"Physical and Printable" Game Improved Tagging

[Karrius]

Copied from an email sent to support:

There is no sort of organization or separation of board games and roleplaying games. While I understand these are all very much secondary, it would be nice if it was easier to distinguish between the two. Saying that, I acknowledge that the tagging system is still only like a week old, so hopefully when it rolls over to physical games, that problem will be solved.

When you go in to tag physical and printable games, you get a huge list of tags that were used for the videogames. Would it be possible to just have totally separate tag lists among sections? It would cut down on a lot of the unnecessary parts of the list and make it easier to tag things accurately.

I was asked to give input on what tags would be useful. So off the top of my head:

Types

First, the TYPE of game, keeping in mind multiple of these can apply:

• Roleplaying Game (traditional pen and paper RPGs)
• Party Game (this is generally meant to be something like apples to apples, large numbers of players, easy rules)
• Story Game (various games where making up stories is the primary focus)
• Miniature Game (like Warhammer)
• Board game (anything with pieces and a board, really)
• Card game (this is exceedingly vague, yes...)
• Customizable Card Game (should be written out as "CCG" usually means "Collectable")

  Genres

Genres matter more for some games than others, but there are some common ones:

• Fantasy
• Sci-fi
• Modern
• Horror
• Historical
• Superhero
• Fairytale
• Cyberpunk

And they can be mixed and matched for "Fantasy Modern" or "Horror Historical" or whatever you're looking for.

Number of players / tags

For card and board games, the number of players that can play is usually a pretty big deal. While a custom "players" box might be a bit much, there should probably be at least some kind of differentiation between two player games (where a lot of card games fit), and 3+ player games

Board games/card game are weird in that a lot of games blur the lines, and so board games and ON-customizable card games can be grouped together a lot. For tagging, a decent place to start would be Board Game Geek's lists: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamecategory , but to narrow some down:

• Solo play possible
• 2 players
• 3+ players
• Abstract Strategy (like chess)
• Customizable card game
• Co-op
• Real Time
• Deck builder
• Gambling (or betting?)
• Hidden Role
• Real time
• Tile placement
• Wargame (like Risk)
• Miniature game (like Warhammer)
• Worker Placement

Then comes to tagging for roleplaying games. This is... contentious. There's not really a good, defined vocabulary for RPGs, like there is for video games. You know the difference between a "Roguelike FPS" or a "Platformer with RPG elements", but it's much harder to explain the difference between different systems. I'd lean towards first having all the same genre tags as I mentioned above, and then tags for:

• Dice-less
• GM-less
• LARP
• Generic system

There's a lot more possible descriptors, both mechanically (Point buy, class-based, level-based, lifepaths), and setting wise (High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Sci-Fantasy, Modern Fantasy, Cyberpunk Fantasy, etc). I'm not sure how much detail is needed up front, vs just letting people enter their own tags as desired. D&D, for example, should definitely be tagged as both "High fantasy" and "Fantasy", and maybe even "Heroic fantasy" too! People will definitely buy based on genre, but that's harder to narrow down as a thing, as there are so many. I'm not entirely sure if they'd buy a game based on it being level-based vs lifepaths, or d20 vs dicepool, but it's something I'd casually used to describe the game to a friend. If wanted, I can try to list all of those things out, too.

Finally there's the issue of system. A lot of current RPGs published by the big names allow others to write material for them. Pathfinder is the most popular RPG out there, and right now I can write up an adventure for it and sell it for however much I want, so long as it obeys certain rules, and I don't have to give anything back to Paizo (pathfinder's creators). There are... a LOT and LOT and LOT of people who write supplements for the big games. If itch.io is interested in hosting that kind of material I can see about finding a list of what systems are likely to be legally written for, although there are definite complications here - many other websites have exclusivity agreements, and it's very easy to cross the line and do a book that breaks copyright.

slightly reformatted by @fasterthanlime July 24th, 2015

[leafo]

Thanks for the really detailed feedback. We'll definitely have customized tags and metadata depending on the content type. Listing this stuff out is incredibly useful.

[fasterthanlime]

Solo play possible 2 players 3+ players

@karrius I'm not if you have seen what the metadata edit page looks for video games, but we have these controls:

With some rewording, I feel like they could cover those, without having to do numeric data as tags!

[Karrius]

I had not seen those pages, and those controls would work perfectly. Not a lot of people think about solo board-games, but they're definitely a thing, so a slider from 1-X would work great. One thing to consider too is how that might interact with expansions - there are a few games where there are X characters in the base set, allowing X players, but then the expansion has Y new characters, letting you bring in X+Y characters.