jacobkosh
So if you're like me, you like to browse the campaigns here on Obsidian Portal, right? I know I do. And I usually like to browse looking for a specific genre - like when i started my current superhero game ( http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/infinitylegion/ ) I went around looking for all the other superhero games here to get ideas for how to structure my pages and also just for the fun of seeing what other people are doing.
I'm sure you can see the problem with this: to find superhero games, I would need to open browser tabs to show me the lists of games in Mutants & Masterminds, Champions/HERO, ICONS, Villains & Vigilantes, Truth and Justice, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, and of course look through the GURPS list to find any GURPS Supers games that happened to be hiding in the haystack. And, of course, those won't just return superhero games; one of the first results in Mutants & Masterminds is a Mass Effect game!
It seems like a reasonable way to help this would be to add a simple genre category to the main campaign information, like the drop-down menu we pick our game system in. Even some very basic categories like fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, crime, war, superhero, western, historical, and cartoon would, I imagine, cover the vast vast majority of campaigns just fine. Prominently feature this somewhere on the front page and it would make it hugely easier and more fun to find exactly what I need.
I have no idea how easy or hard this would be to do - for instance, would tags be more feasible? Less? I've got no clue. All I can say is that whatever work you guys put into this would pay huge dividends in terms of the user experience for people coming in off the front page.
Comments
We already have tags used in various parts of campaign sites - but not for campaigns themselves, that would be an easy extension (IMHO). We don't have a folksonomy as such yet, or descriptions of what tags mean (like Delicious) nor do we have any kind of hierarchy for tagging / taxonomy.
Even within systems that aren't setting independent (such as Hero System, Fudge, etc) - there are sub-genres. D&D can be high or low fantasy for example. Superhero systems could be four colour, dark, silver age, etc..
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
Tagging is already in place it wouldn't take much effort to turn it into a folksonomy.
Genres have never been in any kind of authority- libraries differ from each other, almost to as much an extent as bookstores and videostores do. If you want to enforce a vocabulary to make it easy to search through - then just harvest the current genres mentioned on "TV Tropes wiki":http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Genres
Make them selectable in a dropdown, but leave a space for "or enter your own".