Is the Powergaming Tag needed?

Question

While reading "Does this armor set work RAW?" I stumbled upon the powergaming tag for the first time. Because I felt the overlap with optimization should be quite large, I proceeded to have a look at the only 19 questions under this tag.

I think they can be sufficiently categorized into three types (number of questions per category in brackets):

1. optimization questions. Some already have this tag as well, others (like these four questions) can be reassigned (15/19).

2. problem-players, such as these two, or this one that already has this tag as well (3/19).

3. No additional tags needed at all, such as the question I quoted above, which would work just fine with pathfinder armor rules-as-written (1/19).

I therefore think the tag is highly unnecessary and should be purged in the flames of hell removed or reassigned.

Answer 1

I am reluctant to blacklist the tag, if only because removing common words from the tag space is generally a poor idea.

I'm also not sure whether subsuming it into problem-players is helpful - it makes the term wayyyyy more generic. Can we not use more specific terms about player problems than one big bucket? We have rules-lawyering for a more specific issue, I think powergaming can fill that niche as well.

We could use the tag wiki summary to help - we could keep powergaming as the negative use and in the summary basically say "if you're looking for this as a positive practice, use optimization instead" and similarly in optimization "the negative extreme of this practice as a problem in-game should be tagged powergaming."

Answer 2

I agree, it's probably unnecessary because it can be rolled into other tags like you've described, without losing any particular benefit.

However, it is also probably an inevitable tag which will be repeatedly re-created. I'm not sure what all the tag re-assignment and purging options available are, but I expect this to be a Lazarus tag.

Answer 3

I propose cleanup of the tag, integrating the existing questions into optimization and problem-players as outlined in the question.

However, as BESW points out, the tag will likely be re-created by new posters. I think making powergaming a synonym to optimization will be sufficient to prevent that, and the large majority of the questions fall under this tag.

Answer 4

Regardless of how it has been used, I tend to think of the word powergaming as being a subset of problem-players, and not of optimization. While optimization is commonly used with respect to power (i.e. optimizing a character’s power), it is far from the only use of optimization. Moreover, powergaming as a term is typically a pejorative in the RPG community, wherein the problem being described is a player’s devotion to mechanical power, at the detriment of the game as a whole.

In other words, I think the common use described by @MrLemon is an inaccurate use.

Unfortunately, that does not lend itself to a happy solution; making powergaming a synonym of problem-players causes too many people to miss optimization, and as @BESW says, if we don’t make it a synonym of something it will just keep getting recreated. The ideal would be a sort of “did you mean..?” question with both options, but the system doesn’t support that (and I don’t think it would be a particularly good addition in general).

I just think that powergaming and optimization are not synonymous, and establishing the tags as synonyms just seems wrong. Does anyone know if there is any precedent on other SEs about this sort of issue, where you have a tag that’s too frequently used to try to keep deleting it, but is used in two very different senses that don’t lend themselves to a single synonym?

Answer 5

What can we do to keep the tag dead? Blacklist it.

KRyan points out quite well that powergaming doesn't fit cleanly into either problem-players or optimisation, and that people will use it for either, depending on whether powergaming is a good thing or the problem in their situation.

Y'all are asking what alternative there is to simply removing it or synonymising it though: it's blacklisting the tag. As long as the tag's blacklisted, it simply cannot be used, and people will have to seek an alternative or drop the tag altogether. I don't know if RPG.SE has any blacklisted tags, but you could experiment by asking a question on Stack Overflow and trying out the code, programming, or homework tags.

Mind you, someone might just use power-gaming for their alternative.

Let's wait to see if this is really necessary though.

Blacklisting is appropriate for a tag that keeps coming back despite all efforts to destroy it, but let's first see if it really is a Lazarus tag (as BESW put it).

I suggest that for now, we burninate powergaming. If, further down the line, it comes back and gets our notice, we can re-burninate it and start a new meta topic requesting it be blacklisted on the basis it's definitely a Lazarus tag.