New article text features make Dbljump much more than a game database

Summary: So long plain text, we’ve added new powers for video game historians creating article text on Dbljump! Learn more about what’s changed, how we’re planning to make Dbljump articles even better in the future, and how to get involved.

Article text and references are key elements of Dbljump articles. We’ve always believed that a pure database can’t store the right level of detail, or the veracity of information, that’s needed to properly archive video game history.

But we’d forgive you for saying our article text has been a bit on the basic side - until now, that is.

We’ve launched new features that give game historians like you more power to tell the full story about the games, people, and companies that interest you.

This post explains the changes, shares our plans for making Dbljump articles even better in future, and asks for your help to move forward!

Rich text with Markdown

Our article text used to be plain text. Now you can use the simple Markdown format to create rich text in Dbljump articles. We’ve created a custom Markdown editor based on the TinyMDE project to make things even easier.

• Easily create unordered or ordered lists, which are ideal for summarising the stages in a game or the career history of an industry professional.
• Style text with bold and italic, handy for adding emphasis and marking publication names.
• Add headings to text sections. This helps you better organize your article content, and makes it more readable. (This feature isn’t enabled by Markdown, by the way; Markdown headings aren’t supported.)
• Mention other Dbljump articles with inline links, creating even more connections between our topics. Links to pages outside Dbljump are blocked.

You may ask, why are inline links to pages outside of Dbljump not allowed? Let me explain with a reminder about our referencing features.

APA-style references: still here, still important

Links to external sources continue to be a really important way to make the information in our articles verifiable - which is central to our mission of making a trustworthy gaming knowledge base.

When you create a section of article text, you can click “Add reference” and enter the details of your source. Dbljump will automatically handle the APA-style formatting, links, and numbering for you.

You can reference books, web pages, YouTube videos, online articles and more.

Read more about this in our previous blog.

How can we make article text better?

We’re not finished improving article text, or any part of Dbljump for that matter.

In the future we’re planning to…

• Make text sections sortable. This is important for putting things in an order that makes sense and flows well, so it’s pretty high on the priority list.
• Enable spoiler tags. Some article text could include story spoilers. We think it’d be cool to give readers the option to unhide spoilers, or not.
• Improve the mentions feature with search. As you’ll see when you try it, right now it’s a little bit cumbersome to add those inline links. We plan to add a simple search-based link button.
• Add images to article text, probably by enabling you to link images in the database with specific text sections.

All these will help make Dbljump a better platform for game historians and everyone who reads our pages. But what do you think is missing from Dbljump?

We really want the needs of game historians to drive our development roadmap.

Send us your feedback via Facebook, Twitter/X, Cohost, or Bluesky. You can also email me directly at neil@dbljump.com.

You can try all this out now!

New entries are being published on Dbljump all the time. Here are a few you can take a look at to see our new article text features in action:

• Kim Swift, creator of Portal
• Out Run, the classic 1986 Sega driving arcade
• PlatinumGames, the mercurial developers of Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, and many more great action games

You can also, like, really try out all our features by making your own articles on Dbljump. You could add a game you’ve always wanted to know more about - personally, I find researching Dbljump articles a great way to learn about game history. You could add a developer or artist who you really admire, but who isn’t notable enough for a Wikipedia page. Or you could tackle one of the big topics, like Nintendo, Minecraft, or Hideo Kojima!

To do that, just sign up and feel free to get in touch (via the same links given above) if you need help.

Thanks for reading. There’s a lot more to come from Dbljump in the near future - I hope you’ll follow our progress and get involved.