Sometimes, people come together to do wonderful things. And sometimes, people come together to do terrible, silly things. When it comes to Steam’s new tagging system — which is currently in beta — it’s a mix of both.
Yesterday, Valve introduced “Steam Tags”, a system which lets users label games with a few words or phrases. Most of the tags are the sort of thing you’d expect: Skyrim, for example, is tagged as an “RPG,” and clicking on the RPG tag lets you see other games tagged as RPG, too (clicking on a tag won’t take you to a list of games if there aren’t enough games tagged with a certain word or phrase, though). You can tag stuff nearly anything you want, though only the most popular ones will show up on a game’s page. If a tag is used often enough, you can also browse other games with that same tag.
Not all the tags are as straightforward. Notice something about the leading image in this post, for example? Casual is the last word most people would use to describe Dark Souls! And yet, there it is, currently highlighted as a popular casual game. Trolling is definitely a thing in Steam Tags right now.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the tags, shall we?
Let’s start with the “bad” tag. It does have games notorious for being poor — The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, for example. It’s hard to argue the quality of that game. Gone Home, though? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad!
And yes, there’s a lot of Call of Duty hatred on Steam. These are the tags you’ll find attached to Ghosts:
Dang. Let’s take a closer look at the “garbage” tag, shall we?
Why is Fez on there? What are people saying about Fez, I wonder?
Oh, holy shit. People’s dislike for Phil Fish, creator of Fez, is informing how they tag the games. Yesterday, a few developers on Twitter expressed dissatisfaction with the tagging system, as it would be easy for users to abuse it and potentially harass developers, if not unfairly tag a game. Gone Home would be a prime example, as far as unfair tags go:
It’s not the only one:
Games with anthropomorphic animals, meanwhile, tend to get a lot of furry hatred — see Lugaru HD’s tags to see what I mean:
Remember: this system is supposed to help people find games. Some of these tags aren’t useful, or they unfairly paint a game in a negative light.
Some folks are even using the tag system to spoil games. Here’s Final Fantasy VII, for example:
BioShock Infinite and The Walking Dead also have spoilers attached to their tags…don’t click on those links unless you want those spoiled, obviously! Other games might be spoiled too, so be careful when browsing tags on Steam.
The Actual Steam Tags Tumblr finds that, if a game has a small enough community, they sometimes are able to get away with tagging something with all sorts of ridiculous and sometimes offensive things.
//N.P.P.D. Rush//’s tags, for example:
Fish Tycoon:
Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People:
Diaper Dash:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Valve expected this to happen — here’s the FAQ:
Q. What if I don’t agree with a tag that has become popular for my game?
A. Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers. Often this is simply because there is some piece of information regarding the game that customers feel is missing from the store page.
If this system is going to be a useful one, it’s clear it needs some tweaks and possibly moderators. Right now, the system is a bit of a mess. It’s not all bad, though! There are plenty of funny ones, too.
Sonic The Hedgehog’s tags:
Hate Plus:
DayZ:
Hopefully, if Valve changes the way things work, they find a solution that allows us to have some unorthodox but harmless/funny tags, too — not just serious and boring ones.
And it’s not like some of the ridiculous tags can’t be useful to some people. From a Reddit thread titled “The new Steam Tags are already paying off“:
What are you tagging your games on Steam? Find any noteworthy tags? Let us know in the comments.
Comments
27 responses to “The First Day Of Steam Tags Is Both Funny And Sad”
So something positive for the games industry is destroyed by the internet?
No, not the internet, stupid people that think they’re funny.
It’s always the minority that spoil things for the majority.
As per usual, i’m not surprised to be honest.
people these days have such an obsession with being “trolls” that this happens to most new things.
I was going to upvote you, but then I realised that your premise is wrong.
Nothing can ever be good if there’s a possibility that the Internet can destroy it. This experiment was flawed from the beginning.
lolcats hasn’t been destroyed.
You’re not looking hard enough. 😛
That’s a bit over dramatic isn’t it? I mean what’s the industry really losing out on? They’ve pretty much just crowdsourced category tagging with no rules or predefined tags with extremely predictable results. It would have been sort of cool but even if it worked perfectly it’s still limited to Steam games and context free adjectives taken on good faith. If you want to find a Zelda-like you’re much better off going to Google and getting a proper review, footage, etc.
