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I reviewed about the top 300 tags on the site under the criteria I submitted for review here:

On the coming murder of "dependent" and "meta" tagging

And the following tags were marked for further review - I do not endorse burninating all of these outright, nor do I feel we should take any action without further review - this is just an overview. Some of these tags might live on, and there's just a big chunk of tagged questions that need re-tagging.

These tags were marked under the guideline of "tags that are applied across multiple games and represent common game mechanics" criteria. For the most part, these are tags with more than 10 questions.

I think some of the questions under these tags are likely to be tagged correctly, however, a spot check of some of these tags showed an overwhelming bias towards using these tags to subdivide many different games worth of questions based on common game mechanics.

I've grouped these generally to avoid just spamming a wall'o'tags, but there's probably some that might belong in some other category or whatever. It's a rough bucketization, nothing more.

Without further ado... gulp:

"Single player" type tags:

"Story" tags:

"Money" tags:

"NPC" tags:

"Audio" tags:

"Cheats" tags:

"Achievements" tags:

"Digital distribution" tags:

"Game recording" tags:

"Multiplayer" tags:

(Now that you're desensitized to looking at tags, the tags below this line are on this question, and not on this list.)

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  • I would say "minigames" is a genre tag, actually.
    – Raven Dreamer
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:42
  • @RavenDreamer Possibly so, not the way it's being used though...
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:43
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    I would consider [achievements] to actually be a substantive tag on its own. Even if we go by other criteria of judging a tag, there is notoriety in being an expert at getting Achievements in games, so it's not entirely a lost cause in its dependency.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:43
  • There might be some overlap between single-player and multiplayer tags - weapons and combat, for example - but that's a semantic difference. Even if you had them all together, I don't think it changes their current purpose.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:45
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    @DaveDuPlantis, yeah, I just stuck them into rough buckets so that you wouldn't go crazy looking at an unbroken list of 50-60 tags. There's certainly some overlap between the buckets.
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:48
  • @GraceNote, maybe you should start a question to discuss its usefulness?
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:49
  • meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/718/…
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:55
  • Are we making a distinction between tags that should stay, but shouldn't be used unless the game has hundreds of questions, versus tags that should never be used (and therefore should be deleted)?
    – bwarner
    Commented Jan 25, 2012 at 14:37
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    @bwarner, my understanding is that when a game tag hits the "needs more tags" threshold, we come up with specific tags for that game. Most of these are (by my interpretation of the guidelines) far too broad to qualify. However, I've heard a couple of "exceptions" to this rule thus far which I'm trying to wrap my head around.
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 25, 2012 at 16:15

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  • @agent86 I'm just going through your list and applying what makes sense
    – badp
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 22:21
  • Ah, gotcha. Just figured I'd probably done something dumb and overlapped a couple. my mistake.
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 22:26
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I'm going to throw this out here, because it's already been wrongfully deleted once.

"Story" tags:

The should not be lumped in here with the other tags. in this case is referring specifically to questions about the plot, lore, or in-universion questions about cannon-ity etc.

This meta question / answer has more info. This tag does not deserve to be deleted again. (I may have taken it a little personally when it was deleted the first time. :/ )

is probably a useless tag. Not only is it rarely used, it's not used consistently. There are questions which ask "Does game X support language Y", there are questions which ask "Does game Roh have a Sigma language patch?", and there are questions which ask "Can I scan a lego creation and import it into a minecraft world?" ...wait, what?

is also not being used consistently. Most of it looks like it could fall into , but I'm afraid this one's going to have to be picked over by hand to sort out. As a tag, I find it less useful than , and that one was murdered in the dead of night.

Ultimately, I don't think is a meaningful distinction (don't all games have endings?).

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    Endings is a Bad Tag, but it can't be merged because many of the questions are mechanical or otherwise extra-diagetic, rather than narrative based. (e.g. How many endings are there? How do I get the good ending? What's that song in the credits?)
    – LessPop_MoreFizz
    Commented Jan 25, 2012 at 12:35
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    I asked Grace the same thing about "achievements" - why is story an exception? (Please don't take this as an attack on the tag; mostly I just want to reduce my "false positive" rate in future tag sweeps.)
    – agent86
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 19:08
  • @agent86 because sometimes a lore question about a game can be answered without knowledge in the game itself (for instance, many of the World of Warcraft | Lore questions can be found in books, etc.). The story tag exists to differentiate questions about game-mechanics from questions about plot in cases of ambiguity - which is the same reason we don't add the game's name to the title if it's in the tags.
    – Raven Dreamer
    Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 21:25
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Without having explored the entire list yet, here's a few nominations for tags that I believe are not useful (regardless of the game) and should be removed. I'll add more as I get a chance.

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