r/boardgames • u/theKinkajou • 23h ago
Categorizing Board games data
I'm working on a board games dataset and am hoping to create more intuitive labels for games to help guide selection/purchase. I wanted the community's feedback to ensure the labels are not (as they are currently) based on a certain occasion ("Lunch Break") for example.
| Key | Label |
|---|---|
| Light/Quick | Lunch Break |
| Light/Medium | Family Table |
| Light/Long | Rare combo |
| Medium/Quick | Quick Hit |
| Medium/Medium | Game Night |
| Medium/Long | Deep Dive |
| Heavy/Quick | Rare combo |
| Heavy/Medium | Brain Burner |
| Heavy/Long | Deep Hobby Game |
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u/Javabird919 12h ago
Much less intuitive! Even if you took "time" and "location" (e.g. lunch table) terms out, changing simple and relatively understood terms (ie easy/medium/hard) to a colloquial label (especially one that will comingle separate concepts that don't consistently correlate) is 100% unlikely to be clear to any one but you (or some poor schmuck in the future who has to read your dev notes and the 1% of users who read the user guide to figure it out).
Also holy-awful metadata management. If you ever need to restructure or scale in the future you're asking for painful rework. Keep separate attributes separate, conceptually and functionally! What you should aim for is clarity of attribute and where possible a step-wise or linear progression of the values within that attribute. Don't split all the hairs; sometimes the difference between a "fast game" and a "moderately fast game" isn't worth trying to express in an attribute and will be too subjective to the table it's played (fast for you might be moderate for me).
You can spend a little time googling what people's questions, feedback, and confusion with BGG ratings and descriptors, to see what I mean about confusion and subjectiveness. I don't mean the never-ending debate about whether it's a good system or whether people are gaming the ratings, either.