In-game descriptions as artist commentary

I am currently uploading official art extracted from a mobile game. In-game, each image includes a short description related to the contents. Is it appropriate to include this description in the artist commentary even though it's not from the original artist?

I know there are a series of Genshin Impact food icons on here with the in-game description in the commentary (the vast majority of "commentary game_cg rating:general"), but I don't know if this is a good example to follow.

Edit: Since I haven't gotten any answers in a week, I'll just go ahead and add the commentary to my uploads. It doesn't seem like it will do any harm and I haven't seen any objections to the food icon commentaries. If they're really not supposed to be there, I can always remove them.

I think they shouldn't be there. I would be for also removing them from the Genshin items.

Blank_User said:

In-game, each image includes a short description related to the contents. Is it appropriate to include this description in the artist commentary even though it's not from the original artist?

There are no rules about it but personally, it depends on whether it has relation to the artists, copyrights and/or characters present in the image, like some second and third-party sourced illusts from mobile games.

I don't think it's a necessarily bad idea, maybe add a small "in-game description:".

Collective said:

There are no rules about it but personally, it depends on whether it has relation to the artists, copyrights and/or characters present in the image, like some second and third-party sourced illusts from mobile games.

on this: something bipface brought up in discord is user commissions populated by skeb artists which we sometimes pull for commentary. it’s a great point, since that bit of background info can add a whole lot of context to what would otherwise be “original generic anime girl xyz”. to tag it, I can only think of the ugly non-artist commentary, so this idea needs more fleshing out.

to that end I don’t think it could hurt to have non-artist commentaries, as long as they’re properly tagged and provide some extra layer of detail to the focal point of the image.

bob14234657 said:

it’s a great point, since that bit of background info can add a whole lot of context to what would otherwise be “original generic anime girl xyz”.

That's what helps my hobby with commentaries and proper char, copy and arttagging the most.

Since there are mixed opinions on this, I'll hold off on adding the commentary to each post for now. I added some tentative commentary to post #6199306 to see how this might work based on everyone's feedback so far. The format I'm using right now is:

Title

In-game description:

Character description

Quote from character

Would something like this be appropriate?

This feels like something that could real easily get out of hand. I might be alright with it if the description actually contributes to the image, as bob described, but if it's just a general bit of info related to the character it could end up being something that would be better off in a wiki if it's really worth noting, and those are already prone to useless information from overzealous users.

For example, the description of post #6199306 is just basic background and personality information of the girl, and none of it's even reflected in the image itself. The idea of ingame descriptions being useful to taggers is also moot if it's not even in English (good luck getting someone to translate them).

blindVigil said:

This feels like something that could real easily get out of hand. I might be alright with it if the description actually contributes to the image, as bob described, but if it's just a general bit of info related to the character it could end up being something that would be better off in a wiki if it's really worth noting, and those are already prone to useless information from overzealous users.

For example, the description of post #6199306 is just basic background and personality information of the girl, and none of it's even reflected in the image itself. The idea of ingame descriptions being useful to taggers is also moot if it's not even in English (good luck getting someone to translate them).

The character description is the same for all images focused on the specific character. I agree that those would be more appropriate for the wiki.

How about just adding the character quotes, then? They are different for each image and usually relate to the image contents in some way.

Artist commentaries are meant to contain data from the source as provided by the artist, not random information like this. They're called artist commentaries for a reason. For in-game items like food, item description belongs to the respective game's wiki/fandom site, not danbooru.

nonamethanks said:

Artist commentaries are meant to contain data from the source as provided by the artist, not random information like this. They're called artist commentaries for a reason. For in-game items like food, item description belongs to the respective game's wiki/fandom site, not danbooru.

Understood. I will not put the in-game text in the commentary. Thank you for the feedback.

Edit: Looking back, I think this is probably what blindVigil meant about things getting out of hand. While I would not call the quotes and item descriptions random since they relate directly to content in the specific image, another user might use them as justification to add something farther removed from the image and the artist commentary like a viewer's comment. I don't know what that means for commission commentary, but I do know there have been many problems with users pushing the limits on what tags or ratings cover. I would not even have suggested it if I didn't see the Genshin Impact game assets, which I wasn't sure at the time if it was good practice.

I agree with putting card information in the commentary. It's not random information and relates directly to the image providing context and an easy option to translate it if it's in a different language compared to it being in a comment

This was probably bumped because of what I said in forum #404686, but I want to be clear that I still understand the concern of users getting carried away with this. If this is going to work, we need to set some boundaries.

