Do we have personal problems with polls/List<T>/Game-Rec questions or is it habit?

Question

I'd honestly like to get an opinion out of the community. Do we have an actual personal issue with List questions/Game-Rec questions or are we deciding against them because that's what the rest of SE does?

The main argument that I've heard is "You can't be an expert in Game-Recs or List", but I'd like to point out that a lot of the questions we answer as 'experts' here are not because we know the answer off the top of our head but because we know where to look better than the OP.

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My question is a poll: Do we [not like]/[not enjoy]/[not find useful] the recs and list questions or do we simply not want them because that's what SE does?

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Personally, I think allowing such questions leads to a huge repository of knowledge that gamers are in fact out looking for. Also, as we continue to grow, the List questions and Game-Rec questions will subside. There are only a finite number of these questions that are ask-able. I also think that such questions may make the difference between this site being a community and a Q&A site.

The difference is much less prominent on SO since for the large part the requirements of a community and a Q&A site for programmers are pretty similar. And SO also "allows" debugging questions, which are, in my opinion, not in the charter of SE.

So which is it? Do we think that these questions detract from this site or that such questions detract from a SE site in general?

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Suggestion:

For game lists, let's think of them as Abelian groups, (X, g), of prime order. The operation is key feature X and the identity is the game g₀. We close a question if it is equivalent to (X, g_i) and there exists a question (X, g_k) of which g_i is a member.

How's that sound? :D

Basically, we DO have a limited number of List questions because lists ought to be determined by a property and occasionally a game. The only limitation we have to place is that only one property can be listed at a time.

Answer 1

I actually like some of them, not all of course (but I do like some of the ones that are currently closed).

This sums up my feelings pretty well: [game-recommendations] and single, correct answers

Answer 2

While I take a lot of my perspective from experience in the existing SE sites, I do in fact believe these kinds of questions to generally be poisonous to this site specifically. The large quantity of list questions, specifically because people keep adding to them and so they get bumped back to the front page, makes us look more like a shopping plaza than a place to get solutions. Moreover, they are a broken window - we are greatly weakened against closing the more casual subjective lists by having these lists open.

I don't see our goal as being just a repository of lists and lists of games. We have great resources of actual knowledge and help that we can provide to people. But it's not really easy to see that. Every day, someone finishes a game they liked and decides to ask if there are any similar games like it. It's tiresome.

Also, the number of list questions is not finite. It's very far from it. You can have permutations across everything from genre to platform to player support to costume design to theme... and that's not even getting into the whole gamut of questions like "What are games that are like X?" which can literally be asked for every game in existence yet we seem to think is a "narrow enough scope". The fact we're still seeing new ones pop up every day is a testament to the fact that we won't see a decline in them if we just let them be.

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All that said, I do realize there is in fact a lot of attraction and attachment to lists. I have been, and am still willing, to find out a middle ground through which we can define an acceptable list. We are ultimately a community-run site - so if it is agreed that the community wishes that we allow lists, we need to define how they can be acceptable. And we really need the people who are pro-list to speak out, as I mostly see a lot coming from the anti-list faction.

Answer 3

I agree with Grace's comment "I do in fact believe these kinds of questions to generally be poisonous to this site specifically."

I expanded my opinions on this subject further in another thread, but I'll briefly summarize them here.

I believe that lists are Bad Questions™, and that their presence is detrimental to the growth and production of this site. I believe this because I know that people with specialized information are attracted to that high level of knowledge and, there for, questions which require it. A recommendation does not require a high level of knowledge as it is essentially an opinion (this is the reason opinions are bad).

What's worse, the presence of Recommendations is essentially a mandate to any new users to continue with this trend. In fact if you look in meta.gaming, you will see threads which take the stand point, "There are other game-rec's why was mine closed?" In essence, by allowing even a small number of very specialized game-rec's we are inviting disaster onto ourselves.

Now certainly I enjoyed certain recommendations, mostly on the subject of programming and terminals, but I think the price we pay to have them is too high. My stand point on this is clear. All game-rec's must go if we are to be successful as a serious QA site.

Answer 4

juan-manuel proposed Game Recommendations on area51

This would help clearing it out of gaming.stackexchange

Answer 5

I've had this negative experience when I came over https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/6399/what-are-some-fps-pc-games-that-you-can-play-on-a-lan-w-out-external-dedicated-se . When I came over the question and saw it was pretty fast closed, I felt like someone took the wind out of my sails. Suddenly the whole joy around gaming was let down.

IMHO such things are substantial for a gaming community.

Answer 6

summary: In my opinion, List/Recs/etc are fundamental to a gaming community, but we need to find that middle ground that Grace Note mentioned.

So a suggestion:

In my opinion, lists are fundamental to gaming in the same way they are fundamental to movies and music -- because, by nature, gamers tend to try and form personal communities rather than professional ones. Programming/Tech use are different in the sense that people usually have a specific question like why am I getting a segfault at 3am or why won't Office2010 start in Windows 3.1 and are looking for a professional community. However, programmers and tech users aren't necessarily looking for a community. Gamers tend to turn into a community or move to a place where they can join one.

Gaming.se must be more lighthearted an a little more lax for the reason that there are already many other places where people can ask their questions, but also hang out. I think we still need to put restrictions on list questions, or somehow separate them and force them to be CW, but that would of course be changing the engine. As I pointed out in my question, we can set strict guidelines for list questions, such as no more than one property per question and no more than one question per property, and that people wanting to find the intersection or union of two properties ought to go read the posts themselves.

Honestly, however, I think the number of list questions are going down significantly and those that do pop up are hugely popular because they are questions that a large portion of the community wants to see the answers to. Also, I'd like to point out that the active members of meta are possibly not the representation of the entire community. It may be good to (once we've found a few options) encourage the whole of SE to come vote on the proposition.