3

I was watching a bit of chat the other day and saw a discussion about the [game-info] tag. Currently, it's only on one question, but it has been used on a few instances. Its original creation was for this question, which was an ill-fated attempt to create some sort of basic data resource for games. Since then, it has been used for a variety of reasons with no clear-cut definition.

What are your thoughts about this as a tag? Is it a redundant junk tag that has no meaning? Or can we derive an intuitive and consistent meaning for the tag and keep it in our family?

2
  • junk it........
    – tzenes
    Commented Oct 12, 2010 at 20:29
  • In my mind using "game-info" as a tag is as generic as using just "gaming." The more general and vague a tag, the less useful, since tags are meant to classify questions and help people search for and browse topics.
    – Wikwocket
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 1:41

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
1

Apparently, 4 out of the 5 uses of this tag were by me, so let me try to explain a bit of my thinking:

My interpretation was that the [game-info] tag didn't denote questions simply asking for game information (which would be most of them) but identified the type of information being requested. Questions tagged [game-info] should pertain to factual, embedded data of a game that should in no way be subjective at all and therefore should not differ from answer to answer.

For instance, the difference between certain weapons (in terms of damage, effect, range etc.) as opposed to how to use each of said weapons. The former question has answers that can be quantified specifically as part of the games mechanics, whereas the latter question is more subject to player experience, although it can still be answered.

Let's imagine for a moment that our fair site has grown to epic proportions. So epic, in fact, that a simple search for [superawesomefungame] and [weapons] turns up 271 answers. Now say that our user is looking for information on the weapons themselves; not how to use them, not where to find them, not how to make them, but a list of what they do in terms of things like

  • Damage
  • Range
  • Effect

Etcetera. Not wanting to skim each and every question that comes up, the user merely looks for the [game-info] tag, and instantly knows which question he needs to read.

21
  • While I agree the name [game-info] is a bit ambiguous, I still think a tag such as this could have some merit.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 2:24
  • Would you mind explaining that merit to us? Why isn't just putting "I only want factual, embedded data" as part of your question insufficient.
    – tzenes
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 2:27
  • 2 reasons. a) A user may not want to read the entire question to find that out. b) A user searching for answers in pre-asked questions may like to immediately know what kind of information is presented in an answer.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 2:38
  • So first off, we don't tag questions based on answers, so that kind of goes out the window. Secondly, if we're trying to save the user time trying to find terms like Damage Range Effect, then why aren't we tagging those, maybe they only care about one and not the others? In fact, let's take this to its logical conclusion: Let's tag every key word in the question. Of course with that many tags we'd need some system to search through them; and now we've reinvented the search engine. If what you care about is damage knife [modern-warfare-2] why aren't you just searching for that?
    – tzenes
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 5:14
  • Well tagging each individual element (damage, range, effect, etc.) would become ineffective, for the simple reason that an asker asking about a certain item in the game, may have no way of knowing which information will be given to him/her. [s]he may not even take a certain element into account at all, in which case, those tags would be missing. Compound that with the fact that there is a maximum of 5 tags per question, and it becomes cumbersome.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 12:01
  • @Gnome I wasn't actually suggesting tagging words like Damage, but instead pointing out that using a search engine produces the same effect. But let's get to your point may have no way of knowing which information will be given to him/her. If you only care about damage and nothing else, how is using the tag damage different than game-info? In both cases you're solving the same use case A user may not want to read the entire question to find that out.
    – tzenes
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 15:24
  • @tzenes If the question/answer thread covers more information than simply [damage] then it would become awkward to tag each individual topic would it not?
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 16:19
  • @GnomeSlice if the question/answer thread covers more information than simply [game-info] then it would become awkward to tag each individual topic would it not?
    – tzenes
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 16:20
  • @tzenes > Hmm. I suppose that is true.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 18:19
  • It seems to me like you're describing the [game-mechanics] tag.
    – Brant
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 19:02
  • @Brant > Not exactly, [game-mechanics] is more along the lines of how a game itself works as a whole.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 22:21
  • Let's consider two points - one, why is finding charts/tables more distinct than how to use/how to find/how to make such that it gets its own tag? Two, what about a question that gets two answers, one of which is a chart and the other of which is textual data? The beauty of the Stack Exchange engine is that we don't need constraints that all tables must be grouped in an index of tables.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 12:20
  • @Grace > In regards to your first point, maybe it's just me but I see a convenience factor. The kind of thing you'd want to find by using the [game-info] tag, or successors of it, is the sort of basic information that you'd want to find in the game manual. You probably don't really want a super long explanation for something like that, and the tag would make that particular answer very easy to access for anyone else who requires that same basic information, without having to search copiously. Again though, it seems like this is just me, judging from the other responses.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 18:37
  • What can I say, I'm stubborn, but if I'm the only one who sees the same merits of the tag that I do, then I'm likely mistaken. :)
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 18:39
  • Okay, attempt number 2 at a more coherent comment. To start, whether or not this kind of question needs its own tag, I still side with Arda Xi in that it is extremely ambiguous to what "game-info" refers to, since the vast majority of our content is exactly that. Perhaps a [statistics] tag can be used - this won't dictate what the answers come in, but instead dictates that the answer is going to be about actual statistics of elements in the game. But before we introduce that tag...
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 18:58
0

As I stated in the chat, I believe that game-info is what this site should be about. What kind of question would belong on the site but not be about game information?

I only see one question on the site tagged with [game-info] though, and it seems that if we should keep the tag, it would refer to exactly that, metadata about games. I'm not sure whether we should still call that game-info though, due to its ambiguity.

0
0

To explain what I did:

I took the liberty to remove the game-infotag from a number of questions that were all made by the same user. He was under the impression that every question asking for "game information" would have that tag.

That removed that tag from all questions except the one you linked, which could be thought of as "information about many games" -- I kept it for lack of anything more descriptive (although game-db would've probably worked.).

If no other question has that tag, it'll eventually be pruned. Otherwise I don't think it's that bad under the meaning stated above.

6
  • For the record, that is not the impression I was under.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 2:09
  • i'm sorry, then @gnome
    – badp
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 5:16
  • @gnome I've read the backlog and it sounds like things were the way I thought it was :)
    – badp
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 9:38
  • ? I really don't think that any question asking for information about a game should be tagged [game-info], I was under the impression that it depends on the type of information being given/asked for. Mostly the kind of thing you would expect to find in the game's manual, but isn't there for whatever reason.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 11:51
  • @Gnome "Well, I sort of figured that questions tagged game-info pertained to factual, statistical information from the game, say damage stats, for example." ...which is what I said, after you consider that we should always be giving factual, statistical information whenever available.
    – badp
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 12:19
  • Looks like we had an error in communication there, my bad. By statistical, I meant something that you can quantify, not something like a strategy.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 13:56

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .