User:Smuckola/Tense

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This essay is about grammatical tense, particularly regarding a historical perspective of works of fiction, audiovisual media, video games, and consumer products. As a fundamental element of literary logic, tense is a fundamental element of encyclopedic neutrality, providing a subtle tone for the entire landscape. Logically, the everpresent tense is to be used as the default neutral tense, where possible. To fail to do so, is to explicitly or implicitly push a WP:POV. The summary is that products will always exist, fictional content is inherently to be referenced in the everpresent tense (as per WP:TVLEAD), and only a specific mark in time is past tense. An exception is with regard to people or organizations, whose existences are dependent upon biological processes and legal fictions, and thus can be referenced in the past tense. As with logical quotations and logical commas, an editor must be bold even if most others are wrong. Some cases require finesse; but it's generally an issue of neutrality: nostalgia and sentiment, versus grammar and logic.

For example, one could say, "The XYZ video game console is a 1980s best seller, and is the first to receive a console port of ABC arcade game, which is widely considered to have been the best of its time. Its enduring fame is due in part to the fact that it had been designed by the late Foo Bar, who was also the first female president of the United States."

Tending to write from their own point of view, most people decide by habitual fiat that anything not currently in widespread production, is magically past tense. People have egocentric tendencies to write from their own perspective, as if they are a lighthouse on the hill, declaring that a given subject is not graced by their (or society's) light, and thus disincluded in the set of that which is. A subject seen as deprecated or bygone to history, is selfishly seen as enshrouded in the mist of time, and relegated to the set of that which was. The colloquial hyberbole is "nobody wants that" or "nobody bought that", even referring to a product with tens of thousands or millions of units sold. Another tendency is to write from the product's own vintage point of view, as if to personify its experience. Another tendency is to fail to flow gracefully between the role of encyclopedic detective who's nailing down hard facts, and the author of literature who's describing abstract concepts. In any case, the tendency is to write things like "The Atari 2600 was a game console". These rhetorical existential questions would then follow: when, why, and how did it supposedly stop being a game console; and what did it then become instead?

Sometimes, a writer must diagram statements with logical tests: "This product 'is a 1980s best seller' or 'was a 1980s best seller'? Is it not a best seller of the 1980s anymore?" Does the subject exist or does it no longer exist (as with biological death)? Sometimes, prose must be rewritten so as to avoid problems altogether, and to be mostly in the present tense. A point of orientation must be chosen, whether it's that of the developer, of the product.

Examples: comparing an older era product to the newer era of the same product, but they all are still existent; a magazine remains existent, though its publication is past

Product prototypes and demos might require sentences to actually flow between the past and the present, a technique which is not flipflopping. Those prototypes are instantiations of historical artifact, and it is not enyclopedic for today's author to speculate whether those could ever be recovered for public distribution or have any warranty for any particular fitness.

Software releases are media publications, and in the case of video games, works of fiction. The writer may find it helpful to think of software as a work of fiction, or a character or an actor thereof. Logically, they are to be mostly in the present tense unless otherwise appropriate, selectively per phrase, without being confusing.

In terms of classic computing and gaming, the very premise of a "dead" system is generally fallacious, and revisionism fails at its own practice. Hobbyists maintain technique even within totally unviable markets, which are sometimes revived. In the 1990s, the NES was colloquially declared "dead" and its games worthless. Now, emulation is totally commoditized and Nintendo has resumed sales within their Virtual Console. 1985's Super Mario Bros. has returned to store shelves in malls across America, once again providing prime competition for the burgeoning indie market. The Atari Jaguar was colloquially declared "dead", and was later officially opened by Hasbro for public development. Apple "killed" the Apple ][ and Nintendo "killed" every console it ever made once they competed directly with the subsequent generations. Active development exists, with quality releases, for even the hardest systems to develop for such as the 2600, or the most commercially failed systems such as the 32x. The past is just another form of competition, and there's no accounting for taste. None of this actually matters to grammatical tense, but it simply illustrates the pointlessness of revisionism.

Many societies are market driven. Many markets are a consumer treadmill driven by conspicuous consumption. Markets which aren't dominant thus acquire an air of nostalgia even about recent things, with a heavy helping of materialistic condemnation of the inferior. As a culture of hubris, it's all about products and trends, not about technique and facts, and those trends are either in or they are out. It's a zero-sum mentality which implies that dominant market trends actually represent absolute values, such as omnipotent knowledge, validity and invalidity, and other existential judgments and condemnations. Encyclopedias exist to fundamentally combat and undo that — to describe it, not to perpetrate it. The theory of tense must join the rest of the Wikipedian tenets of neutrality.

The word "is" is existential, and these works and physical products will always exist. Furthermore, they are still a design of intellectual property. This is true even if someone magically acquired and destroyed every single physical instance ever made, even if emulators were magically nonexistent, and even if it was not officially released (as with a prototype). It is not to be decided by fiat that something isn't good enough for the present, that a work shall not continue in the future (not that that's relevant anyway), or that it no longer exists. It is only logically appropriate to utilize the past tense for verbs which are actually temporal in nature — something which is associated with a fixed point or range in time — such as "this was aired at this time" or "this was made to be that way". Indeed, some phrases in some articles could be theoretically rewritten either way so that the tense may follow, and we can mix tenses in the same statement if it necessarily makes sense, but we cannot change what simply is. Also, contents of fictional materials utilize an everpresent tense as per WP:TENSE.

The physical products are the manifestation of intellectual property. As a work of literature, an encyclopedia consists predominantly of the idea of those products and their representative intellectual property — not the actual products themselves, as with a physical storefront. This is not unlike how people design and write clean-room emulators. One may envision a dystopian apocalypse where every last physical retro device has been confiscated and destroyed, and still that fact cannot be precisely known (see also Nazis vs. radios, or Taliban vs. computers). Such an uncivilized world could be an end-game scenario for Wikipedia itself!