[guide], [strategy], [tips], [how-to]... which do I use?

Question

Ignoring that strategy is still being occasionally used for the genre, we have a number of tags related to classifying what a question is asking for. I'm personally unsure what the differences between some of them are, so I thought I'd ask what everyone else is thinking. I'm only targetting the general approach tags, not specific ones like efficiency.

• [strategy] (Tag count is bloated from the genre)
• [tips] ×13
• [guide] ×11
• [how-to] ×8
• [walkthrough] ×4
• [tactic] ×1

This list only contains the more common ones that are currently used. It is understandable to both create new tags for certain situations, as well as remove any of these that are decided to be less-than-useful for purposes of tagging.

It should be noted that [guide] and [walkthrough] are both used for questions where the goal is to find a guide/walkthrough via link as well as general help questions that can be handled on-site.

If we decide this should be upgraded from a discussion to an FAQ, then I'll convert it to CW. But right now I'm shooting mostly for discussion.

Answer 1

I think we could simply do without [tips]/[how-to]/[strategy]/[tactic]. It's like having a [proof] tag on a math stackexchange or [find-the-bug] on StackOverflow.

[walkthrough] and [guide], however are fine, since we wouldn't be hosting the content (unless it's a CW!).

Answer 2

In my opinion all these except [strategy] are distinct, although similar.

• [tips] is useful for asking about better ways to perform a specific task. "Any tips for using the chainsaw in Alien Swarm?". I would expect most answers to [tips] questions contain the actual answer and not just link to it.
• [guide] is a complete guide for some aspect of the game. "Is there any guide available for how to build a hammerdin in Diablo 2?". I would expect most answers to link to external guides.
• [how-to] is useful for solving a specific problem. "How do I open the 3rd door in The Door Game?". I do agree it can sometimes be similar to [tips]; I say that we restrict [tips] to cases where a user asks about a better way to achieve a certain task, and restrict [how-to] to questions about a task where the solution is unknown to the user.
• [walk-through] is for detailed walkthrough of complete games. Like [guide], I would expect answers to only contain links.

About [strategy] I am really unsure. It looks as if it could always be either [guide] or [tips].

Answer 3

Strategy is such a generic term, that I think it would be problematic for it to describe a genre, rather than a real "strategy" for a game. I believe all strategy genre games fall into either real-time-strategy or turn-based-strategy. The specific genre titles are far more descriptive.

There may be other kinds of strategy genre games, but none are coming to mind for me. Descriptive tags could probably be assigned to those too.

'Tips' (and possibly 'How-To') could be rolled up into the strategy tag.

Answer 4

One related tag that I think is useful and was created recently is [pre-gaming] - essentially questions that are best answered before gameplay begins, such as What achievements are easily missable in Final Fantasy 13.

It strikes me as a useful distinction worth keeping, wheras tips/guide/howto/tactic all seem to be too similar (and in general, too broadly applicable across most questions on the site) to be useful taxonomy.

Answer 5

I believe that the system is sufficient and we don't need to censor the use of any tags. If someone does not wish to use a certain tag they will not, and the ones that get used the most will have the highest count. It will work itself out in the end, just trust the system. Thus the tags will naturally become a footprint of the way people already think about and classify game related content.