What is the point of "help me remember this game" questions? [closed]

Question

UPDATE:
As of 16/3/2012, Questions asking for help identifying a game are now prohibited on the site, unless you have an actual artifact from the game such as screenshots or audio clips.

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For example, Help me identify these two old games from before I knew English well (with “screenshots”).

Mapping these to existing close reasons, there are two that fit.

1. Too Localized. What value does this question have to anyone else on the planet, other than the one person who asked? In other words, what internet user is going to be searching for and finding information about a game one person vaguely remembers playing in broad terms?
2. Not a Real Question. Half-remembered descriptions of a game you vaguely remember playing, does not make a real question. This wouldn't be tolerated on any other site in our network. Unless the asker has demonstrated and documented that they've invested substantial effort to find this game, and given us something concrete that provides us with a reasonable chance of actually finding a game, it's simply not a real question, it's a half-remembered question.

It is my opinion that these "help me remember this {thing}" or "help me identify this {thing}" questions should be banned from all sites as a matter of policy.

Examples from the last two days:

• https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/11404/identify-late-90s-computer-adventure-game-climbing-a-gloomy-tower
• https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/11255/an-old-2d-plane-game
• https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/11293/a-pc-game-where-you-leave-walls-in-your-wake-and-have-to-avoid-colliding-with-oth

Also a problem on other SE 1.0 sites:

• http://answers.unshelved.com/questions/3710/unkown-fantasy-novel

To summarize some of the discussion from below:

• these questions lack value because they are insubstantial, that is, they refer to something that someone vaguely remembers doing, not something they remember and can talk clearly and lucidly about. They are Not a Real Question from that perspective. They're more like.. imaginary questions.
• because these questions are insubstantial -- based on vague, broad, half-remembered descriptions (and possibly at best a screenshot) -- it is unlikely anyone else will be able to find them through a web search. That does not advance our goal to make the internet better.
• If we allow vague and insubstatial questions, we are explicitly opening the door to "write my code for me" and "do my work for me" questions (or worst case, Yahoo Answers) -- no need to expend effort or provide code or even think, really ... just explain in vague, broad terms what you want and we'll somehow figure it all out for you? That's a very dangerous precedent to set.

The only positive attributes of these questions I can think of, based on the comments:

• If we get an excellent user who asks a good, thoughtful identification question and sticks around in our community to participate, then it's worth allowing it in those rare cases as a high quality "getting to know you" fun question.
• if the user can produce a screenshot or some other reasonably concrete identifying artifact to work with, other than "I kinda remember.." I have less objections to these questions. I'm still not a fan of them, but I think that's a fair way to limit how many we have.

I will be personally monitoring this [identify-the-game] from now on and aggressively closing any that I find which are insufficiently clear, as Not a Real Question.

Answer 1

Those questions are good for the same reasons duplicates shouldn't be deleted, or even closed.

Use case: I have this awesome game in mind, but only recall a screenshot or some details of the game and Google isn't helping. I ask and get my answer.

The next person who is going to look for that game now can find it with a larger number of keywords... or can find something close enough.

Sure, that question doesn't do it right by asking two questions in the same /question page, but that's part of a larger, SE-wide problem.

Finally, I would like to address "What value does this question have to anyone else on the planet" point. This opens a fairly large can of worms:

• How do you objectively measure the number of people that will ever get to a question from Google?
• What's this minimum "worth"? Isn't helping the asker good enough?
• Should we close questions on games that are too obscure because "not enough people" are going to play them?
• Why isn't this "worth" stuff mentioned in any SE FAQ, if it's important enough to warrant closing questions?
• What about "why doesn't my code work" questions on StackOverflow?
  • How many people are going to have the same snippet?
  • How many people are going to Google for that code?
    (I don't know why the code fails. I just know it does. At best, I know what I'm trying to solve and can google for that, but SO frowns upon plz-to-send-me-teh-codez.)

Answer 2

I agree with bringing this up, not because I don't think we should host them but because for a while they've always felt like a strange borderline item. Might as well get a ruling on them out of the way.

The positives of these questions are simple to enumerate.

• Objective - It either is, or it isn't. No opinion technically changes this.
• On-Topic - It's a question to identify a game.
• Is A Question - Big round of applause for these to actually be questions. They also rarely can be judged by the NARQ Marks (This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.)
• Is An Answerable Question - We have a decent enough track record of answering these. At least 50%, if I'm not mistaken. Which, well, isn't stellar.
• Is A Solvable Question - The correct answer to these are conclusive to the question.

