175 Reasons LessPop_MoreFizz Doesn't Like identify-this-game
This is a list of every currently open unanswered ITG Question that has not seen activity in more than a week. All but the first 25 or so are more than a month old. It should be noted that this list is more than four times the size of the list provided by the "Unanswered" list on the tags page. This is because the Unanswered page only lists questions on which there are no upvoted answers. And votes on ITG questions are fundamentally quite worthless. So instead, I went through all 650 ITG questions, and compiled a list of every single question with neither an accepted answer, nor an answer which the OP has commented is correct in a comment. (See, ITG askers are very bad at accepting answers. There are roughly 50 such ITG questions, where there is a correct answer without a checkmark.)
These games are Unidentified, the askers have Forgotten them, and the questions are Old.
Per this old Meta post by Badp, we should be closing these questions as NARQ. To date, we have only ever closed 31 ITG questions.. Given the generally low quality of many of these questions, this is way too few. Even more problematic is that the vast majority of the questions listed above are abandoned. They have largely been asked by users with under 50/150 rep, who have derived all of their rep from their single ITG question. In most cases, they have not returned to Gaming.SE since the initial burst of enthusiasm when they asked their question.
These questions are a Broken Window.
Many of these questions are probably duplicates. Many others are bad questions that are effectively unanswerable. They are cruft that makes it harder to justify the closure of new bad ITG questions, because we have allowed so many old bad ones to stick around.
So, what should we do with them?
My thought is this: Somebody (I'll do it if a Mod won't step up, but I'd suggest a Diamond does it), should go through all 175 of these and leave a comment on each one, asking the OP to either accept one of the existing answers or clarify their question. After one week, all of the abandoned questions that have not been refined or answered should be CLOSED as NARQ, and subsequently deleted.
A few additional notes from having looked at over 200 ITG questions in rapid succession: 'Duplicates' are rampant (though we have no way to be sure, and thus can't do anything about them!), the vast majority of askers have never returned to the site (quite a few have even deleted their accounts! Those questions can never be answered!), even among answered ITG's, the number of deleted answers that should have been comments is sky-high, and a fair number of bounties have been auto-awarded to games that are not the answer. I even saw one or two instances where the asker commented that a particular answer was correct (or self-answered), and a seperate answer, naming a different game was instead the top voted.
[identify-this-game] hasaccepted:0
will turn up all the identify-this-game questions with no accepted answer, rather than relying on the 'Unanswered' page or manual trawling.