An example of Valve's contradictory attitude of giving the community power only to take it away is the tags system. Implemented to allow the Steam community to create their own tags to help organise games and create new categories, forming new ways to search for similar titles on Steam and find certain lists of titles which might best interest users. The result was definitely a mixed bag, with all the abuse you would expect. Due to their hands off approach, Valve permitted multiple titles to carry unrelated and useless tags which ranged from old jokes such as "Half Life 3 confirmed" to unsavoury and offensive additions such as "Jews did 9/11" and similar choices. Despite this, among these were some surprisingly effective additions which significantly helped with browsing. "Walking Simulator" was attached to titles such as Dear Esther, which helped to signify the lack of serious interactivity in the game and the way it presented content to the player. The likes of "Procedural Death Labyrinth" was added to a specific sub-category of roguelikes, and even comedic tags such as "Nanomachines, son" listed fantastic cyberpunk titles. Furthermore, tags were utilised used as warnings, with mentions of "bad PC port" often showing up alerting the community to problematic releases and buggy content. While the system needed definite cleaning up, Valve's response to this was overkill. Deleting just about every tag imaginable, it only permitted certain extremely basic tags to remain, usually only linking into a title's genre. This crippled a potentially fantastic idea and as of yet there have been no major pushes to bring back certain tags, with only a few truly useful ones starting to emerge again. This mass purge only serves to harm Steam. It not only tells the community that Valve is unwilling to permit the marking of games with tags useful to them, but it will go out of its way to hide which titles are broken, are poorly ported to the PC or are buggy beyond belief. These are not actions which help engender faith or goodwill from users, and it serves as a black mark on Valve's otherwise good track record.
A gamer who has played everything from Daikatana to Dwarf Fortress. An obsessive film fanatic valuing everything from The Third Man to Flash Gordon. An addict to tabletop titles, comics and the classics of science fiction, whatever media they are a part of.
