1

I seen this question, which had been closed for the obvious reason of asking for a game recommendation.

TL,DR: OP is asking for recommendations, trying to find a game that is like Agar.io, but plays more like bomber man, and allows online multiplayer through sharing a "server URL".

This got me thinking (UH-OHH...)

Would this question still be closed if OP was deliberately asking if anyone can point to the existence of such a game? They would not be asking for recommendations, opinion or speculation, rather, evidence that such a game exists.

Would this be considered too broad, due to the possibility of too many possibilities? It could even count as "game identification", as we would be trying to identify games off the OPs description, regardless of OP not having actually played the game before, nor requesting a specific title.

I see some questions that get closed due to relying on speculation or advice, where I can see a valid answer based off definitive evidence. I often think it comes down the the way OP has worded their question, but sometimes I just assume its a contextual error from the auto-generated close message.

Other times, I see an answer that does rely on a fair amount of opinion, and it gets up voted and accepted. Naturally, if the answer has satisfied the OP, and garnered enough positive feedback, we could assume that in this case the answer was a definitive solution to the original question.

MORE TL,DR: Could there be cases where "what are some good games that have.." could be reworded to "is there a game that has..", or would it still be automatically off-topic?

I guess I am just asking for a bit of clarification.

1
  • Sounds to me this would be jumping out of the recommendation area, but into area of identification, albeit for an imaginary game.
    – DJ Pirtu
    Commented Jul 23, 2015 at 12:45

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

No, you're juggling semantics to make a distinction without a difference.

For the purposes of our scope here at Arqade, you can consider a recommendation to be any request for a list of games (or single game!) that meets some specific criteria, whether that's "great RPGs where I can play a sneaky wizard" or "what was the first game to have laser guns" or "are there any online multiplayer jai-alai video games".

You'll note that that definition ends up being really similar to what a game ID question without any artifacts from the game looks like. That's not an accident; there's a reason that neither works here.

You must log in to answer this question.