When should we edit game names out of question titles? And why?

Question

I like including game names in my question titles. I feel it makes more grammatical sense and gives a clearer indication of what the question is about. From time to time, though, I see an editor come through and delete the game name from the title, calling it unnecessary. And I'm ok with that - standards are standards for a reason.

Then, while I was writing this question: Can I change the difficulty in Metal Gear Rising? , I chose to disobey the naming conventions.

Here's why:

We already have half a dozen questions titled "How Can I Change The Difficulty?"

I realize that most of the time, there's no problem removing the name from the title; it's unambiguous enough to say "What can I do with Dragon Bones and Scales?" without adding "...in Skyrim", but in this case I feel that the game name in the title could only improve clarity.

• Is there a standard for when we should edit game names out of question titles?
• If there is a standard, what's the rationale?
• If not, can I use my judgment?

Answer 1

Game names in titles are not necessary, as the name is already in a tag. The general guidelines is to avoid putting tags in the title, unless the tag fits in naturally.

So the following would be bad

Metal Gear Rising: Can I change the difficulty?

but adding the tag into the question with proper grammar would be okay:

Can I change the difficulty in Metal Gear Rising?

In cases like this, where the question itself is completely generic and applies to many games, adding the title perfectly acceptable, it might be even necessary to circumvent the duplicate title check (you can't have two questions with exactly the same title on the site).

Cases where I would avoid putting in the name in the title are all questions that have rather long titles. I tend to only add it for very short and generic titles.

Answer 2

Simply and sadly enough, when SE didn't put tags at the start of the page title, Stack Overflow was getting outranked on Google by scrapers that did. Putting tags at the start of the page title is the only thing that worked.

We don't want to have all question titles look like "Metal Gear Solid 3: how can I jump?" (why would we have tags to begin with, then?), so this is why we prefer typically to leave the game name out of the question.

Now, there is an implicit feature request here to fix the list of "Questions that may already have your answer", for example by adding tags next to each suggested question. If you think that might help I suggest you see here.