Tag suggestion: Reverse-Engineering

Question

I often see questions where a user is interested not in copying a game as a whole but in pulling apart a particular game mechanic in order to better understand how it works and apply this to their own development.

In these cases questions can tend towards being subjective if a user is asking "How can I make a game like Diablo 3?" and doesn't meet our FAQ criteria. However if the user is trying to understand how a specific mechanic works more directly such as "How does a character sheet store and implement character stats for use in skills and items such as Diablo 3?" then we can apply a "Reverse-Engineering" tag (if there is something similar I was unable to find it.)

This means the question promotes non subjective discussion about how to create a mechanic. The tag allows the asker to show that they are trying to pull apart an existing example from a known game but showing any viewers they understand not to ask "How can I make X game?".

Unlike Arqade we do not use tags for labelling a particular game (for example "Diablo-3") but we should be encouraging people to try and pull apart how existing games were made so they can reverse engineer for their own benefit and learning.

This is why I believe a reverse-engineering tag or similar would work well for these situations.

Answer 1

You can create new tags if you have enough reputation. I don't think you have to ask anybody for permission to do that.

Answer 2

"Reverse-engineering" would be a meta tag; it's not talking about the question content, but about the method which is desired to be used to arrive at an answer.

Stack Overflow has a policy about meta tags: "From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged."

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

Answer 3

I'm not particularly fond of the idea, for a few key reasons:

• It presupposes a particular solution to another similar problem is what somebody else has already done (usually because that somebody else is a "professional") and can result in a case of tunnel vision for the question-asker, who could be missing better solutions to their specific problem as a result. I'd rather see us guide the asker to solutions that are tailored to their specific problem they're having in the development of their game (and if they're not actually developing a game, the question is off-topic).

• Tags are useful for searching questions, and so should reflect the content of the question and the problem it's presenting. A "reverse-engineering" doesn't reflect the question (unless that question is off-topic), it reflects a potential solution.

• There are some aspects of reverse-engineering that are a legal grey area.

Your one example doesn't even fall into a category I'd consider 'reverse engineering' at all. The poster wants to implement a mechanic that looks and feels like a mechanic in another game, but he's not actually decompiling the Pokemon binaries and examining their compiled machine code, or anything like that. He's just using it as a model; this is exactly the kind of scenario where I think the tag is damaging (or at best, not useful).

(Note that I'd already removed it, along with overbroad "state" tag.)