Tagging games, lots of doubts

[Osoitz -]

Hi everyone,

I recently discovered both debtags and Goplay and I am really excited about
both projects and would like to help tagging games. I already contacted
Miriam about Goplay, but since she is busy these days I'll ask the debtag
related doubts here.

I've seen that the current strategy for tagging games goes in the line of
genres, I am also aware of OpenRating. There are some other game
characteristics that are important too according to the questions one can
find in Linux gaming forums. I would like to think a different approach to
later propose it for inclusion. I'm throwing these doubts here to test my
understanding of debtags and your expectations.

Let's say that I would like to find multi-player games.

This question can be partially answered with the network::client and
network::server tags, but it doesn't cove hotseat games (players share same
computer).

Would tags like game::singleplayer / game::multiplayer /
game::multiplayer:network / game:: multiplayer:hotseat be OK acording to
debtags filosophy?

Do the network::* tags make game::multiplayer:network redundant?

Also, some games are useless without a network connection, as I understand
it debtags say "it _allows_" [playing through network], so how do I kown "it
_needs_ " [a network]? Would that be implicit in the absence of both
game::singleplayer and game::multiplayer:hotseat tags?

On the other hand does it make sense to put at the same level a tag like
game::multiplayer and a tag like game::puzzle? They answer to different
questions, genres would be better under game::genre:* but since debtags only
allows 2 levels (right?) a tag like game::genre:board:chess couldn't exist.
I'm confused.

I see anyway some problems with the current approach even without the
introduction of the word 'genre', to be precise game::fps would belong to
something like game::action:shooter:fps according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres and I agree, for me it makes
little sense to find Openarena both under action games and FPS, since these
answer to the same question and are not mutually exclusive, but that is the
current approach. I am very confused.

To be sincere, I am not a big fan of genres and the idea I have in mind is
that you could find a FPS by the combination of questions like '3d
enviroment', 'subjective camera' and 'the objetive is to kill' which seem
more debtags-friendly, but these real life questions should help me
understand it all better.

Another thing. Apparently only Adept (a KDE package manager) allows using
NOT witg debtags (maybe command line tools too? haven't tested), but neither
debtags-edit nor the WebUI seem to allow that, since these are more or less
the 'official' tools I ask myself if I am not understanding something really
wrong about debtags. Is this just a ToDo feature in the tools or is it a
conceptual decision that I don't get?

Thank you,

Osoitz
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