Misleading series tags

Looking at the Zelda group I noticed a lot of unofficial Linux titles.
In this group (actually in all the groups based on a specific copyrighted series) I would expect to see only the official games, otherwise all the group stats would be inaccurate and almost useless in most cases.

Would not be better to have a child group named, for example, "zelda-based", "unofficial-zelda", or something like this ?

I would agree. Many of the games I presume are actually Zelda clones.

Only for videogame series or for other series based on other media as well? Take Star Trek as an example. You know, games like the super-old Star Trek games originating on mainframe computers which surely had no license. I don't think it needs an official license to be a Star Trek game.

With a videogame series like Zelda its more difficult. I'm not sure if its a good idea to "ban" the games from the Zelda tag. But I see the problem here with the huge number of Zelda-like games made with the Zelda Classic framework. I mean, when they take place in the Zelda/Hyrule world, even unofficial games are Zelda games. At least sort of. If they only take the Zelda Classic engine and it takes place in a different universe its not a Zelda game. Don't know how to handle this best.

As usual there are fringe cases, another solution would be an "any-zelda-related-game" group, and the main group that picks only the official titles.
The two groups would still be related and no precious data lost.

And Pong and Breakout. For zelda games, I do try to verify that the fan games take place in the same universe as the official ones. Some official ones actually don't. I don't really like tagging fan games with official series tags but I'm not sure if there's an alternative.

Both info (official games line-up and anything related to a theme) are quite precious, so we need two tags to cover both cases.

I am still not convinced about splitting fan-made Zelda games from the Zelda group.

I can see two possible scenarios.

A:
Tag 1: "zelda-series" - Games that take place in the Zelda universe (regardless if official or unofficial).
Tag 2: "zelda-like" - Meant as a subgenre for games that replicate the gameplay of first NES Zelda and SNES Zelda. Not the other Zeldas, because I think the when we say "Zelda-clone" we all mean the gameplay of the very first Zelda. These are the so colled "Zelda-clones". Example of such games would be Golden Axe Warrior or Neutopia. So the first Gameboy Zelda game would get this tag. The N64 Zelda would NOT get this tag!

B:
Tag 1: "zelda-series" - Official games in the series. No unofficial ones.
Tag 2: "zelda-world/zelda-universe" - Don't know good tag name. All games that take place in the Zelda universe, whether official or unofficial.
Tag 3: "zelda-like" - see above.

I personally still think that scenario A is totally OK. I sense that you lean to scenario B.

For stats I find it more problematic to have not yet released or cancelled games entered btw.

Scenario B is mostly consistent with some other situations that already exist at UVL (such as zork/zorkverse). And Scenario B lets *equel fangames, clones, and influenced games exist smoothly as relations without corruption of the official series. Mario games and many of the others mentioned here could use the same solution.

You could separate them into Zelda series tag and Hyrule tag, where one is the game series, and the other one is the setting, with the non-official games only having the setting tag. Not entirely accurate when dealing with the other worlds in the setting, but there's no common name for the multiverse, so Hyrule should be used to refer to the multiverse rather than the specific primary world in it. Alternatively call it Zelda Universe/Multiverse.

It is a good time to talk about a consistent way of tagging for all games series, not just zelda.

[game]-series:
-> For official games in a series. Can span completely different game types. This is commonly used so far. But there might be instances where there are such groups that also include unofficial games. In that way I have to ask what to do about unofficial conversions. For example I encountered lots of C64 games that were later converted by fans to the C16/Plus4. Would they get the series tag or not?

[game]-based:
-> The group that combines official and unofficial games. Again can span different game types. Thinking of all proposals so far, the -based sounds best so far IMO.

[game]-like:
-> This is when a certain game defined a sort of subgenre. pacman-like, frogger-like etc. We already use this.

[tie-in series]:
-> This is a tag like starwars or startrek, marvel, batman... Basically a series that is not an original videogame series, but originated from TV, comics etc. For this general tag we should always assume combined official and unofficial releases that take place in the respective universe. Simlar to the [game]-based tag, but in this case the "-based" is not included into the tag name.

A tag like hyrule would only work well as a location tag.

Thats the way I would define it.

These more often than not define a setting by name of the franchise rather than a series, tho the two are often interchangeable in meaning (both series and setting).

Not all official Zelda games take place in Hyrule. Not all same-universe fan games take place in Hyrule. I have no objection to a Hyrule tag; but it isn't a comprehensive solution to the problem at hand.

-series and -universe seem best to me. No need to involve tie-ins, -series is for games and tie-ins as separate tags as needed. -like is mainly about game mechanics. -series -universe is characters, setting, story; independentable from mechanics.

Sounds good to me.

To recap:

[name]-series is for official games

[name]-universe is for unofficial games

[name]-like is mainly about game mechanics, or more accepted names like metroidvania.


I have just created metroid-universe
I made the group a theme, not a series. Is this correct for you ?
Also, its parent group is Metroid

...

After playing with this idea, I'm realizing the universe is somewhat misleading, as it would imply that englobes any metroid game.
This is not what I was aiming for...
Metroid-based would make more sense to me.

[game]-universe from my understanding is for official and unofficial games. The question is what your starting intention was in this topic. Was it to get unofficial games removed from the series tag? That would be accomplished with the universe tag. Or did you want to have a specific tag to only list unofficial games? I see not very much value in that, at least I never really searched for that. So the main question is: Do we need this tag?

If yes: "zelda-unofficial" or "zelda-series-unofficial"? "Based" could mean game-mechanics again.

Always remember that the solution for Zelda should be the template for all other series, which will likely result in some necessary clean-up work.

Ok, the main objective is to keep the -series tag "pure".
Then the description of the -universe group will be something like "Any official and unofficial game based on the Zelda series"
This means that any series with at least one unofficial game will spawn the -universe tag...
Ok, that's almost fine with me.

Hopefully FINAL recap:

[name]-series is for official games

[name]-universe is for any game related to the series, being them official or unofficial

[name]-like is mainly about game mechanics, or more accepted names like metroidvania.

Location concept puts it up for display as the game setting which would be the best option in that case.

-universe makes sense as a generic global tag for both official and unofficial games in the same setting. Using -based makes sense for only non-official ones but brings up confusion if it's games that are in the setting or games that are Like some of those games (overlap with -like in meaning).

For the unofficial games, we have fangame which probably covers all of them? But it doesn't relate to what they're fangames of (which makes the general -universe tag useful).

Looks like there is a lot of tagging to be done.
Using Zelda as example, maybe the best options is to use a script to automatically add the zelda-universe tag to all the games tagged with zelda tag.
Then, the zelda tag is removed manually from the unofficial games.
Tomorrow I'll check the script.

Feel free to propose the tags to be added.

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The script is ready and tested (uvlbot-1)
I'll give it a try now with Zelda

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All worked as expected!
Done for Metroid and Pokémon too.

Fairly sure there's only very few companies involved with the official games, so you could just check for some company's involvement and the tag removed when they aren't there.