But these are basically our bare minimum expectations we're hitting. So rather than know what the positives are, it's enumerating the negatives that directs their worthiness to remain on the site.

• Localized - I don't find this a strong argument. Nigh any tech-support question we get has this same problem, wherein they basically pray that one of us had the same problem. Likewise, some of our more esoteric questions have very low searchability and likelihood that someone else will need the same answer. At least, until they read the question which leads to them being interested.

• Low Usefulness - I have argued the importance of being useful as a metric for good questions. However, I stated in just the same point that all this does is emphasize what is worthy of upvotes. Less-than-useful questions, such as esoteric ones, can still be fit for the site.

  When it comes to personalized questions, there's a difference between when I ask for something that still has a measure of external curiosity it can inspire ("How do I make this difficult but ultimately unnecessary climb in Bunny Must Die?") and something which is really localized ("Given my party setup, how can I defeat the Behemoth King without Quickenings?"). In both cases there is low searchability, but the former is one that people who do come across the question will learn something, while the latter is just a bit too "Help me win my game". I find that identify-this-game tends to lean towards the former.

• "Ease" - It can be stated that these are "easy" questions, in part due to them being based more on passive knowledge than active knowledge. But, in that our goal is to provide answers, I don't see this as a problem. With the exception of your anomalous example (it has the "A-For-Effort" vote accrual), these questions don't actually get a lot of votes.

• Bad Trending - I can't predict the future, but there is the possibly valid concern one might see with regards to the volume being encouraged. There are only 84 such questions right now, which isn't too much. While both game-recs and identify-this-game have uncountable permutations, the latter has a smaller infinity (think of rational numbers versus integers, for example). To me, this is only a concern if they become some kind of farm like List of X questions. I think we can err on the side of allowance for these because they don't generate enough attention to be a real problem.

• Passive Knowledge - Now, here is the trouble point, and the one that does concern me since it is one of the major fall points for game recs. The majority of our questions are based on what I call "active knowledge" - people provide excellent answers either because they deliberately learned it in the past or they performed research. In essence, it refers to true subject matter expertise. People are more inspired to answer these.

  There is subject matter expertise in knowing about games themselves than knowing how to play them. The problem is that our site does not exercise this knowledge, which is why we perform so poorly at repository building. No one is inspired to do all that much research for identifications and recommendations, and instead people rely primarily on their passively acquired knowledge. If you passively learned of the game (such as by playing it in the past), then you provide answers, but if you didn't learn of the game you just skip the question.

  Identify-this-game has a lot higher success rate than game recommendations ever had. But its reliance on passive knowledge does worry me, as it makes them far less likely to get answered (which, also, is a similar problem with tech support!). It also may make it feel unwieldy to some users, since people get correct answers for "just knowing". I'm not certain how much weight this carries, and if it's enough to bar them. But it feels like the primary issue.

• Not A Problem - The other real issue can probably be that these feel less like real problems. They're outcasts even among trivia like what were characters named, because at least other people are going to search for that. It's also rarely a pressing issue for the author, too, as it is far more likely someone is comfortable to wait and see if it'll ever get answered. This can lead to stagnation in combination with the passive knowledge point: no one cares enough to answer, and no one cares enough to dredge it back up.

This is my analysis of the situation. They are real questions, even if they aren't problems so to speak. The issues of searchability are not too different from a variety of other questions we cater to, including the kinds of questions which define our existence (the obscurity of a game is irrelevant to its fitting on the site). However, they have mediocre performance, are based more on passive knowledge than active knowledge, and can stagnate really badly. I think they have a point, but I can understand if it is agreed that they don't have enough of a point to stick around.

Answer 3

What value does this question have to anyone else on the planet, other than the one person who asked? In other words, what internet user is going to be searching for and finding this information?

I'm sorry, but I am really, really struggling with this statement. Is not the entire point of a Q&A site to get answers to my questions? My question has value because I value it and want an answer. I should not have to consider whether or not my question is of value to anyone else on the planet before asking it on a Q&A site.

Answer 4

Oh wow Jeff I disagree on so many levels. TL;DR version below.

