Vibe: (How “dark” is the content of this game overall with regard to how it might affect your mood?)
Noon - appropriate for anyone
Sunset - a bit of shadow; might inspire some feelings
Dusk - serious thematic tension, but generally positive
Night - potentially heavy subject matter
Midnight - not for everyone; discretion advised
Or do it by weather:
How did the content and story of this game affect your mood?
Sunny (perfect picnic)
Partly Cloudy (reminded me it could rain)
Overcast (threat of rain, but it never happened)
Rainy (had to move to shelter)
Thunderstorm (in the basement with a flashlight)
It’s interesting how many ways a game/book/movie can vary in heaviness of subject matter. Like, there can be a little heavy subject matter or a lot; the heavy content can be in the background or it can be the unrelenting focus; it can be tempered with humor or not; it can be relatable/realistic or unrealistic/fantastical (and so feel more at a distance and less threatening). It can be sad but cathartic, or sad but beautiful, or it can be sad and bitter, or sad and bleak and hopeless. It can deal with heavy subject matter that feels like it’s in the natural order of things (like someone dying of natural causes) or not in the natural order of things (like someone dying young, or dying as a result of people doing evil things).
(I’m not suggesting we make a scale to account for every variation! Just thinking out loud about how many variations there are.)
I think with a “mood” statistic you need to frame what exactly you want to accomplish and what you want to get across - what does this tell a person who might be selecting a game?
I believe the intention with this stat is to disclose without spoilers the “tone” (mood/vibe/trauma) of a piece. Is it meant to disturb you? If you’re in a good mood and want to play a game and remain happy you don’t want to pick a game like Taghairm or Slouching Towards Bedlam; this stat ostensibly informs you if the game is a “buzzkill” or not regardless of authorial intention, content, maturity level, etc.
The “buzzkill” can happen in different ways, but I think it doesn’t matter whether a game is “sad but beautiful” or “sad but bleak” - just the idea that it might be sad in some manner and cause an unexpected mood shift for someone subjectively who doesn’t want or expect that is the point. I think it helps if the stat is cumulative and voted on by the audience. You’re wanting to gauge the audience’s reaction to the vibe, not specifically whether the game succeeds in its intentions or not.
A game might start with a death: if it’s a murder mystery, that’s par for the course and potentially not disturbing at all and ranks positively on a vibe scale. If the game begins with a loved one passing and is two hours of reflection and emotional musing on the life, that might be overall a positive experience as a game and win awards, but should rank more negatively on the “vibe” scale because the reader is focused on emotion rather than having fun solving a murder mystery.
I could be wrong and you’re intending something else, but that’s my contribution.
I wasn’t originally thinking of making a linear mood scale. It seemed like you were coming up with a scale (which is fine), so I was figuring it was depending on your intentions for the scale (or the intentions of everyone commenting, if we’re looking to reach some kind of consensus). For me, “sad and beautiful” vs. “sad and hopeless” would make a difference in how I’d react to it, and whether I’d want to play it or not. (But I don’t know how to put those on a scale, exactly.)
In any case, realistically, I don’t think we’re looking at a serious possibility of IFDB adding a whole new field where people can rate how dark a game is on a scale of 1 to 5, so I’m not sure whether it’s worth spending all that much time hashing out the nitty-gritty details of how one would work. The benefit of the freeform tagging that we were originally discussing is that it just uses a feature the site already has.
It’s possible to use tags that are distinctive to context by making them multi-word. For example, instead of just “buzzkill”, you could use “Ondricek Vibe Scale:buzzkill”.
I could see having some kind of prefix like that to explain a tag, yeah. I wonder if it is possible to use a “:” in a tag, or if that would interfere with the search syntax.
In my recent tagging adventures, I’ve noticed a few existing mood tags (overall they seem quite rare). The two I’ve seen are peaceful and grim, although neither has been applied to many games.
I added some at the beginning because I thought they might help the automatic recommender thing, but then it seemed like that wasn’t definitely going to happen, and I haven’t been doing much tagging since.