Game Identification Questions

Question

I've been a long time lurker. May I say, for all of you answering questions, the amount of SciFi knowledge I have learnt I have a great appreciation for.

Do you know what I appreciate more? How you handle identification questions. If I'm having trouble remembering a video game, I ask you guys. And I'm a very big video game buff. So it doesn't happen often.. but..

At Arqade (our sister site for video games), I can't ask an ID question based off memory. I have to provide a visual artifact.

I've been there for ages. I'm not going to get in to why it's like that, but it really has to be because of past experience. I'm familiar with Stack Exchange, so I'm not troubled. I ask on here if I can't ID the game (assuming its SciFi).

But that made me wonder. There has to be a better way for us to handle these sort of questions. There used to be a time when we would just click 'this belongs on another SE'. We could theoretically send these questions your way.

But we would do it without thought. Without consideration that this question would be a good addition to your site. Or even actually on topic..

What if there was a better way?

What if I could transfer these ID questions to you.. but only because I also had a 10K rep score on your site, meaning I had an understanding of what was on topic, meaning I was active over here to edit the question into a good question, and actually be willing to put work into getting it answered.

At the end of the day, these are just people trying to remember something they were passionate about, across the scifi and video game genres.

I'm just toying with ideas to put something forward to meta, at the moment; but I want your feedback.

How would you guys feel about the few members at Arqade who were also active members here on SciFi having the ability to migrate game ID questions when they are asking for help identifying Sci-Fi related games, and are able to provide enough detail to make a good quality question, sans the "physical artifact" that is required at arqade?

Answer 1

This seems to be largely addressed on your home site

• My game identification question was closed as off-topic. Where can I ask for help instead?.

In brief, yes, we at SFF:SE are more than happy to accept video game identification questions, and have done so for many years (with a pretty good rate of success, I might add).

Other than making sure that you're not sending over crap (e.g. that it's about sci-fi or fantasy and has at least one semi-uniquely identifiable feature), please exercise your best judgement on what to flag for migration here.

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If you want a specific migration pathway, you'll need to ask your own meta+mods. I'm pretty sure ours wouldn't mind being on the receiving end, but given the relatively low volume of candidates, a custom flag ("I think this would be a good candidate for SFF") would almost certainly do just as well.

Answer 2

This doesn't sound like a bad idea. The migration system is sort of broken at the moment and needs a large overhaul which is mostly why it's not really used. There are few migration pathways open, none out of SFF, for example. That means it's down to either flagging a mod to move the question elsewhere or commenting and pointing a user to re-ask elsewhere. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the latter is the better option.

However, to talk about your suggested proposal. It's not a bad idea. One of the key problems with the migration system is that people don't know enough about the site they are migrating to and so end up sending something over that's off topic or even because they think it's a better fit elsewhere. That's part of what led me to posting this pair of questions but for suggesting migrating to Arqade. Your suggested proposal is better in that regard, though the rep threshold may need moving about.

I have seen some potential problems in it and it's down to how the migration system currently works.

• User accounts: a user only has an account on a site where they have created one. That means if a question is migrated to a site where they don't have an account then they won't get notifications for things on the now migrated question (I believe). This means they could miss it being migrated and so never see answers posted. This is bad for the OP, obviously, but also somewhat annoying for us: we already have a problem with drive by users, don't want to make it worse.

• Migrating "crap": Whilst the usual rule of don't migrate crap stands I would like a system where something that's not inherently crap can be migrated and if closed not returned to its previous site. Currently, if I'm remembering correctly, if a migrated question is closed it is returned to where it came from. This obviously isn't ideal for both sites and the OP.

As this would mean a rather large overhaul to the migration system at present I actually think a comment to the OP is a lot better as it gets around most of this stuff. Something like, cut down for some brevity:

Unfortunately, your question is off topic on Arqade as there is no visual artifact included. However, as the game you're looking for is science fictional/fantastical this is on topic over on [scifi.se]. Please ask it over there and you may also want to check out their guide to asking a good ID question.

This is similar to what started me to lead the guidelines for "migration" effort where I went to other sites, including Arqade, and asked for any guidelines they wanted from us for us to "migrate" questions over to them. Although that effort wasn't as successful as I would have liked so might need some more work put into it in the future.

I think a simple comment like the above for on topic game id questions as well as making sure the question has at least a decent amount of detail should suffice. Unless a large overhaul comes to the migration system this is going to be your best bet.