Games Categories

[Enrico Zini]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 12:47:37PM +0000, Anton Piatek wrote:

> Categorising anything can be really hard, and games are no exception.
> You think it is easy - RPG, RTS, FPS... etc. But then you get games
> that span sevetal categories...
> The question is, what categories are essential? Minor categories are
> useless as they are too fine, but we should think about what top level
> categories there are, then break them down into sub-categories.

I suggest to start to work from the tags in the game facet in debtags:

  game::TODO - Need an extra tag
  game::adventure - Adventure games
  game::arcade - Action and arcade games
  game::board - Board games
  game::board:chess - Chess Games
  game::card - Card games
  game::demos - Demo programs
  game::mud - MUDs, MOOs, and other multiplayer RPGs
  game::platform - Platform games
  game::puzzle - Puzzle games
  game::rpg - Role-playing and adventure games
  game::rpg:rogue - Rogue-Like RPG games (Nethack, Angband etc.)
  game::simulation - Simulation games
  game::strategy - Strategy games
  game::tetris - Tetris-like games
  game::toys - Toy and Gimmick
  game::typing - Typing tutor programs

Debtags allows multiple categories, so a game which is more things at
the same time can get all of them.

Multiple categories happen also among different facets, so for example
the game facet can be crossed with the interface facet to tell terminal
games from X games, and the 'role' facet can be used to tell real game
packages from their related data packages (like for example
wesnoth-data).

When a game appears that cannot be made to fit in an existing tag, one
can tag it game::TODO and see how to improve the category system.
There's also a proposal for improvement already:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/2005-November/001110.html

Three example searches can show that we're almost there, but a bit of
work still needs to be done:

  debtags search 'game::arcade && role::sw:application'
  debtags search 'game::arcade && role::sw:amusement'
  debtags search 'game::arcade && ! role::aux:*'

Namely:

 - See if game::arcade is a category too broad
 - Check if a game is 'application' or 'amusement', and add the missing
   role tags
 - Add the missing role::aux:* tags to the various *-data, *-images,
   *-sounds... packages


Besides improvements, I think that debtags already gives a pretty good
base to start implementing user oriented cool stuff right now.

For example, IMO we miss a neat game launcher, like a simple interface
(think the game launchers in the inflight entertainment systems in
intercontinental flights) to show all installed games, organised by
category, with a small description and why not a thumnail image (taken
from a standard file in /usr/share/doc/game, maybe?).


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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