Feature request: let developers choose game category

[bicilotti]

A quick search in the database shows that there are more than one hundred games in the "Newly added games (not yet categorised)".
If I recall correctly, the category is chosen by the panelist, when s/he manages to rate the game. As it stands the backlog for the panelists is huge, there are some uncategorised games from 2009.

I think it would be a great idea to give the game-makers the opportunity to pick the category of their games themselves. That would help the games to be more easily found via the search button (which in turn would lead to more comments/rating) and generally tidy up things without any risk of someone gaming the system.

edit: and since we're here, do we really need the "mags" category? I think it only adds noise, let them be short/non-adventure

[AGA]

I think I meant to do this at some point.  Will do.

[AGA]

Okay, users now have the option to specify their own game lengths on the add and edit pages.  Panel members and staff can still change it if they really want to, but this should at least stop the backlog getting any bigger.

Changing the MAGS ones would be more complicated.  If there are some games in the database with the 'MAGS' ID that may not be adventures, I can't safely set all 'MAGS' IDs to 'Short Game'.

[bicilotti]

Excellent, thank you!

Changing the MAGS ones would be more complicated.  If there are some games in the database with the 'MAGS' ID that may not be adventures, I can't safely set all 'MAGS' IDs to 'Short Game'.

Even though I am convinced on the merit of the change (based on the reason that every sane database table should consist of columns which are orthogonal & related among each other, and that "MAGS" as it is breaks orthogonality and should better be a flag or another column than anything else), it's probably better to wait a bit for some more opinions, as it could be a potentially more controversial change.

Just for the records, going through the MAGS database I only found these games which are tagged as MAGS and are Non-adventures:
Blackmail in Brooklyn
City of Thieves: Rescue Sandy
Dennis Dennis Revolution
Outrage Dreamer Roads 4-3 [MAGS] (debatable)
The Shawshank Redemption

(but are there medium length adventures among MAGS? That would open another can of worms).

[selmiak]

Hubris comes to mind really quick, and there are probably a lot more...

MAGS is its own category, it's a short to medium length game made in a set timeframe (1 month) while short games made for making a game (read: outside of the MAGS competition) that are no longer than 5 or 10 minutes can have production lenghts of 6-12 months or longer thus beeing more polished and tested and all. Having done a MAGS game last month I refuse to open a completed games topic for it until we have polished the game to the point where we can say it is indeed a complete game, well, it is completable but not everything we wanted to put in made it in due to time constraints, but I hope you see where I want to go with this.
I don't mind if an author makes 2 gamedatabase entrys for a mags game and the polished up final outcome that might be categorised as short/medium or even full length title (or even another entry for the (demo of the) totally shinied up commercial rerelease several years later...). From a future gamearchaelogistic standpoint this is even more interesting to see the game evolve...

So letting gamemakers set their own gamelength is good, but just running a replace function on the database to turn MAGS games into short games is not going to work and I think the MAGS category is needed to differentiate. Everyone is free to polish a MAGS entry and add it as a non MAGS game to the database, actually there are no checks in place to submit a mags game as a non mags game, but that's another story.

But the whole idea made me think of another thing: why can't I search the Database for OROW games?
After some cool and some rather confusing titles over the years this deserves a category of its own.

But what would be even more useful than replacing the MAGS category is a short link or popup or tooltip explaining what MAGS games are, when searching the gamesdatabase. People new to AGS will not know what this is. Same for OROW if it should get its own category.

[AGA]

The simple reason is that OROW didn't exist when the database was designed.  If someone can give me a full list of OROW games (ideally IDs, don't care about the names) that are in the database, I could make a new category.

I agree that MAGS does kind of mean something very specific though (like OROW), and should probably stay separate, much as it may clutter things up.  I could put a pop up giving fuller explanation of what every game type means though.

[bicilotti]

Everyone is free to polish a MAGS entry and add it as a non MAGS game to the database, actually there are no checks in place to submit a mags game as a non mags game [...].

This convinced me, I guess it's up to the developer to decide whether to tag it as MAGS or not. For the records, I my idea wasn't to scrap the category altogether, but put it in another column.

AGA, I know this is naive, but what about starting with a select id from someTable where desc like (regexpish thing here with OROW)?

[AGA]

DESC is a MySQL keyword, so that wouldn't work. n00b!!!

Ahem.  Could search the description field to find mentions of OROW or MAGS, yes.  Although then you have to take into account mentions of 'One Room, One Week' and 'One Room One Week' too of course.  Easily done, but I can't guarantee it'd be complete.

[bicilotti]

DESC is a MySQL keyword, so that wouldn't work. n00b!!!

