What are the requirements for asking a game identification question?

Question

I want to ask about a game I don't know the name of. How should I do that?

Answer 1

TL;DR:

Game-identification questions are okay only if you include screenshots, audio, or other tangible media from the game.

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We use the tag game-identification for asking questions about games that the asker doesn't know the name of. However, we have very strict restrictions on these kinds of questions to avoid numerous problems we've had with these types of questions in the past.

Game identification questions based only on the asker's description of a game are off topic. Please see our vote where we decided this. This has now been the status quo in the community for a long time, and is unlikely to change soon. If you have a new, compelling argument that hasn't already been made for us to change our minds, please bring it up in chat first.

If you include a screenshot, audio file, or other tangible media from the game itself then we make an exception and your question is on topic. The reasoning for this exception is outlined here and here. Note that there needs to be reasonable proof that your artifact is actually from a game, more so that just you think it could be. See: Where do we stand on artifacts the asker believes are from a game?

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Clarification: This distinction is based primarily on use case.

• We support the use case where someone sees or hears a thing that is clearly from a video game, and wants to identify more concretely what video game it's from.
• We do not support the use case where someone remembers something about a game and wants to identify what game it was.

Editing questions from the latter category to include an artifact from the game does not remove them from that category, and questions of that nature should still be closed and deleted as per the normal process.