Is there such a thing as too much trivia?

[Spherix*]

Nope, no such thing as too much trivia. Different people are going to find different things interesting. As long as it's not super obvious (Mario is the main character of the Mario series!), follows the site guidelines, and is well-written, we'll be glad to have it. I know I'm always glad to see things in the submission queue that I can just hit 'accept' on, and don't have to reject or rewrite the whole thing.

Some of the things I've seen a lot of as I've been reviewing trivia:

• Make sure the link you provide as a source actually is a source for the trivia! I've seen some trivia where there's a source provided, but it's just a page about the game, and doesn't mention the information in the trivia at all!
  
• When using a video as a source, if it covers more than just the trivia item, and it's more than a couple minutes long, please provide a timestamp for what part of the video contains the trivia item. While the whole video may be interesting, and worth watching under other circumstances, when trying to verify submissions we want to check their accuracy as quickly as possible so they can be posted for everyone to enjoy.
  
• The trivia should not be phrased as if it is speaking to the reader. In short, don't use 'you'. I know it can be difficult to phrase some things in a way that doesn't sound awkward, and the passive voice is discouraged in English, but just substituting 'the player' in for 'you' often works.
• While our audience is primarily gamers, that's pretty much everyone these days. Try to include enough detail so that the trivia is comprehensible without requiring a lot of familiarity with the game. A lot of things can be understood just from context, and you can safely assume basic gaming knowledge, but if the general meaning of some game-specific term or mechanic can't be determined from the name of it, provide a basic description of it.
  
• Along the same lines, make sure to include enough details to show why a particular fact is interesting. Anything can be normal in a particular piece of fiction, so if something stands out as being unusual, say so. Provide something to contrast it with.
  
• If a particular piece of trivia mentions some other game, series, or company, make it a link! It makes the site feel more interconnected, and encourages people to stay awhile and look around. They may end up finding something interesting that they wouldn't have gone looking for otherwise. We even have a special intra-site link tag: "urli". It basically includes "www.vgfacts.com" at the beginning of the link, so you only need to specify the remainder of the url.

All of this boils down to making the site look professional, and making it useful to other people, those who don't know as much about video games as we do. If the point was to just swap trivia amongst ourselves, we'd only need the forum. I don't think there's any other site quite like VGFacts, in that we're trying to create a structured, searchable repository of gaming trivia. Lots of sites have gaming trivia, but it's generally not the main focus, and is tacked on in a way that isn't easy to search or explore. For example, Wikipedia actively discourages trivia sections on pages, because they don't want pages to be a loose collection of facts. Wikis just aren't suited for it, because of the underlying structure of their database. But that's what VGFacts excels at, what its database is designed for. Let's make the most of it.

And just so you know, you're not alone: I care about Ecco the Dolphin, and would love to see more trivia about it.