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This is the question that prompted mine:

Steam version of Fallout / Fallout 2 in a window

There have been several attempts to retag it, some of which have reversed earlier retagging, so I thought it might be best to confirm our policy here in a more general sense.

The question is currently tagged this way:

That doesn't seem right to me. badp's answer to how we tag games in a series, the leading answer to that question, touches both sides of this situation, but does not address it directly:

  • we should not use two tags for a question about a single game, and
  • we should use only the series tag for a question about the series as a whole.

This is a question about some of the games in a series. I believe it should be tagged in one of two ways:

  1. With only the series tag: this would imply that it covers multiple games in the series, and the question itself will specify which ones. This would be my preference.
  2. With only the games to which it applies. It doesn't scale very well, and could cause confusion as to when the -series tags are to be used, but I'll concede it makes sense for questions about two games.

Does it make sense to tag questions like this with the -series tag, even though they do not apply to the entire series? (I'd also like to remove , but there have been enough revisions already; I'd rather just do one more and get a consensus on the general case, or spell it out here if we have had a consensus and it just wasn't clear to me.)

Other similar questions are below, not all tagged the same way:
Third Person Mode for Portal / Portal 2
Should I continue one of my Mass Effect playthroughs in Mass Effect 2 or start afresh?
Attaining 100% in SNES and N64 Mario Games

(Warning: there is some cleanup to be done on these questions. The -series tag has been used on quite a few game-specific questions that aren't part of the issue here. I'll try and spread those out a bit.)

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  • Do note the times on the edits. They're each more than 6 months apart. There's no ongoing edit war, at least.
    – Raven Dreamer
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 1:09
  • 1
    True, but one revision has been reversed at least twice, so I thought it might be good to ask about this specific case, even if it turns out that the revisions are a result of ongoing changes in policy.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 1:40
  • ...it is just common sense to use the tags of the specific games if the series tag cannot apply.
    – badp
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 7:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This question in particular is in a bit of a bad spot because it's asking two (admittedly, related) questions:

  • How can I play the steam version of Fallout in windowed mode?

and

  • How can I play the steam version of Fallout 2 in windowed mode?

The series tag should only be used for concepts that apply across games - if a question is tagged with it, the question should be about the series itself, not the games within the series.

In this case, the question is not about the Fallout universe - it is about the game's interaction with Steam - so the Series tag should not be used.

Not sure why you don't think Badp's answer covers it.

c) Questions about the over-arching series of the game should be tagged by adding -series to the tag name: , not .

Emphasis mine.

The question is not about the fallout universe, so don't use the fallout series tag.

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  • Well, maybe the problem is the type of question itself ... there are even parts of your answer that would be unclear to me without the rest of it (concepts across games - I think I know what you're getting at, but isn't playing in windowed mode a concept that applies across games?). Your last sentence is the clearest explanation, I think. And maybe we don't have to worry about the five-tag limit until we have a legitimate question that applies to enough games in a series to "require" six tags.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 1:56
  • @Dave You can put games from unrelated series into windowed mode, and they don't become part of the same series when you do :P. I would take for granted that the concepts must also be specific to the games, not just applying to the games.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 22:11
  • I completely agree with this point. When I see a series tag, I think the question should not be asking about individual plot points (unless those plot points are important to later games e.g. the Virmire choice in ME1) or technical issues related to one or two titles within a much larger series. I'm currently on the fence regarding questions about different game mechanics used in two or more games of a series (e.g. weapon loadout differences between ME1 and ME2); however, such questions may already be off-topic (in the vein of "because the devs said so").
    – MBraedley
    Commented Feb 21, 2012 at 16:02
  • OK, question for you: I'm not sure why this question of yours is tagged with ME3 and ME-series rather than ME/ME2/ME3. If I understand your question correctly, you're asking about the games themselves; a question about the series would ask about, say, the history of the fleets involved, whereas your question asks about decisions you make in the first two games and how that affects the third.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Commented Mar 8, 2012 at 23:41

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