As I’ve been going through my played games adding tags, I’ve noticed some common trends that I feel might be cool to have a tag for, but that I can’t think of a clear and pithy way to encapsulate in a tag. I figured other participants might have similar issues, so I thought I’d start a thread where we can share elements that we would like to have a tag for and discuss what might be the best way to word that tag.
(I’ll put my own examples in a reply to this post, just to make it clear that the intent of the thread isn’t exclusively to discuss those specific ones.)
I’ve noticed that the “translation” tag is commonly used for both games that are about translation and games that are translations, or have translations. This is one of those unavoidable ambiguities of user-applied tags that I’ve talked about before, and I’m not really trying to “fix” it per se, but I think it would be nice to have a more specific tag to apply to games where the translation element is diegetic, as it were. My first thought was for that tag to be “translation mechanic”, but that doesn’t quite feel accurate for cases like The Fall of Asemia or Verses, where there’s less of a puzzle or select-your-translation-approach element, and I would still want to include those games in the “revolves around translation taking place in-universe” category that I’m envisioning.
There are a number of games that have descriptions/sentences of a strictly limited length—basically, I’m looking for a term that would encompass After-Words and free bird (two-word descriptions), The Loyal Doom (one-word descriptions), and maybe also something like Collision (if we don’t consider uniform sentence length to be required for the category). All I’ve managed to come up with is “two-word descriptions”, which is too specific, and “constrained descriptions”, which is too broad (this is a kind of constrained writing, but there are other kinds, like avoiding use of a specific letter or what have you).
For #1, how about using translated (or maybe translated game) for games that are translated and keeping translation for games about (or contain) translation?
Constrained sentence length
Limited sentence length
Constrained description length
Limited description length
Constrained number of words
Limited number of words
Constrained word count
Limited word count
Limited-length sentences
Limited-length descriptions
Constrained-length sentences
Constrained-length descriptions
Word count limit
Word count constraint
These to me sound more like they refer to an overall word count limit, as in the Twiny Jams, not a sentence-level constraint. I think your other suggestions work better.
(Incidentally, is there a tag for games with an overall word count limit? I’m not seeing one. If not that would be another tag that might be worth adding.)
Technically yes, but in a creative writing context rather than a linguistics context, if it’s formatted like a sentence I tend to just call it a sentence regardless of whether it meets the grammatical definition. Not sure what would be clearest/most self-explanatory in this case, though.
That’s interesting. I think I used the word “construction” a lot in creative writing, and “phrase” seemed a more conversational way to put things. But “sentence” is maybe more conversational than either. I’ll open some games and recheck my reaction.
(e: but I wrote kind of wonky poetry and needed technical language)
One thing I observe regarding the example games: they aren’t arranged in “traditional” paragraph format, which, coupled with the lengths of these passages, gives a “poetic” feel. Maybe it’s a different tag, but there is something distinct about the constraint and the arrangement working together.
I agree it falls under that umbrella! I was just thinking about what might be a term for this specific flavor of it. But maybe starting out by tagging things with the umbrella term wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
Tagging “mouse” (the rodent) vs. “mouse” (the peripheral?)
My ideas:
Mouse - for the rodent
Mouse support - this game has built-in support for at least some mouse input, such as Zork Zero or a Twine game. While most modern interpreters allow using the mouse to type on an on-screen keyboard, I’m using it here to mean that it’s specifically coded in the game.
Mouse requirement - this game requires use of the mouse (or Tab+Enter) to click on things in order to play it.
I’ve been sticking to tagging “mice” for the rodent, since I think that’s more automatically understood as the animal rather than the peripheral, but I guess that’s not ideal if a game has only one mouse in it.
I think “mouse support” and “mouse requirement” sound good for categories of mouse input.
Emery, I use trackballs, so I use the more general term “mice” for trackballs (and touchpads, but I dislike these…) and mouse for the “inverted trackball”, this to say that is a YMMV case, that is, the core issue on tagging things, which is basically classifying things.
In several games, such as Jigsaw and Quotient: The Game, you manually control a vehicle, such as a plane. Should each vehicle (car, plane, etc.) be given their own tag, or just “vehicle”? “Usable vehicle”?
I like “usable vehicle” as a way to distinguish the thing you’re describing from games that might prominently involve a vehicle that the player doesn’t manually control.