surely you don't need to know anything about videogames when a question asks "What is the best engineer hat in Team Fortress 2", right? I mean, hats are purely cosmetic, right? They don't affect the way you play, right?

Oh, look. Maybe you do need to know that a non-unusual Hotrod, in fact, does give you an objective strategic advantage in the game to handle this question no other hat in the game gives you. Maybe there is a "best" hat, after all? Maybe you do need to know what you're talking about before you close questions?

Even when you do discount these bugs, there might still be a right answer might be "any hat so long as it isn't the Gibus". (For an engineer the "I have a hat, you can trust me" effect probably isn't very important, though; you can make a number of arguments here, but if you haven't played TF2 you can't.)

Of course the main problem with this kind of question is that, when the answer is a negative, proving that it is so becomes much harder than asking the question. Do you know all of the bugs and quicks of TF2? I sure don't. "No you can't do that"/"No you can't know that" answers really don't work: "mods can do anything" one might say; "you just didn't look hard enough" another might retort, even if the correct answer at the time of posting actually was negative.

What's the difference between voting to close a question because you don't think there is an answer and answering that you don't think there is an answer?

Four people — plus all those that come after and don't reopen the question.

If five people think there is no non-speculative answer to a plot question (and there aren't five more who reopen it), it's fair to say that the community thinks there is no answer we would allow. This means that the community thinks it is futile to let the question be open for answers we would downvote and delete anyway for being helplessly speculative.

If those five people happen to be wrong, someone who knows better can comment so, use his vote to reopen and/or ask others to do so.

This is different from having an answer with four upvotes. Upvoting answers can become instinctive, second nature: "yeah this looks right." More people have the right to upvote than they have to downvote, too. On the other hand, bar for closing and reopening is the same, however. It's also a high bar: we ask people to know what they're talking about and understand how this site rolls before they can make this kind of call. If five highly-experienced users can reach the same conclusion without it being overturned, I feel that's more authoritative than having an answer with four upvotes.

Additionally, voting is anonymous; answering isn't. You might very well know for certain that there isn't an answer to a question, and yet you don't want to engage the asker and get into an argument about it. Why should the site ask any one of us to be the one person who steps up to say the obvious and gets all of the inevitable notifications for it?

As a moderator, I sure do occasionally miss the opportunity to not be the one person who makes the right call. We abstain from opening or closing questions frequently in order to not be that one guy. It's not a pretty place to be, and most people who commented about downvotes should know how that can turn out.

"But badp, what if we don't have five people out of 254 3k'ers who do think there can't be an answer?"

Oh dear, what then? What happens then is that, huh, the question doesn't get closed. So long as we do delete subsequent speculative answers, the site is no worse for having a question open and unanswered. It's way better, in fact, than closing an answerable question.

"But badp, doesn't that mean that it'll leave us with a lot of unclosed lore questions? Surely we're about to drown in a sea of poorly-written fan fiction!"

You don't know that. Is there a history of lore questions getting speculative answers? Do we expend a lot of effort downvoting and deleting them? I don't know. I don't think so. Although, if you will, I'm just one person; maybe if four more agreed with me... :D

Answer 3

It's sometimes hard to know for certain that a lore question isn't addressed in-game somewhere. Until we chance upon a better criteria for deciding which lore questions are on topic, or until we decide to ban them outright, that's the criteria we have to work with.

Taking the in-game test as a given, then, and knowing that it's impossible to disprove a negative*, the implication is that we should leave them open when there is uncertainty about whether the question is answered by game content. That's probably unpopular, but I can't see how we can do otherwise and not contradict the current policy.

By implication then, it is appropriate to vote to close a question when we are certain it's not addressed by the game content.

If we don't like that, we should just ban lore questions.

Assuming that we accept lore questions at all, it's OK for one of dubious subject matter to be left open when we're not 100% certain that it's off topic. Either the community's knowledge of the game will improve and it will gain a positive answer, or the community's knowledge will improve and it will get closed by users who are certain.

Something to remember is that unanswered questions aren't broken windows, they're riding the long tail that this site is designed to serve. Being creatures of the present it's strange and difficult to trust that our future selves are capable of taking care of this for us, but this is an explicit part of the site's design.

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^{* Disproving a negative isn't quite impossible with nearly every known game, because the vast majority of games are finite state machines. With perfect knowledge of a game, we can easily disprove a negative about that game. That's the only reason that makes the current lore question policy workable at all. If these sorts of things were actually impossible, we'd have a lot more problems with lore questions than we already have.}

Answer 4

Just to play devil's advocate...

Let's assume lore questions are on topic. We will also assume that these questions are good in all other regards (no "poke the plot hole" questions). Let's also keep in mind that we are a gaming site.

"not addressed directly through in-universe sources" is indeed misleading as the question no longer stands by itself. It is being judged by it's answers.

Let's say we change it a bit so questions FROM non-canon are off-topic. this means if I ask a question based on something I read in a Halo book, that is off topic. However, asking about lore from the Halo game is fine.

This still poses an issue though. Say I ask a question about the Covenant glassing planets (which is in game). However, this question is either unknown or is answer through other sources (books, videos, etc.) As a community of gamers, surely one of them has read the books, but the question is now outside of the gaming realm.

However, MOST video game lore questions are likely under "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" genres. For these, we could migrate them to the appropriate Stack Exchange site. Remember, we are working under the assumption that these questions are good and the only topic of argument is the lore aspect.

Now say we get a question for a game that is not really Fantasy nor Science Fiction. In fact, say it also has no non-game sources (no books, no comics, no nothing). Asking about the lore of this game does not belong on SciFi SE. Since we are th egaming community, and the lore is limited to this game, it would belong here if anywhere.

Many users here have a strict "If it is not a problem, it is not a question" policy. Personally, I disagree with this policy, but it exists. For the sake of argument, let's assume these users agree to the following: "Just because I do not like a question does not mean it is bad/off-topic". Now the lore questions can stay here.

Now we break the "questions are good aside from lore aspect" assumption. Lore questions are a grey area. There are obviously stupid lore questions and obviously good ones. For example, this Bioshock Infinite question is asking about lore that can be complicated and difficult to understand. However, if one were to ask about Portal 2 "Why can't Chell say 'apple'?" it is something highly unlikely to be mentioned in the game.

So, how do we differentiate between good lore and bad lore. The answer is a simple "we don't". Instead, we allow answers like "This is never mentioned in the game". Bad lore questions will be down-voted just like any other bad question. Comments will be made suggesting how the question can be improved ("perhaps ask why Chell never talks instead?").

TL;DR

Assuming the Lore question is GOOD and is asked about something IN A GAME, it can at least start here. If it extends past the scope of gaming (and is still good) it can potentially be migrated. If it cannot be answered from the game (and is good and strictly gaming), then "This is never mentioned in the game" is an acceptable, definitive answer.

Answer 5

If the lore question helps solve a practical problem a user faces, it is on topic.

For example, asking about racial backgrounds in fantasy games in order to help understand the story. Q:Hey, I'm an Elf, why do Dwarves attack me on sight? A: Revenge, in the year 10 AR, the Elves raided the Dwarf homeland and they swore revenge.

If the lore question is trivia and does not help solve any practical problems, it is off topic. Example, asking about population size of a particular city/region.

I do not have access to the close vote dialogs, but I would suspect that that question got closed for that reason simply because I flagged the question with that reason & and there is not 'trivia is generally off topic' close reason for people to use instead.

Answer 6

Blanket ban all lore questions.

The end.