Tags & you, finding games on the wiki

General Discussion
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What am I getting myself into…
the following might be a bit of a messy explaination, I’m tired, heading to bed, but if it can sit here an extra few hours for people to react to before I try to work with it tomorrow, that can only be great. might read over and re-word some things tomorrow. bear with me.
with that out of the way:

As the wiki is still being set up, and I’m taking a tiny break, I’ve begun to wonder about tagging.

Right now, on the forum, there are already quite a few tags, and I already don’t know which ones to pick half the time.
Now, I’m wanting to look at games, figure out how to exactly tag them, and do them justice on the wiki.

Thus, I was wondering what tags people generally look for, and what they hope to find, or expect to find, and what they are still missing.
Including, but not limited to:

  1. how would you define the tag? - an “obvious” definition to you might be less obvious for some others
  2. how much of said tag should be in a game? - a single mention in a large game might not be enough

Unless I’m really, really bad at searching, I just felt like we didn’t really have general… definitions. And while a lot of tags to kind of speak for themselves, or can technically be looked up and taken as a “close enough” I do think setting a few pointers on what people really look for, and thus what tags we should really take into consideration when… well, tagging, could be nice.
I also want to mention the wiki allows for a bit of extra customization. (I say a “bit”, but really, sky’s the limit)
So what things would you add to tagging in general, and how would it affect your search?
I was personally already thinking of tagging tags as minor/normal/major (not 100% worked out, but in a nutshell:)

  • Big game, single mention? - Minor
  • Small game, single mention? - Possibly just normal (2 minute game 1 mention stuff)
  • Occasional mention? - Normal
  • Core of the game loop? - Definitely Major

Adding those should, I think, already add some depth.

And what tags are you missing or hoping to see? there might be some games out there already, and if I got some extra things to look out for? All here for it.
With that, can someone here explain me when I should tag with “anthro” and when with “furry”? surely here someone has something to say about that one…

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Okay, so - going from the major sites I know which have more comprehensive tagging? Here are your big three:
1.) Engine - You’ve got the individual wiki pages made so that the engine type is mentioned, but no ability to sort by that. Some people don’t like RPGMaker games, some people hate Twine, that’s going to be something people want to use to search even if only to avoid things they dislike.
2.) Commonly-Disliked Content - Incest, hard vore, popping, NTR, that sort of thing. If it’s there (and especially if it’s unavoidable), it needs to be tagged so that people can be aware of it and you won’t have complaints of getting “jump scared” by something undesirable. Think of the stuff that tends to get a “Beware, this contains…” preface and go from there.
3.) AI Content - This falls into the same general idea as point two. People want to know if AI-generated content is in a game so they can avoid it.

Basically, your first focus on tags should be things that will cause people to skip over a game or get upset if they encounter it unexpectedly. That establishes a baseline state people won’t actively complain about (too much - there will always be some gripes). You can get more nuanced from there, but that handles a lot of what people use the tags for right now (basically “content warnings”).

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There is no clear answer on this, really. Lots of different takes, going way back. Better for you to just pick one of the established definitions and stick with consistency that way versus trying to find a “correct” answer.

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I like the Minor, Normal, Major system. There’s so much variety in a lot of games that I feel that noting the frequency of stuff is a great idea. Then for the game side, the engine and main gameplay system is probably fine. I doubt we need to micro organize every aspect of the game.

The other things that immediately comes to mind is the setting and tone. Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Modern, and also things like Comedic, Realistic (and also realistic gain), Dark. I think these factor a lot into what people like, so they should be categorized. Also maybe the art style. 3D, 2D, Pixel, Anime, Cartoon.

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Systems like this are a hobby of mine so I wrote a lot, lol. The short version is: Look at how tagging and tag-defining works on Archive of Our Own and VNDB, pick one or two of the most essential features, and start with that. Work with a small group that cares and can get stuff done. Be ready to adjust as the situation adjusts. Have fun and don’t get burned out!

many words wow

Designing tagging systems is tough. If you can, you want to leave yourself (or someone who comes after you) room to change the design later. I don’t know how to do that though. Three systems that might make sense to look at for ideas:

Danbooru (an anime image board) goes all-out on defining and refining tags. Pick a few tags and check out the history of the tag definition page, and search the forum for that tag. What you’ll find is serious thought on what exactly qualifies as x, and efforts to re-tag images to fit. Of course, images are a lot “smaller” than games, so some things just won’t be the same.

F95Zone is a porn games piracy site. Its general vibe is pretty incompatible with Weight Gaming, but it has almost exactly the same goals tagging-wise. It would be worthwhile to browse their list of tags (and popular user requests for tags! Mods are too slow to add them), and see what to copy. Definitions are looser than Danbooru’s for sure, but generally the core of a tag is the appeal or anti-appeal of it. “Will people who like x like the x in this game?” They tend to leave more subtle/subjective stuff to recommendation threads, which works better on a forum than a wiki.

