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Last night I asked a question regarding an original Gameboy game and I included the Gameboy tag. The tag was removed by another user (who has a score about 5 times larger than my own.)

I was under the impression that in the StackExchange network, it was common practice to include various related tags to a question. Partially, because it can aid in helping people find questions and, also, users who follow one, loosely related tag to a question, may get a message stating a question has been posted which they may be able to answer?

If I'm asking a question about a specific game, should I include a tag like gameboy, or is that bad form?

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It should only be included if the game is available on multiple platforms and your question is only relevant to the tagged platform.

See Should questions always be tagged with either a console/platform or with "multi-platform"?

Tagging around here is a difficult issue - we operated without any consensus at all for the longest time. Recently, Jeff has tried to force us to deal with the tags, with some success.

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  • Thanks for the first link. I can understand the reasoning now. I would fall on the other end of the argument, but I won't operate against community guidelines. It is good for filtering, but I would make a "soft" recommendation that if a game has only one tag, selecting the primary, playable architecture can be added as a tag. If a game appears on multiple platforms, then it shouldn't be tagged with multiple platform tags in this case.
    – RLH
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:09
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    @RLH It's very problematic to try and apply platform tags partially - it causes a lot of inconsistency in the appearance and usage. If people would use a platform tag to filter games they are interested in, missing out on games that are on multiple platforms, or because of something like how many other tags are on the question to begin with. It's a very confusing user experience.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:13
  • @Grace: I certainly see your point, but I also see from the perspective of someone, such as myself, who likes to follow tags and help others. As a gamer who loves playing primarily old games, I want to help and support the small community of gamers that still like to discover old NES and SNES games that we might have missed when we were kids. Other than trolling the questions as they arrive on Gaming, there is no mechanism for people such as myself to follow new NES related games. Does that make since?
    – RLH
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:18
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    @RLH And how do you feel about missing out on questions on NES or SNES games because it got re-released on the PSX or Wii? It'd certainly hinder your ability to find those questions. As a likewise expert on older systems, I would also love to filter by platform. But because of the nature of the tagging system, and cross platform results, it's simply not something we can cleanly accomplish currently. We have been looking at ways to improve this in other places, though.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:21
  • @Grace: Like I said, I'm not going to rebel and (please understand) I'm really trying to voice my opinion. I feel like this issue is a bit of a catch-22. What solutions have you all been brain storming? I'd like to be a part of the discussion, especially if the site administrators are trying to design coherent options for making this functionality a possibility.
    – RLH
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:25
  • @RLH I'm not trying to silence you, I'm sorry that I'm coming across as such. I'm trying to explain that we do want your very exact use case to be implemented, so hearing your opinion is good. As for what we're looking at, I can't say anything solid because we don't have any feasibility metrics yet, but a lot of the better ideas involve this information being inherent to the game itself, not the question.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Dec 8 '11 at 17:31

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