Game tag - When to create own tag for games?

Question

I have just created the minesweeper tag and the rock-paper-scissors tag.

The reasoning for this was:

• Rock Paper Scissors (Lizard Spock) is popular enough to deserve its own tag. (37 questions seem to be applicable for it)
• Minesweeper has seen some questions (posted by me) not directly related to implementing the game, but rather analyzing it.
• Minesweeper is a very known game, and users looking at a pure Minesweeper implementation in Python might be interested in looking at an implementation in JavaScript, or an algorithm for the game in Java.

This has led me to investigate the other games out there. There are currently 470 questions tagged game, although not all questions that can use it are actually using it. I would like for us to pay some attention to the game tag and the different games out there.

Let's take a look at some numbers:

• 6 reversi is:question closed:no
• 7 battleship is:question closed:no
• 8 trading card is:question closed:no
• 14 minesweeper is:question closed:no
• 18 [game] memory is:question closed:no
• 37 rock paper scissors is:question closed:no
• 72 tic tac toe is:question closed:no (which has its own tag, although 48 questions are not using it)

I added the game when searching for memory to avoid memory-performance questions.

Some of these tags do exist on StackOverflow already, such as minesweeper.

Other games to consider checking out is:

• Chess
• Hangman
• Tetris
• Connect 4

When should a game get its own tag?

What games are worth adding a tag for?

Answer 1

When should a game get its own tag?

Game tags are not 'meta' tags, they identify a core concept that will be present in the question. minesweeper tells us something about what the code does, not about the person writing the code, or the problems they may be experiencing. So, game tags are real tags.

But, we can't go tagging everything, what's needed to make the tag worth adding? Tags have been described as being useful for:

• For askers, they connect experts with questions they will be able to answer - they allow you to direct your question to the people most able to answer it.
• For answerers, they are for sorting your questions into specific, well-defined categories. You can follow tags, get updates on changes, even mails and other notifications.
• Tags can be used to report on broad statistics, tracking activity over time, etc.
• Tags can be used for awarding badges.

So, would it be useful to tag a question with minesweeper, knowing there may be experts out there in that field? Would you follow a tag minesweeper? Are we looking at minesweeper tag statistics?

I believe the answer is yes to all three. The minesweeper tag is useful.

Is it useful even though there's already game? I believe the tags complement each other.

So, minesweeper is a good one.

I believe rock-paper-scissors meets those criteria too.

The rock-paper-scissors is a special case because it is related to a weekend-challenge, and there are now a number of people where the tag will be followed.

battleship .... not so much. I am not aware of a 'following' for that tag.

Bottom line, there is both supply, and demand, for both the tags you created. It is past the threshold.

What games are worth adding a tag for?

tic-tac-toe is a candidate too. I can see it being useful.

Any game which has at least 3 or so existing questions, and does not fall in to another sub-category of game, is a good candidate for a new tag.

I am not sure any of the other listed games are ready for a tag, but that does not mean I am right. Feel free to propose a new tag for things, but be mindful that tag fragmentation is worse than not enough tags.

Cautions.

The counter-argument for tags is that it fragments the namespace for Code Review. There is a limit of detail for each tag. chess may be good, but 3d-chess-from-star-trek, not so much.

There has to be an expectation of a reasonable, and continuing number of questions that will be candidates for the tag. Will there continue to be a need for the tag?

There also has to be no overlap with existing tags that fall within the game tag.

Answer 2

126 number-guessing-game

Answer 3

41 battleship

Answer 4

39 quiz

Answer 5

27 adventure-game (not all applicable)

26 role-playing-game

46 battle-simulation