Talk:Doctor Who The Official Annual 2020

"Accessing TARDIS Data Files…"

It seems to me that this is a story in the same way that Who Is The Master?, or the Case Files, are, except in prose. I wouldn't classify it as a "(game)". IIRC there is maybe one bit where you're "supposed" to "fill in the password" yourself, with a pen, on the physical page — but it's not as though you have to do that for the story to progress. Is Before the Flood made interactive by Capaldi briefly pausing to tell us to "google it"?

However, I know User:WaltK disagrees, so — let's hear it! --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:12, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

I referred to my copy of the annual to see for myself, the way it's laid out (scattered across the data files about the series 11 episodes) gave me the impression it was basically an extended puzzle pages already scattered throughout the book.

As for the The Space Lord, isn't that title alone in fact the name of Vault 13's first chapter? It kind of feels like if we're going to count this as an independant story, then Vault 13 should instead be treated as an anthology with all the chapters getting their own pages or something. WaltK ☎ 18:29, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Woah, I think there's a bit of disconnect going on. As far as I was concerned, the "data files" about the enemies and tech seen in the various Series 11 episodes are the meat of Accessing TARDIS Data Files…. That's the whole point, and also why I compared it to a prose version of Case Files.

The only bit of "gameness" I can see in that story thread of the TARDIS's records of recent travels being replayed is at the very end, when the field with the password is left blank and there's a note from the Doctor about how to find it again (or something). There are other games and puzzles in the Annual, but they're not, that I can see, part of the TARDIS-data-file frame story, any more than the documentary bits sandwiched in the middle are part of The History of the Doctor.

The Space Lord is its own discussion, so I'm making a new section about it. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:48, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

The Space Lord

Now, the fact that the chapter of the original story was or was not called that isn't really the point. The thing is that in the t.o.c. and such, The Space Lord and the Rhino story are clearly assumed to be the same type of thing. The Space Lord being given new illustrations adds yet another layer to the idea that what they did is borrow "raw text" from an existing story and republish it as its own standalone story, meant to be a release in its own right that can be read without knowledge that it's supposed to be part of something bigger.

In other words, IMO, "independent story" vs. "promotional extract" is about the way the text is presented by the publishers, not necessarily about the nature of the text.

Compare, for example, The Creation of the Cybermen, though of course, the actual text of that story had been (subtly) altered from its original form as the opening chapter of Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, so it could conceivably have a page even if The Space Lord does not.

Another concern is practicality: how would we cover the printing of The Space Lord in the Annual in infoboxes, if we chose to cover it as simply an extract from The Secret in Vault 13? It wouldn't be fair to put the annual in "reprinted_in" for the page about the novel, as it might give readers the idea that the novel in its entirety is reprinted inside the Annual. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:48, May 29, 2020 (UTC)