The two points you bring are:

1. They are not useful for anyone else
2. They are too localized

Regarding (1), I would first say - since when are questions required to be useful for other people? There are gazillion stackoverflow questions requesting help with doing something so specific that it's ridiculously unlikely that anyone else will ever actively search for that problem. If you say "only questions useful for other people are permitted", not only do you make the SE sites a lot less user-friendly, you also introduce a metric which is impossible to measure - how can we say if that question will ever be useful for anyone else?

Secondly, I would assert these questions are actually far from useless, for the simple reason someone else might want to search for the same games, and that someone will likely use the same search keywords as what the question contains. I have personally searched for games I have forgot using various keywords about their genre, era, gameplay and appearance - if similar questions were on gaming.SE then I would have probably found them there.

Regarding (2), I'm not sure I understand why you consider them localized. Is it because the user is trying to remember something that happened in the past? What's wrong with that? That seems to me completely unrelated to the localized close reason:

This question would only be relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.

In 30 years from now on the moon colony, this question would be as valid as it is now - trying to identify an old game based on some remembered information. If something will be relevant in 30 years on the moon colony, I don't see how it can be called localized.

In addition, one of the biggest reasons I see for allowing - if not encouraging - these questions, is the fact that SE sites are uniquely qualified to answer them - they are probably one of the few places online that try to build a repository not of general data but of personal questions. Having SE sites one of the few places where these questions are usefully answered will give those sites an edge over anywhere else. "Want to find information about that old game? That's a tough thing to accomplish! Go to gaming.SE, that's probably the only place they will be able to help you".

Finally, I think these questions are equally useful for other sites. Say there's a new bike with triple-suspension system and flowing optic fiber wheels* going around in conventions. The question "can someone identify this cool glowing 3-suspension bike?" will not be useful for others users, it will probably get a lot of off-site views as well. True, it's an example of a current item, but (1) you also said questions of "identify this {item}" are bad and (2) questions like "I used to ride this cool 3-suspension glowing bikes when I was little" are likely to become popular and useful as well, if these convention was actually 20 years ago.

*can you tell I know nothing about bikes? :)

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TL;DR

Reading your comments on other questions, I get a feeling your problem is less with the usefulness to others and more with the fact that people are asking less on concrete problems and more simply about things they can't remember, but what I'm trying to say is

1. We are uniquely qualified to answer these questions
2. These questions might indeed be useful to other people - potentially many other people
3. There's no real reason I see for forbidding these questions, there are as valid as any other question

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EDIT about passive vs active knowledge

Grace Note has raised the very important point of the so called "active knowledge" vs "passive knowledge". Active knowledge is more about being an expert on a specific topic(s), while passive knowledge is more about familiarity with a variety of products / tools / whatever in a specific field.

Both [identify-this-game] questions and [game-rec] questions rely more on that so-called passive knowledge - simply being familiar with something. Personally I support both these question types and I feel that passive knowledge is actually a very strong form of expertise. If someone will ask on stackoverflow "what are good libraries for handling X with Y while doing Z under W condition", he is not necessarily looking for a single expert; he is looking for either one person or multiple people that have familiarity and can point libraries capable of doing that. He is relying on the wisdom of the crowd. And I think that's one of the biggest selling point of the SE sites as a whole.

Answer 5

OK, I've decided to pop an answer out there. Most, if not all, of my points have been made by others, but my comments are getting entirely too long. So here I explain myself.

First off, I respect Jeff, Joel, and the entire ownership of the SE network. I want to make that perfectly clear. I've argued with them in the past on Meta.SO, and sometimes (like now) I wish they'd take the "We don't run [site], you do!" out of the FAQ, but by and large I think they've done something wonderful for the Internet at large. Making the SE sites free and a primarily-democratically-created system were amazing steps forward. And I understand, and absolutely respect, Jeff's desire to make the sites the best they can be -- and to be protective of them, to keep them from getting poisoned.

That all said, I want to address some points which have been made in the comments. First off, tzenes makes a good point that some of my rationale could be used to justify "any" question. (BTW, tzenes, I wasn't arguing with you per se. Some specific instances of ITG -- and many other questions -- should be closed with extreme prejudice; it's Jeff's "nuke from orbit" option which scares me. I picked up on the fact that you agreed with the fact that some ITG questions are OK.)

