Content tagging is an incredibly crucial part of any platform, and a staple of a vast number of websites and platforms. It is as much a marketing tool as it is a discovery tool. Tagging is what allows people to search for the things they are interested in, and find things similar to what they are looking for. This is a benefit for both the developers, and users. Picture an individual who enjoys 2D platformers, made either by high end studios, or small passion projects developed by much smaller teams, or even one individual alone. Searching just the text “2D Platformer” brings up several random games, usually only the ones that have “2D Platformer” in the title, diluting the pool from every other game that can be found (Fig 1, generic results).
This means that unless you give your place a generic name that includes the tags you want, your game will be incredibly hard to find and very low in the search pool, making discoverability almost impossible. Tagging alleviates this issue, allowing you to instead search for games that contain the tags “2D” and “Platformer” (and not the generic Sci-Fi, Action, … game type selector). This will show a variety of different games that have the aesthetic and style that you might be looking for, and give you a much better search pool with games that might peak your interest more than a generic place made with free assets titled “2D Platformer”. The algorithm may even be adjusted to prefer games that have a unique name compared to the tags.
Tagging is not only something that would be applicable to games, but it would also work for clothing. Finding certain types of clothes is very impractical, again, searching based on the titles and sometimes descriptions, rather than the actual critical information of the assets. Usually, creators will just dump all of their keywords/tags in the description, but this is unnecessary and could be streamlined into a more effective process. Again, creators would be free to name their outfits whatever they want, i.e. “Galaxy Fit Pants” and could tag them with “sweatpants, space, purple, pants, athletic” such that people would be easily able to stumble upon the clothes when looking for the types of clothes that they would prefer to wear on their character. You could very easily find matching clothes by searching things such as “sport, red” and “business, blue OR dark” and “casual, light”, or even choose between various kinds of crop-tops, jeans, hoodies… (Fig 2, google search) (Fig 3, inappropriate results in catalog)
Roblox is one of the largest platforms in the media industry, but somehow a system for properly tagging and discovering content has never been properly and fully implemented. It would be great to see how people find new content and engage with developers and creators if such a system would be implemented.
