Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

At first I was thinking to something that says if a game is best played alone or in group.
As certain games have enough options to be enjoyed in both ways, I propose two concepts: "alone" and "group".
I'd like to find two better words than these two...

Isn't that just your regular old single- vs. multiplayer definition? Or are you referring to people on the same machine (which still is multiplayer, but a more specific kind)? The multiplayer tags hotseat, shared-screen and split-screen are used for all three kinds of multiplayer on same machine, though they're too specific too (maybe not hotseat, but apparently it's used mostly of PC gaming).

These two ratings are different from the multiplayer flags, they are needed to say "how much" a game is enjoyable in "multiplayer" or "solo" mode.
Some games could have a a boring "death match mode" while the "solo mode" is great, and vice-versa.

That sounds to me like having two different ratings, one for solo and one for multiplayer instead of the one 5-star rating system we have now.

Games do not need to be multiplayer, technically, to be enjoyed by groups. Many people prefer to play Star Raiders as a group.

Same goes for Stepmania and the like, they can be played solo, but most prefer to play in groups, even if they only have one dance pad. The fun-factor is greater, so to say. And as Andrea said, there are plenty of games that have both single and multiplayer where the amount of fun is completely different from each other.

or for a more recent game that people play as a group. Wario Ware Wii

Going back to the subject, are we supposed to offer definitions on what to store, or how to store it? If we use some mock-up of tags for this, the question of what is pointless, though even with them the used categories should be discussed at least momentarily before being used by anyone.

There's plenty of discussion on the how part in the old URS thread.

Since the ratings originally were supposed to have some form of strengths associated with them, we can assume that there's mild, medium and strong. and the values between. Only those three need to be explained, or possibly only the two extremes (mild and strong) - mild because we need an entry level for the category to be used, the mildest cases acceptable for the category, and strong for reference on how to qualify the different strengths between. Alternatively we can call them mild < [something] < medium < strong < extreme, again with only the first, third and fifth being described with third being more of an optional, but it does elaborate on what we'd consider the middle point. There's no need to describe the second and fourth strengths as they should be fairly obvious from the levels surrounding them.

I also suggested this to be expanded to be used with regular tags (somewhere, can't locate it now) to describe the prevalence of the described content in the game, it should be fairly simple to implement (if tags are used as a basis for the ratings).

I think the group games are called social games or something in that direction. Rather poor description since online games are social too, even if you play them alone, but on different level. Casual [?] games are probably very close to this.

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I still think we could do much better simply by using tags a lot more than we're currently using them for and then later seeing which of those tags might benefit from being turned into full blown ratings as this current start-point of "let's create a new, better rating system". Which so far has not progressed an inch as far as I can see.

And I still think rating is wrong word to use for this, since we don't really rate anything, we're _describing_ the games. Although there's been plenty of talk about adding a numerical value to them, which would turn them into ratings of sort (rating how much the descriptor actually fits any particular game), but these are still descriptors more than anything. And ratings sounds like some stuck-up analyst kind of folks would use, and makes at least me think of something that has superior and inferior things somewhere in there when we're supposed to do it objectively where no such things should exist, in which case we come again to describing them rather than rating.

Ergo, I wish people would pay more attention to the tag threads and especially come up with more tags themselves. Maybe check up the full tag lists sometime and find something there to spread as well. We obviously can make much more progress that way.

Edit: If lack of ideas is the problem, try browsing IMDb's keyword list

The problem is not the lack of ideas, it is just not easy to come up with an idea that is simple and powerful at the same time.
I tried to figure how would it be when ready reading the various suggestion on the forum, and it was always lacking something.

Perhaps we should imagine exactly how we will use it when ready, instead of listing the things that we want to put together.

To me, casual users should have a simple and clear view of the key "descriptors" on the gameinfo page without numbers, boring descriptions or similar. Perhaps as simple icons or brief text (building a lot of highly descriptive icons is definitely not easy)
So anyone can determine how the game behaves at a glance.

Clicking these icons will show a broader idea of how these "ratings" are spread and who (depending on the anonymity forum thread) voted.
When "voting" an optional description could be available, and will be visible on the detailed view.
Unused ratings are not displayed, instead of placing a "zero" beside them.

Links to see similarly rated games (to compare with games that you might know, perhaps the ones that YOU star-voted), and the "games this editors likes" (to see if you agree with his ideas) should be provided.

Without adding complexity to the description, do you think something should be different? (note that I didn't wrote about what descriptors to use)

Based on that, the descriptor list _will_ be short, much like PEGI has (you can see all of their icons at their front page).

And because of this, I don't see much point in going very far from what they've already established: Violence, sex/nudity/suggestive themes, drugs, gambling, horror/fear, etc.

However, it was suggested we do something they don't do and list the "good" stuff (faugh!), so... Friendship/cooperation, trust/faith (not religious), optimism/not-giving-up, etc. I somehow can't think of much that actually differ from the first enough and still not be some moral choice that some might consider a "good" thing.

But I get all flowery from thinking that kind of stuff, and I literally hate it and have little enthusiasm for developing such either.

Not all people who buy games think that way. Some people are very concerned about the GiGo effect (Garbage in = Garbage out). I think this is reason enough to accurately list game content. Some politicians are overly concerned about it,and use as a campaigning tool. Not satisfied with the content that exists, they conjure content to ban so it looks like they are working harder. They slander games and damage the reputation of this art form. I think this is also a valid reason to accurately list game content.
But, I'm pretty sure this thread is specifically about concepts that arn't necessarily about player parental control. That is in another thread. This thread seems to be more about a system to list content for player preferences. As in "I feel like destroying something, which games let me do that?", "I feel like creating something, which games let me do that?", or "I feel like sorting things, which games let me do that?"