How many game identification questions would constitute a problem?

Question

I was surprised to see some video game identification questions here, as they don't seem to fit the types of questions I'm used to seeing here that have been interesting and edifying. I checked and found a meta post about game identification:

https://retrocomputing.meta.stackexchange.com/a/779/337

The highest voted answer there includes the following point:

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.

Will it be clear when we are "experiencing the problems"? Or is it possible that game identification questions will start to clutter up the Stack before they can be managed?

Relevant statistic: there are currently 115 questions with the identify-this-game tag.

Answer 1

We have, at the time of writing, 5,440 questions, so roughly 1 in 50 has identify-this-game.

I don't see that as cluttering the site too heavily.

Sites that have implemented bans, e.g. TV&Movies, have had trouble with much higher percentages of their questions being identification. Also with many of those questions giving almost no information on which to base an identification.

Even if you include identify-this-computer, identify-this-card, identify-this-peripheral and identify-this-computer, I don't believe we are experiencing problems.

It is worth revisiting the counts every now and again, but I would say we are OK at the moment.

Don't forget, you can always set these as ignored tags.

Answer 2

My uninterest in these things is that they seem to be essentially close-ended even when successfully answered.

Q: I played this game that (blah blah)

A: It was called (blah blah)

But then what? The questioner got an answer, so I suppose that the ostensible role of the site is fulfilled. But there's no interesting discussion; the questioner is not actually 'doing' retrocomputing, and there's no broader context.

I agree that some actual computer-related questions might also be seen in this light, but for me at least, the discussion is the point. The questioner there usually includes some details (i.e., has done research) which interested parties can follow up on. The best questions are educational, in a way that the guessing-game of 'what game am I thinking of' is generally not.

Answer 3

Of the 116 identify-this-game questions we have open, 12 have no answers and 2 more have no upvoted or accepted answers. The remaining 102 have generated answers that have either been accepted or upvoted.

So it seems we have relatively low number of questions, and they are overwhelmingly receiving constructive responses.