Are questions that are meant to find games of very limited genres be allowed?

Question

Hi,

I notice this thread was closed due to be subjective and argumentative https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/1835/what-are-some-good-turn-based-tactics-titles-for-the-pc-closed. I found in particular that thread was extremely useful. I agree with the fact that thread was closed since the OP used the word "good" in its question. However, the field of turn-based-tactics game are very small compare with the rest of the games out there.

Recently I asked a question https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/2866/what-are-some-srpg-trpg. I noticed the various moderators having discussion on whether this is an appropriate question. My question then is, why is it not an appropriate question? What is the policy here? I don't believe there's even more than 10 or 15 answers possible to that question.

To me, questions such as above is the same genre of questions as looking for a particular library that fulfill a certain types of function calls in Stack Overflow. I feel as if the field for these games are tiny enough that questions asking for knowing what they are should be allowed. However, to know whether that question has too broad of an answer would require the moderators to have adequate knowledge of the possible answer to that question. That is a thorny problem indeed.

Thank you for for reading!

Answer 1

There is indeed an ongoing discussion about if and when game-recommendation questions should be closed. There is still no community consensus, and so I vote based on my personal opinion. In general I just love these sort of questions, but I vote to close them when I feel that they're just too broad.

For example, I approve of "games similar to game X" questions, especially when they also list the traits they are looking for in the question body; take a look at these three examples.

I also approve of questions that feel very specific for me, such as these two, even if they don't list any specific games.

However, I vote to close questions that just feel too broad for me - when I think that are potentially hundreds of valid answers. Here are some examples. I really think the question you listed belongs with those late bunch - it looks very broad, it's asking about an entire popular genre.

Now, the decision of "what is too broad" is very subjective; but as there are 5 different people needed to close a question, it's probably evened out.