Ahem.  Could search the description field to find mentions of OROW or MAGS, yes.  Although then you have to take into account mentions of 'One Room, One Week' and 'One Room One Week' too of course.  Easily done, but I can't guarantee it'd be complete.

xD Just to have a first draft, then we can check what's missing

[cat]

MAGS and OROW should be separate fields. When I search for "Short Game" I want to get all short games and I don't care if they were MAGS or not. It is nice to see the information (like "commercial game") but IMHO it has nothing to do with game length.

[Peder 🚀]

I feel the whole db could do with an "upgrade", the current system is too custom tailored imo and could do with being much more generic.

With AGSA I'm planning on having a multiple choice genres field, a custom tags field, game length field which is exactly what it says, game length, then a category field (MAGS, OROW, Non-Adventure etc).

This obviously would require some work now that there are so many games in the DB, but since I'm already going to do this with AGSA, I guess when I'm done it would be a great time for me and AGA to discuss ways to integrate AGSA and the AGS site/forums again. AGSA only started out as an idea to give developers a place to host their games for FREE without all those silly "download steps" and ads other free hosting sites use. It's however growing to become much more than that, though I'm still doing it for the community, so for me it only makes sense that one way or another it becomes part of the AGS site/forums. After all it wouldn't make any sense to make it a separate community .

[Ryan Timothy B]

I agree with it being a separate category aside from game length.

Also while we're at it, when I search a game (there are other instances as well) you'll have the text "Full games page entry" directly under the game's title and author. Why not remove that and simply keep the game's name as the link to the game's page? I'm often about to click the title when I notice the text below it, then I wonder if clicking the title is a different link than the "Full games page entry" text (it's not). It's quite redundant.

Also the [br]'s and other formatting stuff appear as text in the condensed description with the search results.  (search for Road Racer if you need to see what I mean)

[AGA]

I feel the whole db could do with an "upgrade", the current system is too custom tailored imo and could do with being much more generic.

When you have 1,000+ games, being generic is not good.  The more information people have to actually find the game they want, the better.  If anything we should have more categories!

[Peder 🚀]

What I was trying to say is that it feels too custom tailored to adventure games (sure it is Adventure Game Studio after all, but there are still plenty of non adventure games that are made with AGS). So yes, more categories, multiple genre selection etc is a way in the right direction!

[selmiak]

Also the [br]'s and other formatting stuff appear as text in the condensed description with the search results.  (search for Road Racer if you need to see what I mean)

I tried it, got nothing when searching for Road Racer, when searching for Road Racer AGS I get the AGSA ranked before the AGS entry but no
 tags. Can you post a screenshot pls?!

What I was trying to say is that it feels too custom tailored to adventure games (sure it is Adventure Game Studio after all, but there are still plenty of non adventure games that are made with AGS). So yes, more categories, multiple genre selection etc is a way in the right direction!

Cool idea, but let's not overdo it and stay more general with genres until there are enough nonadventure games in the database that demnad listings to be more generic

[Stupot]

Why not just have basically the same categories but make them more like 'tags' a la blog posts?  A given game can easily fall into multiple categories.

[selmiak]

The only difference between categories and tags is probaly that tags are just words you write in a form and thus letting you freely invent genres like stealth adventure point and click with some subtle arcade gameplay or escape the room adventure with a twist in first person... that is all funny, but organizing it in a database and delivering fitting search results won't be easy on that. As much as I love freedom and despise authoritarian systems, having predefined genres you just check with checkboxes is so much easier to handle. And as programmers are lazy bastards and I like good search results (who searches for any of the mentioned terms anyways...) predefined genres is the way to go imho.

[Snarky]

The database is much better than it used to be, but the "length" category still conflates some other stuff in there, and the precise things that have/don't have fields feels a little random (you can set whether it's a sci-fi or fantasy setting, and whether it's a fan game, parody or original story, but not whether it's humorous or serious, or whether it's first-person or third-person, just for example). Something more tag-like (and perhaps open-ended) for subject/theme and similar fields would work better, I think.

Anyway, clearly the most important thing is to add an "Oceanspirit Dennis" category (checked yes by default).

[Ryan Timothy B]

Now the game length shows like this (it doesn't wrap properly):

Play length:                MAGS game (monthly AGS
competition entry)


It throws off the neat design of everything. But instead of just making it properly wrap, is there any chance of removing the description and having it only visible with a mouse over?

Also things like Genres, Game Length, etc should be a link to view all games with that type. Eg: Viewing a game with the Comedy genre, clicking that would show a list of all comedy games.

[AGA]

That actually was the plan, but I was too lazy to do it yet.

[Radiant]

MAGS and OROW should be separate fields. When I search for "Short Game" I want to get all short games and I don't care if they were MAGS or not. It is nice to see the information (like "commercial game") but IMHO it has nothing to do with game length.

I agree with that. There are also several games that are both OROW and MAGS, for example. It would be nice if there was also a flag for "MAGS winner" and "OROW winner", in my opinion.

[[delete}]

1+