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After reading Should we try to encourage at least 2 tags per question? I'm trying to add a second tag to my recent questions.

What's the proper tag for questions like "How do I solve this puzzle?" Strategy doesn't seem quite right. I'm thinking something like this What do I do after getting the spell to control people?

The tag wiki for says

"Wondering how to accomplish a specific objective in-game? Use the tactics tag!"

How does that differ from "How do I solve this puzzle?"

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I imagine our goal is to work with how is to boss fighting strategies, we need a tag that is that same relation to puzzle solutions.

Which makes me say .

I don't want to use , because puzzles matches closer to what we have. Most of our tags of this class talk about the element we're looking at - we're looking at boss fights, we're looking at mechanics, we're looking at items. We don't use boss-fight-strategy or game-mechanic-info or item-explanation, so in that vein, fits a lot better.

I'd like to think about how non-puzzle type challenges fit into there (say, gauntlet rooms), in which the more frustrating ones can be very much the same inspiration for questions as puzzles may be. But that's probably a subject for another question.

This is actually how is already half being used. Since we want to phase out genre tags from gameplay questions, then it fits pretty well. Many of the actual puzzle-game questions tagged with this can keep the tag because they're asking about how to solve a puzzle. The ones actually referring to the genre, I would suggest .

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  • So are we going to turn puzzle into puzzles?
    – bwarner
    May 20, 2011 at 17:52
  • @bwarner If the community likes this idea, I'll be happy to personally disambiguate [puzzle] from [puzzle-game], then synonym the former into [puzzles].
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 20, 2011 at 17:55
  • What about puzzle-solution?
    – Mad Scientist
    May 20, 2011 at 17:59
  • @Fabian That's not much different than [puzzle-solving]. Puzzle solutions aren't the topic of the question - puzzles are. Puzzle solutions are the answer. Make sense?
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 20, 2011 at 18:02
  • @Grace See my edit, the tag wiki for tactics seems to suggest that it is equally applicable in this situation.
    – bwarner
    May 20, 2011 at 19:32
  • @bwarner I kinda highly disagree with that tag, actually, for the same reason I disagree with [strategy]. To me, the tag is overly broad, and it's very vague as far as illustrating what the question is about. Please see this earlier discussion, and note badp and my comments on the matter.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 20, 2011 at 19:33
  • @Grace OK, but without strategy or tactics its going to be very hard to add a second tag to a large number of questions. Which is OK, but I like your point that as we get more questions about a game, it is useful to be able to sub-divide them based on what part of the game they are about. And in that sense, I think strategy/tactics can be useful (and different). But tactics vs. puzzles is tougher...
    – bwarner
    May 20, 2011 at 19:46
  • @bwarner I'm of the opinion we should have much better tags than [tactics] and [strategy] to describe those questions. As it stands, [tactics] tells me nothing, but it covers the same subject matter that both [puzzles] and [boss-fights] do much more clearly.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 20, 2011 at 19:48
  • @Grace OK, so look at my specific example. This is really slightly different than a "puzzle", it's actually "What do I do next?". It wasn't intended to be a puzzle per se, but I couldn't figure out the next expected goal. Should that go under puzzles, or should that be its own concept?
    – bwarner
    May 20, 2011 at 19:52
  • @bwarner That's kinda the thing I'm personally puzzling about (see the paragraph before my horizontal rule) - I don't quite call it a puzzle but I don't really know better in this instance. Thus I decided to leave my question more about puzzles. Whatever that question should be called, though, I don't think "tactics" as a word comes remotely to describing it.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 20, 2011 at 19:55
  • @Grace Perhaps a "what-next" tag?
    – bwarner
    May 20, 2011 at 21:47
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What about creating an tag? A synonym could be "quests". This could cover a number of genres, from FPS and RTS campaign missions, to puzzle games, to RPGs. Any question where you want to ask how to complete a specific objective that the game gave you, or even how to get the game to give you that objective. It is similar in scope to , but instead of being about the indirect goals that you try to accomplish outside the game's main storyline, it is about the direct goals that the game gives you.

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  • Hm... I'd say [objectives] is perfect for questions like you brought up yourself, and I like the tag, but I'm not 100% sold on it being the best for puzzles. It's definitely applicable, so I'm not opposed to it, and not having 60 different categories is always a positive, but I'm not fully sold on grouping the two together in that vein, if that makes any sense.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 25, 2011 at 12:25
  • @Grace OK, I tagged my question plus a few other recent ones to get the ball rolling. Can you make "quests" a synonym for the tag?
    – bwarner
    May 25, 2011 at 13:42
  • @bwarner There's a fair number of outliers, mostly thanks to WoW, but also for a couple other points. The lattermost I linked probably will get retagged to "side-quests", or summat, which isn't entirely redundant with "objectives" as it were. But we could consider them all just a subset of objectives. I'd like some time to think on it, pending other opinions.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 25, 2011 at 13:46
  • @Grace Whether an objective is required to advance the storyline or just optional shouldn't seem to matter. Its quite possible that the asker won't even know whether it is required. So I'm not sure that it is worth trying to split them.
    – bwarner
    May 25, 2011 at 14:14
  • Part of me is thinking that they should still keep the [objectives] tag as it's still applicable for finding out about subquests and sidequests, so really now it's just thinking whether "side-quest" as a tertiary tag is useful since deviations represent a certain special facet of gameplay. It may be me overthinking it, though.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 25, 2011 at 14:17
  • @Grace Further thoughts on combining [quests] and [objectives]?
    – bwarner
    May 29, 2011 at 18:21
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Why don't we use a as second tag? Besides this has the advantage to be applicable to more than just puzzle. All problem games would benefit this tag.

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    The answer is a solution, not the question. And just about every answer on our site is a solution in some form. So this doesn't seem to make much sense.
    – bwarner
    May 23, 2011 at 13:20
  • Hum... indeed. I understand that. I was looking for a word that describe a "solution" as some absolute answer, like "where is the castle of X" -"It's here". There is no debate (or just a little on how to get there maybe). On the contrary you can ask for "strategies", "tactics" and so on, that are more a discussion and are variables.
    – M'vy
    May 23, 2011 at 13:30

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