Archive of Our Own is a fanfiction site. Their tag system is noted for being extremely flexible - users can put pretty much any text on a story as a tag, and it will show up in searches. For common synonyms, a smaller class of “tag gardeners” will pick a winner and silently convert one word/spelling to the other. This lets the user search for broader, more standard tags if they’re willing to cast a wide net and let sorting or chance guide what exactly they’ll get, or pick more specific tags if they know exactly what they’re after. I believe readers don’t tag; authors do, which gives you a less objective view, but more of a view of what the author was going for.

The Visual Novel Database is, well, that. Everything else I’ve mentioned only tags presence/abscence, but VNDB lets users rate tags’ prominence in the work on a five-point scale and assigns the tag the average or something. It shows most-prominent tags first and in larger font.

Some things to keep in mind about any system with a bunch of volunteer user input:

  • The more effort required, the fewer people will do it, and vice versa. Every step or bit of actual thought added means fewer people make through the process, so whatever’s most important, make it easy and steer towards people doing it first. Some things will be nice-to-haves, but so much not worth the effort that it’s better not to allow them for simplicity’s sake.
  • Most people want some sort of a general quality rating to sort by. Yes, tastes vary, but that’s what tags are for. The main drawbacks of quality rating are raters’ desire to vote more than once (this destroys the usefulness of the rating) and maybe creators’ hurt feelings at low ratings. I know there are some ways Weight Gaming tends to “favor” creators over fans, and that seems to be working out, but I think letting the wiki have a quality score would still be the right tradeoff.
  • Games have updates, and those may change the correct tagging. More popular games should organically get their tags updated well, but it might be good to tack how many updates it’s been since a game has had its tags looked at.
  • Pretty much no matter what, you’re going to have “tiers” of taggers:
    • The lowest tier never tags, but they read them, and there will be more of them than the rest combined, so the name of a tag should maek sense and sound like what it means.
    • The next-lowest tier tags, but only on their favorite games or when they encounter a strong yuck that was untagged. That’s important!
    • Next are “workhorse taggers”. For whatever reason they want to add as many tags as possible. You want systems to help them do their magic and correct them when they slip up.
    • Finally there are tag definers or gardeners. If tags have explicit definitions, they will have final say on those, and be the ones who check the workhorses’ work. They are the tier most likely to be or work closely with mods/admins.

Sooner or later there will be tag edits wars and tag vandals. I think handling those how wikis do (reversions, temp-bans, protecting pages) should work well.

My suggestion is start with a short list of turn-offs and turn-ons, and an indication of length (in hours). Make a place for people who care about this to talk it out and get on the same page. Work on a way for users to rate games without gaming the system too hard and add that next, then set up a system to propose and add new tags and refine/adjust the definitions of new ones.

One personal request: I want a tag for meanness and harder teasing! Basically real characters (not anonymous crowd people) demeaning other characters or questioning their worth because of their weight etc.

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Very surprised that Gender hasn’t come up yet. This was a problem raised by the men-loving community here in the early tagging discussion. God help you if you want non-binary characters.

Added wrinkle: some designers have used the “male” tag here to mean a skinny, non-gaining male protagonist, which muddies the meaning of the tag. Things are a bit better now with the “male-protagonist” and “female-protagonist” tags, but something less ambiguous at the start would be ideal

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First of all, thank you all for giving your insights!

I’ve taken the day to process all that’s been said, looking into some of the sites @BadIdea4 mentioned (Thank you again) and thinking about how I can best give this shape right now.

I’ll feel like I just need to start making some progress on these pages, and thus I will. I’ll be taking into account as much as I can when it comes to strong likes, strong dislikes, and general tags that really jump out.
If I miss a tag or two, I’m sure it’ll appear in another game at some point in a way that makes me think “Hold up, didn’t x have this as well?” and come back to them as they come.

If anyone really misses a tag, I’m sure we’ll hear about it eventually, but having that base is the most important right now. I’ve already accepted that striving for day 1 perfection is gonna burn me out before reaching the 10th game.

I’ll also be looking into the possibilities of pages outside of the normal games, for the sake of filtering, finding, defining and all that neat stuff. But that’s a nice later addition.

It’ll be an adventure, that’s for sure.
and I never thought I’d have such a good time on it as well.
See you guys again when I’ve made some progress :heart:
and if you want to check out progress (since I’m doing this on a live wiki) just head to the Games | Weight Gaming Community Wiki and click the top game(s), I’ll be working from there, top to bottom.

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