I think the biggest issue with this question is the combination of upvotes (many of which likely stemmed from the effort to hand-draw "screen shots"), its popularity, the fact that it actually combined two questions in one and what that may mean for the future. As I have said before, I believe the current count of ITGs is 86, out of (currently) 3,454 questions total. They comprise approximately 2.5% of our current question count. Some are fairly searchable, some are not. (This one was not; I and my fellow junior janitors failed in the editing department -- I cop to that. If I wasn't somewhat tipsy at the moment, I'd be editing that question into shape right now -- it really wouldn't be that hard.)

There are two sides to this coin:

1. You have a new user, whose question proved extremely popular, who received an answer (though, admittedly, hasn't been online since to see it). This is his/her first question, indeed his/her first participation. Is it worth alienating this user -- who may be extremely helpful and productive in other ways -- just to "nuke them from orbit" based on an arbitrary, unspecified rule that it appears much of the Meta community -- that is, the community truly devoted to the site's success -- and even the community's other diamond mods disagree with?
2. On the flip side, if the site were to be completely overrun by these, I can absolutely understand the "nuke them from orbit" option. I understand slippery slopes (I am, after all, a psychotic libertarian; slippery slopes are a big part of our general arguments). But until there is a serious problem with these questions overrunning the site and being shoddy in general, I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

While some here might pitch this as a "community vs Jeff" thing, I think it's extremely telling that Jeff has not exercised the option to obliterate these questions with extreme prejudice yet. He certainly has the power and access to do so, and I'm inclined to believe that he's evaluating all of our arguments. While we may not have convinced him that they are worth keeping, I do believe we have him thinking about other downstream ramifications of a rash reaction here. I understand where he's coming from; I just disagree.

I have two readily-apparent subjects with which to compare:

1. On SO, we have many "help me fix the bug in my code" questions. Jeff's retort is that "at least we have the code to go by, not some vague memory of what might have been." I get that, to an extent. However, these questions provide absolutely no useful merit to anyone else on the internet (one of the arguments made for extermination of ITG questions), and the SO community in general is uniquely equipped to handle them -- and handle them, it does, with aplomb. While ITG might be based on memories (and for many ITG questions, those memories are accurate enough to provide an answer -- including this one), instead of a solid code example to debug, in all other ways, the two are directly comparable: The end user has an on-topic, not FAQ-ruled, question, provides enough detail to resolve it, and gets an answer -- despite the fact that it will likely help no one else on the internet.
2. The entire game-rec tag. Seriously, we're going to allow recommendations for games based on (typically) little information, but disallow real, answerable questions because they might not be fully searchable or the active/passive knowledge ratio is off? I notice that there are 13 pages of game-rec questions, of which several are closed. While no ITG questions may be closed yet, perhaps that is because those questions are on-topic, not explicitly ruled-out by the FAQ, provide value to the asker, provide some fun in answering to the community and in general are fairly well-formed.

Gaming.SE (as with many others of the new SE sites) is not Stack Overflow. Once upon a time, when introducing Super User, Jeff claimed that we should beware, because there would be Ewoks there. If we're going to be somewhat lax on one of the core sites, and do not wish to drive away traffic on any of the sites, then is a network-wide ban and nuking existing questions from orbit really the rational argument?

In a case like this, where -- as I type this -- Jeff's original question is sitting at +7/-14, and almost all of the answers are unequivocally that the question specifically mentioned is OK, and where the moderators of the community are (in general) behind the category ... Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the one who wishes to see these questions obliterated? I think the community has spoken, Jeff. And it looks like most of us respectively disagree.

Edit based on Jeff's edit to his original question

The only positive attributes of these questions I can think of, based on the comments:
...
* if the user can produce a screenshot or some other reasonably concrete identifying artifact to work with, other than "I kinda remember.." I have less objections to these questions. I'm still not a fan of them, but I think that's a fair way to limit how many we have.
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I will be personally monitoring this [identify-the-game] from now on and aggressively closing any that I find which are insufficiently clear, as Not a Real Question.

That is completely, totally and 100% fair. It is the right answer. Some of these questions absolutely deserve closure (depending on community response, that is -- remember that 5 reopen quotes will cancel your moderator closure). My primary argument is with the single question you used as an example.

Having an additional moderator monitor the tag and close bad questions is A-OK. It's a measured response, one which allows for the few which are pretty good/challenging/cool, but which also obliterates the chaff.

Kudos, Jeff, for working with your community on this issue. And thank you, truly from the bottom of my heart. Not just for the network of awesome websites, but for you listening to the community, hearing our arguments, and working toward a middle ground. You found, I believe, the right answer here.

