Does Retrocomputing want to be featured as a place to go for identifying retro games on Arqade?

Question

Hello Retrocomputing enthusiasts, I'm Robotnik, an Arqade (Gaming SE) moderator.

Arqade's community is currently in a bit of a re-invigoration effort, and a part of that is improving our FAQs and help articles to better help users get answers to their questions.

We're currently in the process of building an FAQ about places to go for 'Identify this game' questions (the ones based only on the asker's description of the game, which are off-topic on Arqade). Here's the FAQ in question:

My game identification question was closed as off-topic. Where can I ask for help instead?

I know that Retrocomputing supports some level of game identification, for older games on retro computers, arcade machines, and retro consoles. My questions are:

• What is allowed vs not allowed with regards to 'Identify this' questions on Retrocomputing?
• Would you like to be featured on Arqade's FAQ? - and if so:
• Do you have guidelines that potential askers should take note of before asking 'Identify This Game' questions here?

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As requested for context, here's a bit of an overview of Game Identification on Arqade, what we support, and why.

What does Arqade support?

Identify This Game (in all forms) used to be allowed on Arqade. However, a distinction was made to separate two types of 'Game Identification':

1. The asker remembers a game, and describes it from their memory.
2. The asker sees a game (such as in a TV show, or news article etc), and can provide some sort of evidence to point to.

The first type of question was made off-topic. Why? Here are some of the commonly cited reasons:

• New users would disappear after asking
  _{We call this a 'drive-by' user.}
• Compounding the above: only the asker could definitively say an answer was correct
  _{So a lot of our questions were left hanging in limbo}
• Community voting on answers was mostly meaningless
  _{In cases where multiple answers were provided, the community would tend to vote based on game popularity rather than 'correctness'.}
• Plus they were hard to answer because a lot of asker's memories were inaccurate
  _{Askers have misremembered key information like the platform, characters, colours, and even conflated features from two or more games.}

On the other hand, the second type of question remained on-topic for us. Here's why:

• No reliance on the asker sticking around or providing more information
• Other community members could determine if an answer was correct (and vote accordingly)
• No reliance on imperfect memories - there's no room for interpretation when pointing to an episode of breaking bad and asking what game a character is playing.

This is just a summary of a very hotly contested discussion that spans many meta discussions and chat histories. If you're interested in the full story, here's our game identification tag on meta, and some highlights include this discussion about allowing evidence-based identification, and our FAQ Post: What are the requirements for asking a game identification question?

Why did we face these problems?

Personally I think it's a number of different factors: an overwhelming number of ITG questions being asked, the (generally younger) demographic the site caters to, even the feature-set of Stack Exchange at the time the discussions were happening. We faced a large swathe of low quality questions from drive-by users, and we lacked stuff like custom close reasons and review queues which have made site curation a lot easier over the years.

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So what's in it for Retrocomputing?

Saying all the above, you'd think that ITG on Arqade was all bad, which wasn't the case. The reason that banning memory-based identifications was so controversial on Arqade, is that there were a lot of gems hidden among the muck. The ITG questions where users interacted with us and had a vested interest in finding an answer, were the good, well maintained and well received ones.

Those are the users we're trying to cater to with our new FAQ; where Retrocomputing could be of help to people. After all - the sort of people that take the time to read our FAQ are the users that ask the 'good' types of ITG, and it's those people we'd like to send your way. What do you think?

Answer 1

Arqade should not suggest Retrocomputing as a good place for game identification requests.

For a long time Arqade has had issues with game identification requests. I don't know if your policy now is really the best one (you may not even know!), but what you've settled on is based on long experience with actual problems raised by these requests, trying various strategies to deal with those, and analyzing their upsides and downsides.

Relevant to this are three ways that Retrocomputing is similar to and different from Arqade:

1. We are both StackExchange sites, and thus have many of the same issues with on-topic questions, same differences as compared to other Internet sites, and so on.

2. Your user base is much larger than ours (about ten times the size when counting only users with 200+ rep), but still small enough that it's Retrocomputing may well grow to your size over time. Thus, while we may not have some of the quantity issues you now have, we should be prepared for them to arise and make use of knowledge you've gained from dealing with these.

3. "Knowledge of games" is basically the entire topic of Arqade, whereas it's only a small (though popular!) part of the wide domain of Retrocomputing.

4. A larger percentage of our direct source material has been lost or is hard to access simply due to its age.

Based on the information you've provided, and particularly reading through this thread, it seems to me that you've decided that Arqade is not really a good place to be asking questions where the questioner is giving evidence based only on memory and cannot point to any concrete documentation of the thing he's asking about. I think that this probably extends to SEs generally. ("The memories of the asker are not valid source material for identification questions" particularly resonated with me, because I—and I think all of us—have plenty of experience with how fallable memory can be. Here we certainly value answers pointing to historical sources much more than answers only from memory.)

