Genre and Theme additions and changes

A couple of genre changes / additions would be helpful for classic video games:

1) Board game and Trivia should be separate genres. I'm not sure why those are combined. If it's a game like Trivial Pursuit, select both. For a game like Professor Pac-Man (which isn't a board game) it would be just Trivia. For Monopoly, it would be just Board Game.

2) Light Gun and Shooter should also be decoupled. There are a fair amount of very old arcade games, like Skeet Shooting or Duck Hunt which are light gun games but not properly shooters. Duck Hunt would be Light Gun and Hunting... which should be a genre. There are a good number of Hunting games.

3) BBS. There should be a category for the big BBS games of the 90s, like Barren Realms Elite, etc...

4) ASCII. I know that ASCII isn't a genre per se but neither is text-adventure (which properly have genres like sci-fi, etc...). This is for games like ZZT and Rogue. There are actually a good number of notable ones.

5) Graphical text adventure. This is distinct from text adventure, which is your Infocom style game. Wizard and the Princess or similar. These, admittedly, could fall under the current text category, but these genres are distinct enough that having them databased separately would be useful for searches for one or the other.

6) Under themes, a catch-all Military should be a theme, for those that don't fit into Modern Military or WWII. Games like Valiant Hearts would fall into this, or games that are non-specific but aren't medieval or modern.

7) Food/Drink under themes. There are a good number of these. Burgertime, Tapper, Food Fight, cooking games, etc...

8) Circus under themes. This would include games like Circus Atari, CarneyVale, Circus Charlie, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top, Circus Games, Big Top Barney... (there are a LOT of circus themed games)

9) Pirates under themes. There must be a zillion of these.

10) Something under genres for pet simulator type games. Like Nintendogs, tamagochi, that dreamcast sea monkey thing, etc... maybe even Little Computer People

That's it for now.

Many of these more specific things are handled using concept pages, like BBS Door Game for example. I think they want genres/themes to be a bit broader.

@fisk0: I'm not certain I agree with that; at least not in every case. Most of this list are broad enough to encapsulate games that have no appropriate genre or theme currently.

The first two decouplings are no-brainers.

As for the rest:

BBS Games are certainly a vast genre of game, at least as broad (perhaps more broad) than many of the selectable genres. It seems arbitrary to say that Card Games are a genre, but BBS Door games are merely a concept. Or that Text adventure is a genre, but ASCII games aren't. I don't follow the logic. I would, as you, argue against over specificity (say, space shoot 'em ups like R-Type vs Plane shoot 'em ups like 1942... that would be a concept), but these are broad areas.

Food/Drink is an actual, honest-to-goodness THEME, not a concept, of a good deal of classic games. It's not a random overly specific request; it's the actual theme of dozens of old games. Concept linking is so overbroad, that the usefulness is completely diminished.

Here's what I mean:

Say that Food is a concept (I'm sure it already is). That link will bring up literally every game that has food. That's totally useless. The THEME food would bring up games like Burgertime and Food Fight, where food is actually the theme of the game; a far more relevant list.

Imagine if we said that driving is a concept, not a theme. Every game with a car would make that completely useless. Themes are a smart way to index games which clearly have a common theme. Concepts don't accomplish this at all.

None of the themes I'm suggesting are any more or less broad than the ones already available; they are the theme of a good many games that have no good way to categorize them.

I agree with Circus as a theme

Thanks - I've actually edited several circus themed games lately. The C=64 alone has a whole mess of them.

I agree, especially with the likes of adding Pirates as a theme.

Yep, I could name 40 pirate themed games off the top of my head.

Resurrecting this zombie thread. These should get done.

I certainly agree with some of these additions, especially for some of the ones like pirate that has so many games.

Is there a formal way to submit genre/theme suggestions through the wiki? Or do we just add them to this thread?

(Apologies for the necro, I did a forum search and couldn't find any instructions, and this was the most recent thread on the topic.)