Clarifying titles for the more generic-sounding questions

Question

This is barking up a similar tree as this former discussion. The subject of titles on Arqade is one with a long history here. You know me, I'm the answerer to our corpse question, so I'm not talking about titles in entirety. Our policy has always been that we are fine with a slight bit of vagueness for making an interesting title as long as the problem is clear and contained all the same, and also makes sense to search. So for example, this question got a fix to fit our policy proper because...

I'm getting distracted. Ahem. Point is I'm not talking about those.

I am talking about questions like the following:

• What do you lose if you decide to play offline only?
• Where are all the secret areas?
• Is there a way to have my second monitor usable?

These are questions whose titles are indeed, very vague. It's not that the game isn't clear from the title, but rather that these are such broad-spectrum problems that can be applied to not just "a lot of games" (or the alot of games), but "too many games". Tag dependency isn't a rarity, for example I see a question like How do I build a house for my NPCs, I can tell at a glance if the question at least may be in the collection of games I play (do I play any games that have NPCs that I could build houses for?). The above three, though, I can't tell. I can derive that one is a game that can be played online and offline, one is a game that has secret areas, and the last one I could honestly think was game-agnostic. But that basically doesn't narrow anything down. These ones, the generic nature of the problem overrides the otherwise present clarity in presenting what the problem is.

Titles generate interest - mostly by specifying what the problem is but also by being distinct. They're the most prominent aspect of the question on the front page, the first item that we visually filter on. At the very least, the title should be able to narrow down the potential scope of games that a question is about to a manageable thought level. "Every online-offline game", "Every game with secrets", "Every game with difficulty levels"... those are not really manageable thought levels. The amount of pre-filtering it does for a reader is negligible compared to other questions, because it most quite easily hits the "too many things!" level.

We have it a bit easier than other sites like, say, Stack Overflow, who had such problems with titles like "regular expression help" that they called their folks to arms (and the problem does persist). Because our tag diversity is backwards compared to the majority of the network, we actually have tags being able to at least give some filtering without needing to click on the question. However, I feel that for the exceedingly general-case scenario questions whose at-word game scope is too large, it would still be nice and helpful if we considered adding the game name into the title. Organically, of course.

I don't think we need to wage a giant revision stampede to fix this immediately, I'm thinking that this is more a thing we could consider as we march onwards. If people agree that at least for these cases, it would make sense to be clearer. Tags are great, but I feel that the situation of these without identifiers in the title is significantly different, and I think it's enough of a difference that we can give them a different sort of attention in doing this kind of fixing. What do you folks think?

Answer 1

This is only a problem because we only have the one-size-fits-all SE tag engine, and the organization of our site does not map very well onto the rather limited tag system. A more powerful tagging system would solve this problem. If this site would have been created from scratch and wouldn't have to use the existing tag system, we would likely have ended up with something like one game tag per question and then a game-specific list of subtags. The game tag would be far more prominent in all lists, e.g. as the game icon, making it easy to see at a glance about which game a question is. Such a tagging system would solve this problem as the software would know that the game tag is very important and it would display it along with the question everywhere. I don't expect anything like this to be implemented though, as SE has been extremely reluctant in the past to make any big changes to the tagging system.

But I also question whether this is actually a problem. There are several different ways to reach a question on this site:

• via search engines: There is no issue here as the search terms almost certainly include the game, so there is no potential for confusion

• via favorite tags: Many users browse SE sites using their favorite tags or any tag-specific listing. This is mostly a matter of size, the bigger the site becomes the more likely it is that users will filter out specific questions instead of looking at all of them. There is also no issue here.

• Looking at all new or active questions on the frontpage. You might have to look at the tag sometimes to know what it is about, so there is a small issue in this use case.

• via the hot questions list: Here this is certainly an issue as the title is shown without any tags.

I don't consider the hot questions list important enough to make any compromises in good titles, all the other considerations are much more important in my opinion.

I sometimes add the game name in titles, but only to rather short titles or to avoid the duplicate question title restrictions. For longer titles I think adding the game is a net negative and I would avoid that.

Answer 2

As has been mentioned, the only place a question title is displayed without a tag is in the "Hot Network Questions". Worst case scenario there, you clicked a hot question and then see the game it is for. I don't see an issue there, seeing as many of our questions that end up on that list are there because of the "WTF is this?" factor.

Additionally, putting game names is not guaranteed to make the question unique. Say I ask "Where are the other humans?" This would fall under your potentially duplicate title criteria. So I change my question to "Where are the other humans in the game Portal?" Now I get answers for Portal by Valve, which is not what I wanted.

To get answers I wanted, I would have to change my question again to "Where are the other humans in the 1986 video game Portal made by Activition?" Where does the madness end?

It gets even worse when we are talking about the same game but have different systems that have different functionality. Just look at Minecraft or TF2.