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As if the differences between abbreviated titles and full titles was not already a problem, what should we do for games that actually have multiple different titles? There are a few different cases where this comes up, and to be strictly honest I'm not really sure where I sit on any of these. It may even be that since the 5 tag limit tends to be rather gracious in these scenarios, we may just use both tags, but I wanted to hear some input.

Translations versus Original

We can't really host a gaming site and not expect to catch the eyes of import gamers. And not every game that we importers deal with have convenient English names like Lethal Application or Deathsmiles. Some of them have a name that's simply just in another language. And unfortunately, the import gamer community enjoys using both translations of the name to English, and the foreign titles themselves (occasionally transliterations in the case of games whose titles aren't in roman lettering). Should we prioritize the translations, since we're targetted to primarily using English here?

Series identifier versus Actual title

Example being the Wild ARMs games. The 5th game in the series is actually titled Wild ARMs: the Vth Vanguard, but it's colloquially referred to as Wild ARMs 5. Are we to stick with the more commonly used title in these cases, the "technically easier to understand" series abbreviation?

Game literally has two titles

Sometimes, people make games that have two titles. It might be because one is a subtitle, but the end is that the gamers do use both titles to refer to the game. A good example would be Chelsea and the 7 Devils. The actual game disc has that name, but the game icon is bmd.exe, which stands for the game Bunny Must Die. Both titles are completely correct, and people tend to understand the game by both titles. So which one is preferable to actually use?

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I don't know if we can come up with a general rule on this; perhaps it could be a judgment call from the OP, keeping in mind that the community will quickly retag it if it's obviously wrong, and post a question here on meta on doubtful specific cases, which we could resolve one at a time.

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These games seem like exactly the reason tag synonyms exist. Unless I've missed something, the protocol for these games is probably to use the tag you want, and if other questions show up with different tags for the same game, suggest the tags be made synonyms.

My answer doesn't really begin to answer which tag should be the primary, but you didn't actually ask that... usually, for most games with multiple tags, it should be fairly clear which tag is best, and in cases where it isn't, I second @juanformoso in thinking those should be decided in Meta.

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  • We didn't have tag synonyms at the time this question was asked. But that said, the matter of the primary tag basically remains the case of this question anyway - and at that point we seem to have still resolved to just not have a general rule on it.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 12:17
  • @GraceNote didn't realize it was old, it was in my "hot meta questions" feed. Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 14:51

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