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Steam Labs' new experiment tries to solve the tagging problemWhat’s in a tag?
What’s in a tag?
Valve wrotea ton of wordson the subject today as they’re wont to do but really it all boils down to this: users and developers both get to assign tags to games but nobody can ever agree on an exhaustively correct list when there are so many redundant tags in Steam’s system. Lots of games are tagged as “RTS” but not all of those are also tagged with “Real-time” and “Strategy.” Steam now knows that if you ask for “Action-Adventure” you probably also want to see anything which is tagged with both “Action” and “Adventure”.
Valve say it most succinctly with a baked goods metaphor: “when you ask for peanut-butter flavored snacks, we don’t forget to include peanut-butter-and-chocolate cookies (but rest assured, we won’t return any chocolate snacks that don’t also have peanut-butter).”
It seems like sort of a bandage over the gaping wound of ineffective human communication and mutually-agreed-upon categories but I suppose Valve can’t invent the cure for that. They say this is just the first step in improving their tag system and they’ll be monitoring results before they begin combining it with other Steam discovery tools like browsing and recommendations.
Look, I just want to find more games likeStardew Valley. As it is, I run several different searches with various combinations of “casual,” “farming sim,” and “life sim.”
You can find the new tagging experiment in theSteam Labssection of Steam.
