Possible TagFest event for IFDB

General IF Community Resources
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Continuing the discussion from Magic 8-Ball for game recommendations:

Funny you should mention that… I was considering trying to organize a “Tag Your Favorite Games on IFDB Week” event. Would anyone else be interested?

  • Yes, that sounds useful and fun!
  • No, thank you.
0 voters
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A swell idea, and I’ve done most of the tags for “The Legend Lives,” “Nothing But Mazes,” and “Short of Sushi.” One of the great things about Flashpoint Archive, which I am a staff member on, is its tag search system, and we certainly need more metadata for IFDB games so that this recommendation system works. @jdyer has been very helpful with his All the Adventures posts so I can add some tags and references to 1980s games, as well. Kudos to the existing walkthroughs for “Curses” and “Finding Martin,” as well.

However, I have some quibbles with the idea of this:

  1. Making it a contest might incentivize people to give games tags that don’t really apply to the game. For example, I tagged the robot mouse in The Legend Lives as “robot sidekick” because you escape an exploding factory with him at the end of the game, whereas I didn’t do so for the robot mouse in Curses as it is used early in the game and is then disposed of. (Both games do have the robot tag.) Someone looking to get an easy extra tag for the contest might be overly-generous in considering the robot mouse in Curses to be a sidekick when it’s unlikely to excite people who are thinking of Floyd from “Planetfall.”
  2. A week isn’t very long, and it’s unlikely to allow enough time for people to replay all their favorite games to retag them.

I propose that we just make a thread for announcing significant tag edits that we’ve done after we’ve played through a game. This allows multiple sets of eyes to suggest and review tags on a game, and it ensures that the games are comprehensively tagged by someone who is very familiar with the work. A fun way to introduce the idea of being conscientious in tagging games after you play them would be for people to tag a game after they’ve played it in the Interactive Fiction Club.

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I don’t see anything in the original post suggesting that this event be a contest. I read it along the same lines as the Source Code Amnesty events: “Hey everybody, let’s all have some fun together and tag a bunch of cool games. We’ll even be improving the IFDB while we’re at it!”

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I think this is a cool idea, and if I’m honest, I really like the idea of having a new recommendation thing for IFDB. If that’s what this is for!

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I’m a fan of this idea!

Adding a link to this previous thread about IFDB tags, which has some good discussion and considerations: The IFDB Tagging System

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OK. It begins…

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