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A recent question about Magic was tagged with both and . I definitely understand the first tag, but I wonder if the second one is appropriate on a game-specific question. In a more general sense, I'm asking about when genre tags should be used.

To me, a genre tag should be used only for questions that apply to multiple games in a genre or to the genre as a whole. This question is a good example:

Multi-Game Deck Building Tool

Adding the genre tag to questions about a specific game doesn't seem to be helpful: of course every question about Magic is about a trading-card game. In the past, that seems to have been the consensus ... only nine questions are tagged with trading-card-game, and only seven of those are specific to Magic (one more is specific to Pokémon), a very small subset of the total Magic pool.

It's simple enough to edit out of the game-specific questions, but I thought it would be better to ask first to see if the community feels it's necessary or even desired.

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and are both banned, should be as well.

Big overreaching tags don't serve a good useful purpose and allow people to pick them instead of thinking a bit to come up with more precise tags.

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  • I have to agree with Pat here. This tag overreaches. What's actually called for is a better tag for the deck building tool question... card-game-tools? It's already tagged 'software', but I think something more specific might be good. – Tynam Nov 29 '11 at 13:03
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Based on our experience at the Gaming stack exchange site, I would recommend against it. It isn't helpful, and done consistently will actually cause problems with how questions are displayed (since the most popular tag is appended to the question title, and you want this to be the game name).

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Good question. I'd had the same thought when I edited that question, but when I browsed the questions already tagged , it wasn't clear to me what the tag meant, so I didn't feel justified taking a positive action against it.

I agree that the tag seems pointless when the question is not general, but specific to a given game. I'd like a clearer idea of what it is for, though. For example, are all the existing questions with this tag good examples of its use?

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    I think there is only one good example of it, the one I linked above: it is looking for an app that works for multiple games, not just Magic. – Dave DuPlantis Nov 19 '11 at 19:32

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