Scope of the site
Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 11:40 am
Where does it end? Do games like Citadel of Chaos (or more generally: CYOA) qualify?
Thanks, I'll certainly try.Gunness wrote:Hi Sam, and welcome to the forum - hope you'll have a nice time here!
Agreed. But I thought suggesting completely replacing the genre function with a tags system in my very first post, was perhaps a little cheeky.Gunness wrote:It's always a pleasure receiving new ideas, and yours certainly has some merit. If we were to add info on the areas you suggest, I'd prefer (as you do) to have them as tags, rather than introducing an entire new field.
Do you mean you wouldn't want either tag because they cover so many games? Or that there should only be one tag that covers both?Gunness wrote:I'm not too sure of "text only" and "text with graphics". Both because there would so incredibly many of both of them, and because I think that, pretty pictures aside, the game experience is fundamentally the same.
Of course you didn't know that, but internally, what's displayed as "genres" is already called "tags" anywaySamwise wrote:Agreed. But I thought suggesting completely replacing the genre function with a tags system in my very first post, was perhaps a little cheeky.Gunness wrote:It's always a pleasure receiving new ideas, and yours certainly has some merit. If we were to add info on the areas you suggest, I'd prefer (as you do) to have them as tags, rather than introducing an entire new field.
The idea with the genre tags is to help people find games of a certain type. If a genre becomes too wide, it loses its usefulness as it covers too many titles. To take an extreme example (please bear with with here!), we could have a "allows players take inventory" tag. This would cover 95% of all games. The tag fits those games but it isn't really useful.Samwise wrote:wrt omitting tag(s) because they cover a lot of games - the idea of arbitrarily leaving out the tag(s) for one type of game just because they cover the majority, just seems odd to me. You'd presumably add tags for all the other genres in use ...
I understand what you're saying. But I don't necessary think that illustrations is a good yard stick when it comes to telling whether a game runs fast or not. You're suggesting some of the issues yourself. What if the graphics can be turned off? What if they're only displayed the first time? What if they actually coded efficiently, so that they don't take long to render? I can think of many illustrated games that run a great deal faster than text-only games.Samwise wrote:wrt whether an illustrated-text tag is required in addition to text-only - I think there is definitely a case for distinguishing them, especially if you're playing older, classic 8-bit micro adventures. The illustrations on these platforms could often cause a lot of slow-down in gameplay...So much so, that if a game implemented the illustrations so that they couldn't be toggled on/off and also showed them every time you entered a location, they could completely put the user off much earlier than they might otherwise have done
Well, I have a hunch that things are a bit more complex than this. Not impossible, of course, but definitely not entirely clean-cutSamwise wrote:The only reason I can think against applying those two tags, is the amount of time it would take to apply them to the catalogue already submitted in the db but you could always do a global apply to all of the text-only tag, and then go through and remove the tag from those games which aren't classic text adventures - that would probably be a quicker job.
I'd normally expect a search like this to be an AND search. If we were to add the text-only / illustrated distinction, I definitely the idea has some potential. If not, I think it would make the search page more complex to use without adding anything really useful.Mr Creosote wrote:Jacob, what is your opinion on extending the advanced search to allow more than one genre/tag to be selected at the same time as brought up by Samwise?