Ace Attorney Wiki talk:Article naming

I have to admit that I'm still not really sure about this one, but maybe a discussion is warranted, anyway. It seemed to me that not everyone was on the same page with regard to how names are used in the AA games. Hopefully, with the "four contexts" laid out so far, we might be able to make better sense of this stuff. As mentioned in the page as written so far, we will be focusing on the usage of terms in the "spoken dialogue".

Assuming that the later games (particularly AAI and DD) are more consistent with capitalization standards, it seems that perhaps the approach has changed since the first four games. The first four games used certain terms as common nouns, or were inconsistent with whether they used terms as proper or common. I believe that this was supposed to reflect the fact that the setting in Japan is a nondescript town, and thus it has no specific names for the detention center, prosecutor's office, etc. I guess they decided not to push the L.A. idea too far and left those names that way instead of naming them after actual L.A. buildings and such. Nowadays, it's possible that they're all consistently capitalized now, but the fact remains that the "names" aren't really names at all.

I see two problems with trying to base our capitalization standards on the newest game. The first is the difficulty in verifying them. Right now, we'd just have to presume that capitalization conventions are more consistent now than before, and since nobody has the entire script at his/her fingertips, I wouldn't even regard this as a given. The second is I have an issue in general with treating common nouns as proper nouns. The terms used in article titles are also within other articles and linked to from those references. Maybe this next part doesn't really matter, but I feel that capitalizing common nouns breaks the immersion somewhat. This then carries over into the in-universe style that many categories of articles have.

I think that common nouns should be treated as common nouns. The capitalization standards used in all of the games should serve as a useful guideline when it's not crystal clear whether a term should be capitalized, but I think that if we know that a term is common, then maybe that should take precedence over in-game capitalization. There are reasons, typically related to gameplay, for the games to capitalize common nouns, but not to use lowercase for proper nouns. I think that perhaps this is basically the reason behind the reluctance of some of us to capitalize certain terms, even when it looks like the games are going to continue capitalizing them. I get that there aren't many people at this point who even care at all about this, and I don't blame people for not caring, but this is where I'm standing on this right now. And hey, who knows? Maybe there will be even more flip-flopping before we end up acting on this stuff.

capefeather (talk) 02:51, September 2, 2014 (UTC)