Once more, with feeling

Since this debate started, there has been a spate of truly awful [identify-this-game] questions. Some are (thankfully) getting closed. I do not have the power to cast those votes, so instead I've just been downvoting them, and relying on others to do the sensible thing.

At no time did I intend to argue that all ITG questions are good, or qualified for inclusion on the site -- like any other kind of question, there is wheat, and there is chaff. And a lot of the more recent ITGs have been, frankly, chaff. These are the ones where I agree that closure and eventual deletion is the correct answer. (In other words, judge them based on their content, not their category. A point I think many others, such as tzenes, have been trying to make all along as well.)

Just 200 more rep to go and I can start casting close votes ... Need more Fallout questions to answer! :)

Answer 6

In another thread someone asked for stats on ITG, so I've placed them here where they might be appropriate.

Here are some stats on the subject which may help you:

• Answer rate of ITG: 67%
• Number of users who've asked ITGand have rep over 200: 62 (30.%)
• Number of users who've asked ITG and have rep below 200: 147 (70.%)
• Number of ITG asking users who have <5 upvotes: 121 (58.%)

for comparison purposes here are the same numbers for civilization-V (a subject with a similar number of questions)

• Answer rate of Civ-V: 80%
• Number of users who've asked Civ-V and have rep over 200: 60 (59%)
• Number of users who've asked Civ-V and have rep below 200: 42 (41%)
• Number of Civ-V asking users who have <5 upvotes: 30 (29%)

Sadly none of these metrics accurately capture conversion rates (users who stay on the site). The closest is the number of users who have >5 upvotes (users who stick around long enough to become part of the voting community). Based on these numbers, ITG is a fairly bad Getting-To-Know-You question.

Now I'm not sure I have the fight left in me for another game-rec, but based on my personal assessment, Identify This Game is not an appropriate question type for this site.

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LessPopMoreFizz and Powerlord both pointed out that I should take temporarily in to account. To that end I designed the following query:

The number of users who had one of their first two posts (Answer or Question) in ITG and have not gone on to make more than 1 UpVote: 185 (54%)

• Site wide (across all tags): 5324 (39%)
• Civilization-5: 62 (40%)
• Starcraft-2: 213 (37%)
• pc: 152 (38%)
• troubleshooting: 18 (58%)
• spoiler: 74 (35%)
• achievement: 42 (30%)
• minecraft 156 (46%)
• dwarf-fortress 19 (21%)
• the-witcher-2 42 (66%)
• league-of-legends 12 (22%)

Answer 7

Our mandate, as I see it, is to first and foremost expand to cover the graph of gaming information. To that end '[identify-this-game]' has a place on our site.

But Jeff is also right, something is wrong here, something that is hurting our site, something that needs fixing. Let's talk about that for a second.

Jeff's assumption that ITG is the problem, while wrong, is very rational because ITG questions are not like normal questions. In a normal question the question provides the game and context (the node) and the answer supplies the information (spanning that node). As a result we tend to be more leniant with the question (as the user lacks the information) and harsher with the answer (as that user is supplying the information). The issue with ITG is that it breaks this model, so it needs to be treated differently. In an ITG question the answerer provides the context and the asker provides the information. Thus we need to hold the asker to the same standard as we normally hold the answerer.

In this particular case, the one OP linked, the asker not only provided sparse information, but the most informative bit can not be indexed for other people searching for it. What's worse he smudged two separate questions into one (not that asking two questions at once is bad, but two so very different questions). Normally the solution to this problem is to have the community down vote, edit the question or inform the user in comments. None of these things happened. Instead he was resoundly upvoted.

The community failed. So you can see why Jeff might be concerned.

Does this mean ITG is "bad"? Of corse not, these questions are within our mandate.

So should we forget this and move on? No, we really do face a problem and while ITG may not be the culprit, we do need a solution.

Answer 8

"What value does this question have to anyone else on the planet"

1) It has value to at least the person who asked it. And if he took the trouble to type this question on a forum/community it means it really means a lot to him.

2) There are a lot of things people do even if it helps just one person. Think of all the time that people take in typing a response to questions like that. The question page serves a purpose to them too, doesn't it?

Summarizing: The question does serve a purpose.

Answer 9

People ask this kind of question because they're feeling nostalgic about the game. Other people (at least 22) seem to like the nostalgia. So what?