Rework Genres and Themes
Right now there seems to be some confusion with the available options for Genres and Themes. Some options are missing, others are in Themes whereas they would make more sense in Genres, and yet others are way too broad to be descriptive and informative.
My suggestion is first to determine what is a Genre and what is a Theme, and convey that to all the data contributors. I suggest to define "Genre" as something that indicates HOW the game is played (gameplay rules and elements), and "Theme" as something that indicates WHERE the game is played (setting and lore elements).
Then, with that in the mind, the current available options for Genres and Themes need to be reworked. Here is a link to the table that lists proposed changes to be made to Genres and Themes, with comments and explanations:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KahdN-p1zqaQRCK1W9kwar3IbTBsCVFXbS4rHeiC8yg/edit?usp=sharing
I think the new values would be more universal, better inform IGDB users about the games' contents, and allow more efficient filtering by Genre/Theme.
Hey!
First of all thanks a lot for putting this table together, this for sure will become handy when we research this further.
We’ve been wanting to revamp our Genres/Themes/Keywords for a while, it’s a fairly big undertaking that implies a taxonomy upgrade.
We’ve discussed making use of a sub categories to avoid redundancy and more accuracy for example.
While this isn’t on our radar just yet, i would say it is pretty high up our list of feature upgrade. We’ll keep in touch when we start this project!
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FifthArchitect commented
@IGDB
You have had four. years. This is not a "fairly big undertaking". It is not the responsibility of a cabal of IGDB devs to declare what genres users can and cannot use. This is not a difficult problem to solve. You have the combined tagging power of the internet at your disposal and you're refusing to use it.Moving ALL primary and subgenres and even vague mechanical categories of game into Genres is not an undertaking. It's a simple database commandline edit.
Moving ALL tonal and thematic descriptors to Theme is not an undertaking. It's a simple database commandline edit.
Having Genres in Keywords is not a solution.
Having entries such as Horror and Action be both a Theme and Genre, is not an issue. You have over-complicated and disastrously harmed all downstream UX. Redundancy is not an issue. "Vague" categories are not an issue, and anyone with even a passing familiarity with Wittgenstein should be able to understand that they are USEFUL. You have made it nearly impossible for everyone downstream of your metadata to search for games via genre, due to the simple fact that you are relegating genres to metadata categories that are not Genres.