First off, I don't think we need to do this for every game asset, but I do think there is benefit for doing it specifically with gacha cards, as the title is something one might search for if they're looking for art of that specific card. I think at least the title should be included if nothing else.

We should not allow things like attack stats, special effects, etc. in the description. Those I would consider random information that is of no benefit to users. If anything would be allowed in the description, I say it should be limited to flavor text, as they also relate to the image. However, this is less important than the title.

Also, I think this should be limited to actual game extracts, whether extracted by the uploader or found on a wiki page. Promotional art on Twitter, etc. should just use the commentary from that page. Unless we're willing to count this as multiple commentaries, we should only allow this if it would count as game cg (not found on social media), meaning it wouldn't have commentary in the first place.

Blank_User said:

This was probably bumped because of what I said in forum #404686, but I want to be clear that I still understand the concern of users getting carried away with this. If this is going to work, we need to set some boundaries.

First off, I don't think we need to do this for every game asset, but I do think there is benefit for doing it specifically with gacha cards, as the title is something one might search for if they're looking for art of that specific card. I think at least the title should be included if nothing else.

We should not allow things like attack stats, special effects, etc. in the description. Those I would consider random information that is of no benefit to users. If anything would be allowed in the description, I say it should be limited to flavor text, as they also relate to the image. However, this is less important than the title.

Also, I think this should be limited to actual game extracts, whether extracted by the uploader or found on a wiki page. Promotional art on Twitter, etc. should just use the commentary from that page. Unless we're willing to count this as multiple commentaries, we should only allow this if it would count as game cg (not found on social media), meaning it wouldn't have commentary in the first place.

Yep found this from there. To add a bit more on, many game cgs are never gonna be uploaded by the artist on their account(s) but there are flavor texts for the assets in game which I feel should be valid as commentary. Just taking artist's commentary literally doesn't benefit anyone cause those might never get anything. Also, how the heck are you even supposed to search it in a wiki (provided it even exists) without at least a title?

P.S. multiple commentaries is a dupe of multi-source commentary.

Gonna bump this to voice that at least in regards to things like gacha cards that come with titles and descriptions, these do seem to help in regards to searchability in some of the larger cases as pointed out in forum #404686. Also, half the time we won't ever learn who the artist even is in these cases, and it does tend to provide greater context that can help with tagging.

I do think this should be limited to like...Things with in-game text descriptions (assuming the artist doesn't ever upload it to social media or wherever themself, in which case that can probably be used instead). Not your random VN game cg or whatever. That's the point I consider to be getting out of hand (alongside social media promotions as described above).

Looking at the current examples in game_cg ~commentary ~commentary_request -second-party_source, it...doesn't seem to have gotten too out of hand from the first couple pages? Sure it's mostly the same users uploading these, but it doesn't seem too chaotic right now. I'm not saying Danbooru users won't take a mile if you give them an inch, but it should be noted the vast majority of game cg uploaders are very dedicated builders, so I don't think this will end horribly.

Yes, from what I've seen, most of the users doing this are only adding card titles/descriptions to the commentary. As long as we place clear limits, the risk of users overreaching should be low. I actually don't think it would have an effect on how most users add this information at all. It would just be acknowledging what they're already doing. Also:

nonamethanks said in forum #238634:

Artist commentaries are meant to contain data from the source as provided by the artist,

Even if it should be limited to first-party sources in theory, it would be impossible to enforce this in practice. Our uploaders automatically fetch commentary from sites, and most users would probably just leave the commentary in even if it's not from a first-party source.

If we really wanted to maintain the purity of artist commentaries, we could simply purge all second-party sources and third-party sources of their commentary, but we'd losing valuable information in the process. I'd rather we move them to comments or even create a second field to preserve the information, but the cleanest solution would be to just keep them in the commentary (allowing it to be translated by anyone, not just one person). If users want to search for posts that have commentary specifically from the artist, they can filter out second-party source, third-party source, and self-datamine.

@evazion @nonamethanks Apologies for pinging you two on this, but we should have admin input on whether the new arguments @Alixiron, @Knowledge_Seeker, and I presented are reasonable enough to allow for the proposed exception outlined in forum #404705. I have plans to start uploading thousands of gacha card artworks in the near future, so even if the arguments aren't convincing enough, knowing this will potentially save me a lot of work going back and correcting things.

Commentaries weren't really intended for this purpose, but I guess it's fine as long as there's some tag for this type of commentary to distinguish it from normal commentaries.

