[Feature Request] Browse Campaigns by Genre

jacobkosh
jacobkosh
edited October 2010 in Feature Requests
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

  • Curufea
    Curufea
    Posts: 161
    As a librarian - I love this idea! More metadata = more findability = way more useful search results = happiness for everyone!

    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..
  • DarkMagus
    DarkMagus
    Posts: 425
    This has been something I have wanted to see change for a while. Browsing through thousands of D&D campaigns (for example) is just not feasible. If we could do something like what you suggested I would have so much more motivation to browse through random campaigns (well not now, but when I get the time...) which is what I think OP is really about, getting your campaign out there for people to read it, else, why do all the work putting it up here and learning textile to make it look nice if only like 4 people ever read it.
  • arsheesh
    arsheesh
    Posts: 850
    I'll throw in my support for this idea as well. I know that I've often used the search bar to try to locate campaigns with specific tags (for instance I once tried to find any campaigns out their tagged with the term "Noir"), and have had only moderate success locating campaigns of interest. It would be nice to see a feature like that suggested by Jacobkosh (by the way, you've got a great campaign there Jacob; I read through your first adventure log some time ago and really liked it).

    Cheers,
    -Arsheesh
  • jacobkosh
    jacobkosh
    Posts: 27
    Thanks, Arsheesh! I was away when you posted on my board and it had been a while when I got back to it so I never had the chance to thank you for your kind words.
  • jacobkosh
    jacobkosh
    Posts: 27
    And guys, thanks for your support with this idea. I thought I might be the crazy guy out on the ledge with this one. :)
  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006
    Yes, I like it. I support this request.

    "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

  • Takissis
    Takissis
    Posts: 37
    Yes, yes, please, yes! :)
  • Poutine_Paladin
    Poutine_Paladin
    Posts: 285
    Then the owners of the campaigns only have to somehow categorize their own work. Haha. Sometimes that could get complicated, I think. Overall, great idea...completely agree with the concept.
  • Curufea
    Curufea
    Posts: 161
    Meh - crowdsource it.
    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".
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