On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 02:47:35PM -0800, Chris Waters wrote:
> I don't think it's a major problem to have some overlap between the
> categories.
Yes. We probably need some way to tell the menu system that several
categories would fit (see wishlist #128763 submitted yesterday against
menu).
> > Board:
> > games with several players, played on a board (possibly only
> > against the computer)
>
> Technically, no computer games are played on a board -- they're played
> on a computer! :-)
Yes :)
But let's consider that many games are played (on a computer) on an
abstraction of what would be a board. I'm not sure how much precise the
definition of a "board game" is, IRL, but it could be applied to our
purpose: a game which would be considered as a board game irl should be
tagged as board game in our classification.
Does this make sense ?
> Nitpicking aside, though, if you really want to clarify things, I
> would say that there are other categories more worthy of attention:
I'd like to rule out some of those:
> "puzzles" vs. "toys"
"toys" are thingies the user can play with, but without any special rule.
That's somewhat the eniglish distinction of "game" vs. "toy" (or at least
the one I see between the french equivalents for these words).
> "arcade" vs. "tetris-like"
Well, I suppose that "tetris-like" was coined to help not to fill "arcade"
too quickly. Perhaps we should make "tetris-like" a sub-menu of "arcade",
or, probably better, add an "arcade" hint to all "tetris-like" items.
Now for the more serious:
> "simulation" vs. "board"
> "strategy" vs. "board"
This is the same problem with "board" vs. "puzzle", and with the definition
of "board". Maybe we should remove "board" as a menu entry, and use it as a
hint instead ?
> "strategy" vs. "simulation"
Yes, usually strategy games are simulations to some extent. We could define
"Games/Simulation" as the simulation games that are not strategy-centered,
and maybe add a "simulation" hint to items in Games/Strategy ?
> But as for the proposal itself, I think there's a danger in over-
> specification of categories here too. If the categories overlap, then
> someone may put a program in a less-than-optimal category, but if the
> categories have fixed and very distinct boundaries, then there may be
> cases where something doesn't fit into *any* category. Which, IMO, is
> a worse result than the status quo.
If an item does not fit in, say, any submenu of "Games", we could allow it
to by right in "Games", until a suitable category is decided upon. That
would even match the behaviour of the hint_optimize algorithm, which acts
that way if a submenu has too many items.
> I do feel
> that if we're going to do something about our categories, it should be
> a little broader in scope.
That's reasonable I think.
> Frankly, I'm more worried about the "arcade" category, which is rather
> over-full on my system.
On mine as well, but I've not yet found a solution, or wishlist would have
been filed already ;)
Regards,
--
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