The issue here is verifiability. It should be possible for others to verify where you're getting this information from and that it's correct. Otherwise people can put random garbage here and no one would know.

This is also a problem with regular commentaries, which can't be fully trusted either because there's always the possibility that the uploader messed with the commentary in some way. There are already cases where people lie about sources and say something came from Pixiv or Twitter when actually it came from somewhere else, or where self-uploaders write random things in the commentary.

With regular commentaries you can at least theoretically check the source to verify that the commentary is correct (even if in reality nobody does that, and ignoring that the source post could be edited or deleted and the original commentary lost), but with datamined assets it's even harder if there's no source to verify where you're getting this commentary from.

evazion said in forum #418041:

Commentaries weren't really intended for this purpose, but I guess it's fine as long as there's some tag for this type of commentary to distinguish it from normal commentaries.

I think card commentary would probably be the best fit. It's not so much that it's part of a game, but that it has the qualities of a trading card: a title and maybe some flavor text.

I also thought of in-game commentary, but that would limit its scope to game cards only while also making it more likely to be used on other game assets. If for whatever reason we later decided to bring back the commentary for those Genshin Impact food icons that sparked this whole discussion, then a tag like this might work, but that's not what I'm trying to do.

I'll let this sit for a couple days before making a BUR in case someone can think of a better tag name.

The issue here is verifiability. It should be possible for others to verify where you're getting this information from and that it's correct. Otherwise people can put random garbage here and no one would know.

With regular commentaries you can at least theoretically check the source to verify that the commentary is correct (even if in reality nobody does that, and ignoring that the source post could be edited or deleted and the original commentary lost), but with datamined assets it's even harder if there's no source to verify where you're getting this commentary from.

Many of these games have wikis that catalog the cards. The image may even come from the wiki (example: post #10744283). Wikis may be third-party sources most of the time, but I would expect the card information on them to be reliable, especially if they're being actively maintained or haven't been vandalized.

The information can also be validated from official channels / news sites (albeit more scattered and less comprehensive). If the game is popular enough, its cards can be easily found by Googling their titles. You can do this even for less popular games. Search the title of post #7758170 in Google Images and you'll see a screenshot by 4gamer of the card with the information overlaying it, including the title and quote.

If the provided source does not link to the title/flavor text, we can use the tn tags to add a source link to the commentary like we do with multi-source_commentaries.

This is also a problem with regular commentaries, which can't be fully trusted either because there's always the possibility that the uploader messed with the commentary in some way. There are already cases where people lie about sources and say something came from Pixiv or Twitter when actually it came from somewhere else, or where self-uploaders write random things in the commentary.

If the artist uploaded the image themself, shouldn't they be able to write whatever they want in the commentary? Even if they sourced it to their Pixiv or Twitter, we could still keep it as a multi-source commentary.

+1 to a hypothetical card commentary, as gacha cards are the main reason people were pushing for this to begin with.

BUR #54834 has been approved by @evazion.

mass update source:https://mltd.matsurihi.me/cards/ commentary:any ratio:>1 -> meta:card_commentary

I think enough time has passed, so here's the BUR for the initial population. Anyone who has a better idea for a name can submit their own BUR.

These posts are perfect examples of what I envisioned for the card commentary: title in the title field and the flavor text in the description field. I checked each one to make sure their commentaries are in this format, and I used a specific source that records the title and flavor text of each card. The group is also a decent size; we can populate over 400 posts in one go with this.

To make sure we're all on the same page, I wrote a draft wiki to show how I think the tag should work. If the BUR passes and any part of this wiki is unsatisfactory, feel free to change it.

A few things I added to the wiki draft that we didn't discuss before:

• I think it's fine to have rarity and/or awakening/evolution status included in the title in some cases. Some cards will have the same titles across different versions, so keeping that information can make it easier to keep track of them. However, if all the titles are unique, there's not really a need for it. For example, most Re:Stage! cards are 4★ rarity and none of them have an artwork change. Adding the rarity doesn't add anything of value. But some of the Toji No Miko: Kizamishi Issen No Tomoshibi cards have 1★, 2★, 3★, and 4★ cards with the same name but different artwork, so adding it in that case can be useful.

• The part about multi-source commentary acknowledges that there may be no point to uploading some card art assets as we may have superior versions from first-party and second-party sources. However, we don't want to overwrite legitimate commentary, so appending it to existing commentary will still provide the same functionality without removing the information from the actual artist. I also suggested the card commentary should be at the bottom as it is the least important for Danbooru's purposes.