Plus it’s not like Modern Warfare 2 being tagged “bad” is going to cause it not to show up when looking for the “modern military”, “online multiplayer”, “casual FPS” tags. It’d be nice if the gag tags weren’t there, and a month from now when the excitement has died down they probably won’t outnumber the serious ones so much, but the system still does it’s job of putting games in front of people who might find them interesting. We’re not missing out on a golden age here just because some people think they’re funnier than they are and others hold petty grudges.
Hey, some people like playing bad games like Deadly Premonition.
That’s one of the games in my pile of shame.
I will admit that I laughed when I saw fhqwhgads on strongbad.
Yeah. I mean, come on.
I don’t know who that is, but I bet it is Fhqwhgads.
I’ll ask my friend Joe [and/or Jake]
*facepalm*… This is why we can’t have nice things.
I actually feel sorry for the casual gamer that ends up with Dark Souls. Not very, but a little.
Serves them right for not doing a bit of research first.
It’ll be a valuable lesson for them to not trust every message they read.
Isn’t this more or less a non issue, asshattery aside? As a tool to help me find games, I’m never going to be affected by a ‘choke on it’ tag, except if I happen to click on Fez when I search for ‘Platformer’ and look at the tags. It’s not an either/or situation, the valid/good tags are still there. And If I’m after a review, I’m going to read the user reviews and forums, and not rely on a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tag. I guess the issue will be whether it removes tags that don’t get used by a certain number of users, which could lead to the valid tags being dropped.
Where is the Dankey Kang tag for Sonic? http://i.imgur.com/3Sqe5BQ.jpg
This is why we can’t have nice stuff, internet.
I thought the “Sylvester Stallone is spinning in his grave” tag for Rambo was a good one.
As stupid as /v/ is most of the time, this is why I love them. The saddest part is that they’re right about some games like DayZ, Dear Esther and Gone Home.
Recommended tags for you: RPG, Adventure, Casual, Indie, Praise the Sun! Also, a little further down the list lie such gems as “Git Gud or Die Tryin’”.
Trying to glean information from an unmoderated, publicly submittable data source that feeds back into a publicly visible system… and they didn’t foresee this? Really? The least they could do is to limit the submission of tags for a game to accounts that own the game…
Presumably this sort of thing will sort itself out as more people tag games. When there are so few people tagging things, it isn’t that surprising to see some crazy ones like this.
The tag system is great, it shows what the MAJORITY think of the game, not just reviewers and vocal fanboys. The only thing that needs to be moderated is spoilers in my opinion.
Also, ‘Rome Wasn’t Patched in a Day’
I went on a “Australian Ripoff” tagging spree.
That was fun.
That isn’t even the worst of it. Straight away the first tag i saw was “Bad ports of mobile games”
Perhaps Valve should create a list of all tags they would consider to be safe and whenever a new tag is added that is not on that list or hasn’t be used and approved by someone else it would require moderation.
Either way this made me laugh more than it should’ve.
As someone who knows a furry, and as someone who has a passing interest in the furry seen, I must say, I do not see any hate at all towards Furrys in Lugaru HD. In fact, I guarantee it was furrys that put those tags on it.
Dynamic systems will have dynamic shifts, static systems will remain static. Those were the top tags, give it time and funny but true tags will rise while stupid ones will go lower on the list. I really enjoyed stanley parable but walking simulator is 100% correct.
if steam doesn’t/wont put the effort in to make this work they should pull it. there should be an avenue to report offensive tags, should be reviewed by a human, and then the user should be banned from submitting new tags for 2 weeks and all their tags removed. you’d think a big company like this would have some foresight as to how hopeless people are online. it’s only just been introduced, but if they can’t clean it up in a reasonable time frame, remove the feature.
EDIT: just realised they’re calling it a beta, i guess you can get away with more that way, smart choice.
after using it for a while, i dont actually see the stuff pictured in the photos above sticking around for too long, and have barely encountered much stupidity.
As someone who already knows what to expect from certain games I thought these were hilarious.
Not entirely useful but certainly better than whatever a moderator would choose.