This isn’t my own idea, but it’s one that I want to pass along, since I think it’s a good one. The idea is to deploy the “word cloud” view for tags (which used to be the main view for the list of all tags) on each game’s individual IFDB page.
There’s been some previous discussion about how the current system allows more than one person to apply the same tag to a given game, but that in actual usage this seems to happen very infrequently. The theory is that when people see that a tag which they think is relevant has already been applied, they decide that it’s unnecessary.
I think the logic would work a little differently if cloud view were enabled. Adding your own “vote” for a tag would make it more prominent in the cloud view, and the combined input of everyone would help to establish which tags were the most important for a given game.
That could work, but for current tags that’s a little difficult because going back to old games and clicking on tags you agree with is a fairly tedious task, especially when everyone has to do it by themself, not as a team effort. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just a risky one in terms of payoff.
That’s a good point. I’m not imagining a giant effort to do this in one fell swoop – it’s the kind of thing that would emerge over the course of years as people reinforce a tag they see here and there while browsing.
It might be helpful to look at a particular example, say Anchorhead. Right now the tag data for it looks like this:
tags for Anchorhead March 4 2026 UTC
academic NPC (5)
ask/tell conversation (21)
Available on Steam (128)
body horror (76)
changing environment (16)
child abuse (12)
child death (6)
city (91)
ClubFloyd transcript (682)
cover art (1751)
female protagonist (862)
first effort (247)
Free IF Playoffs (64)
full length (15)
gothic (36)
hand state modeled (2)
horror (843)
incest (3)
Inform (180)
Inform 6 (148)
Inform 7 (331)
inheritance (20)
Interactive Fiction Top 50 (114)
Interactive Fiction Top 50 2011 (48)
Interactive Fiction Top 50 2015 (50)
Interactive Fiction Top 50 2019 (68)
Interactive Fiction Top 50 2023 (70)
lighthouse (16)
long-form (110)
Lovecraftian (88)
mystery (475)
narrative-based time (4)
parser (1912)
Published 1998 (3)
rape references (1)
research (16)
score (257)
self-mutilation (2)
surreal (343)
violence (490)
Winner of a comp (325)
Xyzzy Awards 1998 (14)
XYZZY Best Setting (27)
z-code (75)
A tag like score certainly is legitimate, but I don’t think many people will consider that aspect to be one of the more important parts of the play experience. I might expect tags like Lovecraftian, horror and long-form to end up the most prominent in a word cloud view, and these seem like some of the most salient features.
I think this is a good suggestion. Maybe it could be something like an alternate view for tags where the most common user-applied tags are sorted first, and have a larger font the more users have applied them, with a font maximum and minimum. I feel like could code up something like this in a weekend, or a few weekends. More likely a few, since I’m busy right now. Though my pull requests from December are still unmerged, so even if I did make something it would take a while to get into the official site, if it did end up becoming a real feature.
I hate tag clouds. They’re very hard to scan. It’s bad enough having tag clouds per site, let alone tag clouds per game. Why complicate things? Either it’s tagged or it’s not.
You could think of this as an easy-to-implement variant of “tag applicability voting.” Tags applied by multiple people would generally be more applicable.