up vote 11 down vote favorite
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We've discussed this before, but I think it's time to put the final nail in the coffin of Game Recommendation questions.

Take a look at the tag. The most recent stuff is first. Look for the items marked [closed]. You can see that all recent ones have been closed. Since August, none have survived. The recent open questions tagged with recommendations should probably be retagged, as they are using the term "recommendations" in a different way.

There hasn't been a lot of pushback during this time despite what some would surely call heavy-handed moderation. The big question is "How is our traffic?" Is the site growing?

YES

Traffic doubled from 9/1 to mid December. Christmas bumped us up again, we are now running at 3x of September's rate. I don't think we'll hold onto all of that bump in the short term, but Christmas did introduce a good number of people to the site for sure!

Board & Card Games is currently the fourth most traffic'd StackExchange Beta site! and is getting more traffic than two previously launched sites. This has been a great few months and I don't want to lose the progress.

While I wouldn't state that the rec game policy change is solely responsible, I believe it is a big part. Now I think we should formalize it. Update the FAQ, close the rest and move forward.

Why aren't Game Recommendation questions desirable for a Q and A site?

They seem so harmless, people love them, everybody can participate, let's enjoy them, right? They're awesome questions .... for a forum.

This is a Q & A site, Real Questions have Answers! Game Recommendation questions are asking for individual items or games, not really answers. People can earn a lot of rep just by being the first to mention a popular game. After all Dominion is probably a great answer for most any question that starts with "What's a good game for ...?" Folks then vote for the answer which says Dominion because they know it and agree that it's a good game for the purpose. There doesn't need to be any substance to the answer. Nothing is learned, no experience needs to be shared.

Votes should indicate quality.

Too many answers

It doesn't take an expert to recommend a game, anyone can do it. And will. Game rec questions can quickly grow to many answers. After a certain point, any new answer has virtually no shot at rising above the existing answers no matter how good it is. We can't expect folks to pick out the diamond in the rough when it's the 15th answer on a page. A great question will have upwards of 5 answers that we can evaluate and vote between.

They attract more recommendation questions

When people see these questions they think that they are allowed and acceptable here. We can't really fault them for this. Let's clean things up so that we avoid that confusion.

If you've read this far, thank you for your attention! I should note that we would be far from the only StackExchange site to make this decision. Sites that I know of that prohibit shopping or game-req questions include.

  • SuperUser
  • Gaming
  • SciFi
  • Fitness & Nutrition
  • Andriod
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In the case of this particular question, which is so specific I can't imagine that there are many answers--but I'm sure there are some--would it work if instead of asking for recommendations it asked simply if any other games exist meeting this criteria? – shujaa Jan 5 '12 at 19:36
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@shujaa - for me the answer would be no. I imagine the answer for any reasonable set of criteria is "Yes there is such a game" There's a ton of games out there! Next someone will say, "don't forget YYY, also ZZZ is close - you should try that". I see recommendations as a slippery slope. By far the easiest line to draw is "No recommendations" Once you put some exceptions in there, the line gets blurry and arguments will ensue and we end up right back where we started. – Pat Ludwig♦ Jan 5 '12 at 20:13
You've got me pretty well convinced. Related: do you know if there's a way to withdraw a vote to re-open? – shujaa Jan 5 '12 at 20:27
@shujaa - not that I'm aware of, but they do expire (like close votes) after 4 days or so. – Pat Ludwig♦ Jan 5 '12 at 20:29
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I think we're looking at the wrong aspect here. Any question that solicits too many answers is because it's too general. We should close questions that are too general, which would include many rec questions. However, consider this counter-example: "What board games can be played and enjoyed with both my seeing children and my blind son?" I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there may be some. The specificity of this question is what should allow it to survive. – Neal Tibrewala Jan 7 '12 at 20:46
@NealTibrewala - assume there is one game that meets the criteria. If there is one, there is probably more. How do people rank the answers at that point? Votes should indicate the quality of the answer, not be a popularity contest for games. Questions where every answer is equally valid is not valid per our FAQ. – Pat Ludwig♦ Jan 7 '12 at 21:03
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@NealTibrewala - a better question would be along the lines of "How can I play games with both my seeing children and blind son?" Then (hopefully) you'd get answers from people who have gone through that situation and can give you some solid advice - including games that they were able to play with both kids. Maybe a few commenters would chime in with "Yes, I agree with this answer, we did the same things but also with game XXX, XXX". Same basic set of games from both questions, but the addition of the advice and tips makes all the difference – Pat Ludwig♦ Jan 7 '12 at 21:07

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

I think they should be banned, mostly for the reasons you cite. I think we've gone through a similar situation on Gaming, as you can see in the FAQ entry there, with a longer explanation here.

It's very difficult to get a recommendation question to work in this format, and even if we manage to get one that does work, it then leads to a series of closed questions, frustrated users, and "Why was my X closed when Y is open?" questions on meta. Of course we'll get that to some degree with any type of question, simply because we're no different than any other online community in certain respects: we have standards which we expect all users to follow, and all internet sites experience a sort of entropy, in that their content will naturally tend to degrade over time, requiring constant effort to keep up quality.

It's certainly worthwhile to do that for cases where it's the question itself that needs help, but when the topic is also a problem area, we can end up spending a significant amount of mod and user time just to end up with well-written questions that still don't fit the Stack Exchange format. We can spend a lot of time talking about the differences between "what games are like X" and "what is the best game like X", for example, but that won't change the point of the question: tell me about a game like X.

And it's not as though we don't have a place where those questions can be asked. It's possible to have forum-like discussions in chat, and honestly, I think that's the best place for game-rec questions anyway. The best recommendations, in my opinion, come from people who a) know you well or b) know the type of game you're looking for well. Those attributes can be hard to identify in a Q&A format ... but they can be teased out with the back-and-forth nature of chat. (We also avoid the additional problem of extended discussion in comments: another area where it's hard to allow exceptions, because otherwise we spend a lot of time explaining the difference between an exception and a particular case.)

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+1 - Thanks for linking the discussion on video games - I find the logic there hard to argue with, and I don't see any distinction with our situation here either. – ire_and_curses♦ Jan 6 '12 at 3:44
up vote -2 down vote

This is what killed the site for me. Used to love to come here for recommendations. Now, I hardly log on.

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it is unfortunate that SE's Q&A format isn't designed to handle game recommendation questions. BGG is better suited for that, and this site is better suited for rules clairification. – user1873 Jan 26 at 14:05

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