Plot vs. Lore tags - do we need the distinction?

Question

In asking the chat room whether the plot tag would be appropriate for this question, we briefly discussed which tag would be appropriate, plot or lore and whether or not they needed to be distinct.

We have 49 questions tagged plot and 7 questions tagged lore. I've never seen any seriously problematic questions in either tag, but do we need a separate tag for "lore"? While there are subtle differences between the two, do we anticipate the use case for these 2 tags being distinct enough from each other to keep them as separate tags? Or should we just merge them?

Answer 1

While I agree that the two tags are similar, I don't think that they can simply be merged. I see more of a case for removing lore outright, but I'm reluctant to do that blindly.

The issue is a simple one: How do we handle a question about a game-world that isn't related to the plot? Asking Why are there are no tanks in Fallout? isn't an important plot point in the game -- it never comes up -- but that doesn't mean it's not an interesting question.

Some games have the benefit of having an established game universe, in which case a better choice might be game-series rather than game and lore, as evidenced by the portal-series and half-life-series tags. (There's even a fallout-series that the New Vegas question might benefit from)

I think the best course of action may be to simply remove the lore tag entirely. Though it doesn't have a tag wiki, I would define Lore to be any question focusing on the plot and background of a specific game, or a suite of games. In the case where there is only a single relevant game under discussion (such as this Terraria question), it is okay to use only the game tag. Popular franchises, on the other hand, would benefit from a game-series tag instead, as they may be relevant to more than a single game.