Sorry again for the slow response/ I wanted to actually sit with this one rather than reply fast and let it go. Plus last days were crazy.
Thank you for this, genuinely. The Darkest Dungeon vs Darkest Dungeon II tag table is a great example and it lands the point hard that DD2 isn’t fast, isn’t casual, isn’t really “replayable” in the way that word usually gets used, and no amount of automatic tag-scraping would have caught that nuance. I also appreciate the links, and the honesty about the “dread/strategic/investment vs fast/replayable/casual” framing and you’re right that it was closer to “things I assumed were opposites” than an actual accurate read of DD2, and calling that out is fair.
The bigger point you’re making is that tags are noisy because people disagree on both what a tag means and how much it matters, and that this problem exists whether you’re picking the tags or trying to derive a signal from them is one I don’t think I can argue with. And the industry research angle is well taken too. So if 30 years of classification/matching work already exists, trying to reinvent that from scratch with scraped tags is a bad bet, and I’d rather know what’s already been tried and failed than repeat it blind.
This actually pushed me to dig more into it rather than just take the mood/tag approach at face value so thank you for that, even indirectly.
It also gave me an idea, though it’s a different angle than “classify the feeling correctly.” If the real problem is that no automatic system can honestly say “this game invokes dread” or “this one is casual” because that’s a subjective judgment, not a fact, then maybe the answer isn’t to try to nail that judgment algorithmically at all. Instead I can surface the actual differences between two games side by side (whatever’s genuinely knowable, pace, length, structure, mechanics, permadeath or not and etc.) and let the player read that and decide for themselves what it means to them, rather than the site pretending to have resolved something as personal as “does this feel like dread or does it feel like a casual run.”
It’s a good idea, but it needs real thought before I’d build it. Mainly figuring out what data is actually trustworthy enough to put in front of someone that way, versus what’s just tags with the same noise problem you described. But the core of it is don’t claim the verdict, show the differences, let the player decide on how it feels like the right instinct, and it’s one I want to explore properly rather than rush.
More broadly this whole exchange gave me both ideas and motivation to keep pushing on this. I’ve genuinely enjoyed the back and forth with people here. It’s kind of rare to get responses where people actually think it through before replying, and it shows in everything you’ve written.
Thanks a lot man! If you ever want to share more ideas as this develops, or just see how it grows over time, I’ve got a Discord happy to have you there if that’s easier than threads like this one.