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As an occasional consumer of Halo books/games, I'm often curious about certain plot points or want to ask questions about that game's universe. Would this be the appropriate site for these questions? Or is gaming.stackexchange.com the appropriate site? Or is this an area of overlap where both would be equally appropriate?

Note that a lot of these games, such as Halo, have a decently sized expanded universe in the form of books/comics/movies that would seem to invite questions on this site. Does the existence of an expanded universe have any implications for this question? Note too that scifi.stackexchange.com doesn't seem to differentiate between scifi from books/movies/television. Why would games be any different?

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I think you can ask questions about the plot and even production of the game. And you can certainly ask about the "expanded universe" you mention (books, comics & movies).

Off topic would be gameplay, e.g. "how do I complete task X?" Please take that to Arqade.

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Yes. Some SFF universes originating in video games that have active tags here include , , , , , , , , , and .

For many of these universes, there have been non-video game installments released (for example, Super Mario Brothers feature films were released in 1993 and 2023, and Pokemon has been made into a trading card game, multiple television series, comic books, and other works), this is not strictly required if there is enough material in the game or games for a meaningful answer. Now, not every game universe is 100% consistent from game to game or sometimes even level to level, but the existence of continuity errors have never been a reason to rule an otherwise on-topic SFF universe as off-topic. For example, Star Trek has been inconsistent on whether it is possible to beam through shields, but that fact does not mean that asking about the Star Trek transporter is off-topic or that nothing meaningful can be asserted about it.

In a practical sense, of course, there are many video game universes that simply lack the expansiveness to ask good non-trivial questions, but that just means that question-askers need to exercise good judgment and not justification for ruling all video games off-topic. In theory, one could ask a question about the back-story about Atari's Combat (1977) (e.g. who built the combat arenas, what factions operate the tanks, the kind of in-world training that a tank driver must complete in order to be allowed to operate a tank on the field, or what kind of guidance systems the steerable missiles use), but there simply isn't one because Atari never bothered to write one and intended the plot, characters, etc. to be left to the players' imaginations. On the other hand, Activision's Pitfall! (1982) absolutely does have lore behind it, even though that lore is fairly minimal compared to most games today.

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