Now we haven't seen the problems you've seen (or at least not to the extent you've seen them), but I believe that the reasons for this are mostly situational rather than a property of any core difference between Arqade and Retrocomputing. First, being one tenth your size, it seems logical we're only going to have one tenth the pain generated by certain kinds of questions. Second, we tend to be a bit more forgiving about relying on memory when actual source material can't be found simply due to the source material being harder (or impossible) to access.

Neither of these preclude the problems you have had from arising here. That tells me we should start considering the problems you've seen and the solutions you've come up with. However, these solutions also have their downsides due to essential differences between our two SEs; in particular, acquiring documentation (such as a screenshot of a game) can be much more difficult for questions in our area. (Screenshots of games from the Apple I are not exactly as common as screenshots from modern games.)

So my proposal is as follows:

1. We should not at this time introduce the kind of restrictions on questions that Arqade has because we're not (yet) experiencing the problems those were meant to solve, and so there's no point in paying the cost of those restrictions.
2. We should keep in mind the problems that Arqade has experienced and try to prepare plans for dealing with them should they arise here.
3. We should certainly not send to Retrocomputing people with gaming questions unsuitable for Arqade because of Arqade's carefully-developed policies. That's likely just to bring to Retrocomputing the same problems Arqade has had.

Answer 2

There is a long-standing maxim regarding question migration. "Don't migrate crap". That would apply in this case, particularly your first, 'I remember...', group of questions.

Identification questions are contentious on SE sites, look at the soul searching on TV&M. But I think they can be useful. As you say, we already have several well-received examples.

Just bear in mind what constitutes retro.

I would vote yes, let your members know of us. I don't think we would we swamped with a flood of such questions.

Answer 3

I am not, in principle, opposed to ITG questions on this site provided they are about retro games. I don't agree that a question is bad just because it's hard to answer definitively. I do not think such questions should be off topic for this site.

However, I do have reservations with another Stack Exchange site advertising this one as being able to answer the ITG questions, particularly when that site has much higher traffic. Firstly, I think we might get swamped with ITG questions. Secondly, Arquade is a stack exchange site for asking questions about gaming. It's the obvious place to ask an ITG question. Frankly, I think ITG questions are legitimate questions about games and I don't know why you want to ban them just because they are a bit hard to answer.

So my vote would be no, please do not advertise this site as a good place to ask ITG questions just because you on the correct site to ask them don't like them.

Answer 4

While I do agree with most that has been said by Curt - in both of his answers (and more so on the first), I would like to grind it down to a major single point:

RC.SE is not about games - but games are a part of RC.SE

I always had considered Arqade the main forum for everything game related. And ITG questions are for sure more suited there - unless there's something very specific to make RC.SE the first choice (can't think of any right now). Since our scope is rather wide, IDG question may work and be received quite well, but it might as well be problematic. Games are not anything we do now or ever will focus on. As a result I would prefer that

RC.SE shold not named as a potential forum for ITG questions

Answer 5

(What I've suggested in this answer pretty much can't be done, given Arqade's policies. I'm leaving this here for a moment for historical purposes, but it should be deleted whenever the time seems right.)

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This is just my personal opinion as of the time of posting. It should be taken with a grain of salt and attention to this answer's vote count as I'm not actually very familiar with the past history of game identification requests on Retrocomputing SE (beyond reading them on rare occasions) and the problems, if any, they've caused.

Game identification requests should go to Arquade.

Reasons:

1. Games are reguarly re-released on more modern platforms (via both porting and emulation), and so in at least some cases an identification can be made based by someone who's never played the game on a retro platform, or even an emulation of a retro platform. (This doesn't even require having played the game; simple familiarity with the catalogue of Good Old Games may well serve to answer a game identification question.)

2. Games sometimes have sequels that exist only on more modern platforms, and information about the characters, setting or similar things may be identified by someone who's played the sequel but has never played the original.

3. Arquade is a much larger community (roughly ten times the size if we look at relative numbers of users with more than 200 reputation). Further, it's focused strictly on games, as opposed to having many members whose areas of expertise does not include games (such as me). Both these strike me as increasing the chance that someone will get an answer on Arquade that they wouldn't get on Retrocomputing. (That said, I could well be wrong about this; it would be nice to have some actual evidence about this rather than just speculation.)

If this turns out to be agreed upon by both Arquade and Retrocomputing, it would be nice to be able to redirect explicitly in close votes (the Closing » Off-topic » Migration dialogue path). But it seems to me that this also might want to include a link in the commit about how to ask the question in Arquade, since they seem to have fairly different rules about and requirements for questions like this than we do (such as requiring a screenshot or video).