A lot of spam in the discord has led to a discussion on more storygame categories so I made a thread to sift through the shit corgi and malk were throwing out. I also am going to give some opinions and feasible options.
First I would like to say that the most time-proof option, but also the most technologically difficult, is to have dynamic categories; defined by the top 10 or so most popular tags. This will probably never happen but it would allow for the use of tags to automatically sort games instead of hazy grey-area genres. It may also lead to many games being in many of these tag categories, which could be a problem.
Here's some category ideas thrown out. If I missed some, an admin can edit them in here:
- Family Friendly
- Historical
- Puzzles & Games
- Science Fantasy
- Pirates & Zombies
Additions:
Family Friendly looks like a great idea with only one significant member (malk) shooting it down for reasons of "it's retarded."
Historical doesn't really seem like it should be a category to me, but there's desire to split these games from edutainment by Mizal. In tandem with the Puzzles and Games category, this is sought after to lessen and eventually get rid of the Everything Else trash bin.
Puzzles and Games is a category that makes sense as currently gamey games go into either Mystery (which makes no sense) or Everything Else (which is garbage). This category will probably be dominated by Killa and BZ at first, but it would encourage those who may not be so story-savvy and possibly attract more of the parser crowd and other interactive fiction enthusiasts who don't necessarily want to read a novel.
Science Fantasy was suggested in order to break apart the hard science fiction from the lighter sci-fy storygames. It seems like a good idea.
Pirates and Zombies originally a requested pirate category from malk, it was realized that if one combines all the pirate and zombie games together they could easily form their own category. The argument for this one is to free up space for more featured games and greater diversity amongst the other categories.
Renames:
Mystery/Puzzle to Mystery/Thriller; this is a natural course of action as mysteries and puzzle games do not mix and a thriller genre is established in the real world as dealing hand in hand with mysteries. This alone would cause all puzzle games to be moved into Everything Else, which furthers the need for a Puzzles and Games category.
Dark Fantasy to Grimdark; it has come to the attention to many degenerates and non-degenerates alike that Dark Fantasy is a term used elsewhere to describe often taboo erotica. Grimdark is defined as having "tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, or violent." which fits the idea behind the category better.
Fantasy Adventure and Sci-Fi Adventure to Fantasy and Sci-Fi; not everything needs to be an adventure. If combined with the creation of Science Fantasy apart from Science Fiction this distinction will be made even better.
Subtractions:
Everything Else; if we can fit every good game into all above mentioned categories it should empty out everything else - hopefully for good. But there will always be need for a misc category, so perhaps it should stay.
It's of note that I left out joke suggestions like a feet category, barely legal or other pedo categories, a category for retarded/disabled people, and a food based category.
Malk had a good idea.
General discussion about categories without the fast-paced nature of the discord is what this thread is for.