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We appear to have instant consensus that a game tag (or game series tag) should be applied to all questions on specific titles.

Should we also look to apply either a console or platform tag (iphone, OSX, Xbox-360) or a "multi-platform" tag to any question that refers to a specific game?

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5 Answers 5

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I think it should only be added when:

  1. It's a general question about the platform, OR
  2. The game in question has multiple versions, AND the question is specific to one of them (e.g. why can't I find gold nuggets in game X on the PS3, my friend is finding them in his PC version!)

Otherwise the only added value I see in adding it is for filtering purposes - and while that is admittedly useful, I think it will encumber the tagging system a bit too much.

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    If we wanted the filtering purposes value, we could make a list of mandatory tags like the way they're done in meta. For example: pc, console, console-agnostic; xbox, xbox-360, wii, ps, ps2, ps3, gba, gameboy-color, gameboy, ...
    – badp
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 16:06
  • @badp: it's a very interesting approach, though esoteric platforms / new platforms will make it challenging. Maybe open a new question about it?
    – Oak
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 16:59
  • @Oak Done.
    – badp
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 18:09
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    @oak How it will "encumber the tagging system a bit too much"? If there is added value, it should be used. I agree that they should not always be used, but I think they are specifically useful for game that are console exclusive (like Mario/Zelda games).
    – DavRob60
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 14:43
  • @DavRob60 I agree that sentence is a bit strange after I do admit there's an added value. It just seems a little redundant to me. As I said in my answer to another question in this topic I do not think those tags need to be removed, I just won't add them.
    – Oak Mod
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 17:19
  • @Oak Thanks for clarifying that point.
    – DavRob60
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 20:27
  • This answer still seems to make most sense.
    – Doozer Blake
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 12:07
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    I tried to tag every question with a system tag in the early days of Gaming and everyone shot me down and removed my system tags. Now that I can't filter out non-PC games I rarely come to this site anymore.
    – cowgod
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 3:31
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    I am of the persuasion that a tag for a console (or PC) should be added if there is only one tag associated with the question and the tagged system is the only system associated with the game. My logic is that some of us really like to follow questions from old console systems, regardless of the game or if it ever appeared on another system. If you post an NES, want to know about it because I follow the NES tag. Others may feel the same way.
    – RLH
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 17:12
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The vast, vast majority of multi-platform games questions are not specific to any particular platform: tagging them or similar is just a waste of time. If it's not tagged with a platform tag, it's assumed the question is platform-agnostic.

That is, in general, a question about gameplay or plot points is almost always platform-agnostic. But if you tell people "you need to put a platform tag on or put ", they have to decide if their question really is a multi-platform question or just related to the platform they're playing on. And people will generally choose the latter: it's a safe choice. If I'm playing on the PS3, just tag it . Problem solved!

Ugh, no: it just turns into another opportunity for people to get it wrong.

People have been generally good about putting a platform tag on—unprompted—when it actually does matter: those are indeed useful. If a question is not tagged with a platform and it later turns out the platform does matter, it can be added on at that point.

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  • Agreed. I've edited in/out PC on quite a few skyrim questions where necessary. And, until this issue can be resolved, leaving multi-platform out makes most sense.
    – Doozer Blake
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 11:53
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I think that should be mandatory to have the platforms tags.

I have a PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and Ipod Touch but I never play anything on PC.

I started adding tags to my ignored and interesting tags, then I began to notice a lot of tags like:

eve-online, lotro, wow, etc without the platform.

It is just impossible to add all the PC games to the ignored tags.

Also, I bought a Wii just to play Mario Galaxy games, so I would like to ignore it for now and focus on PS3 for example, but if the questions aren't tagged with any platform I can't filter by Interesting/Ignored, so this filter becomes useless.

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In addition to the favorite answer, I think there should be a special case where the adding the platform can help answerers find questions more easily. I would even except an exemption for iOS only. Given that there aren't very many questions for iOS, and the games themselves are only popular for such a short time, it is very useful to be able to search just based on the platform. I think as RLH points out that this would benefit old platforms as well.

So, more generally - I suggest to add the suggestion that platforms be added when the volume of questions for the platform is low.

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Both answers so far make perfect sense to me, but contradict each other of course. So I propose a Tagging hierarchy, which would automatically associate games to all their platforms unless explicitly tagged only relevant to a subset.

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