(Topic ID: 229292)

Searching for machines by THEME

By Pwaka1986

5 years ago


Topic Heartbeat

Topic Stats

  • 26 posts
  • 15 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 5 years ago by rufessor
  • No one calls this topic a favorite

You

Linked Games

Topic Gallery

View topic image gallery

pasted_image (resized).png
pasted_image (resized).png
pasted_image (resized).png
pasted_image (resized).png

12
#1 5 years ago

Hello fellow Pinsiders!

I've been thinking about this for a while and I'd like to see if anyone else has perhaps already done this. I pitched the idea of adding a new way of categorizing machines by their theme to one of the founders and he said they'd be open to adding that function if we compiled the list.

I'm talking about searching (Space, Aliens, Automotive, Racing, Medieval, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Based on Movie, Based on TV, Based on Game, Based on Comic Book, Music, Disaster, Cards/Poker, Billiards/Pool, Animals, Dinosaurs, etc.....)
I think this would be a great extra way to find machines you didn't necessarily know about.

Has anyone already done this before? I think it would work best if each game could be narrowed down to two themes since some games combine themes.
I don't mind working on a spreadsheet to do this, but if people have already done this or would like to help that would be awesome!

Thanks!

#2 5 years ago

Great idea! I’m ready to implement this in our Game Database, as soon as a list of themes has been compiled.

#3 5 years ago

bump. i've started a list but if anyone has done this already that would be awesome!

#4 5 years ago

Pwaka,

I like the list you've got going so far. Some additional suggestions;

Adventure
Jungle
History
Sports
Western
Military

Keep 'em coming...

Thanks,
EV

#5 5 years ago

Sports
Basketball
Hockey
Ice Skating
Football
Baseball
Skiing
Bowling
Boxing
Wrestling
Soccer
Fishing
Tennis
Golf
Gambling
Skateboarding
Surfing
Hunting
Horse racing
Recreation
Americana
Food
Carnival
Circus
Amusement Park
Roller Coaster
Magic
Show Biz
Mythology
Aquatic
Superhero
Monsters
Time Travel
Motorcycles
Trucks
Racing
Road
Transportation
Aviation
Sci Fi
Wizards
Mystery
Vampire
Supernatural
Funny
Police
Emergency
Fire
Pirates

#6 5 years ago

The late 1960's machines had lifestyle themes.
Music
Western
Card Games
Circus

#7 5 years ago

IPDB is searchable by theme

#8 5 years ago

The list is coming along nicely!

Should we sub-categorize to make it easier to find/select a theme? So, for example, put all sports under "Sports" (that one's easy, but not sure about all the others).

Making this thread front page sticky for a while to hopefully get some more input!

#9 5 years ago

For instance, say we are talking about a Bally - Bobby Orr's Power Play, It could be tagged with both Sports as a broad theme, but also tagged as hockey in case people are just searching hockey. So yeah, a sub-category. is that possible to have multiple tags?

#10 5 years ago

I like the category with subs beneath it idea!

Quoted from AMBoggs:

IPDB is searchable by theme

Yes, but a lot of their catagories are so specific you can’t find similar machines sadly.

Maybe combine things so that animals and jungle are under “nature” or “natural” because they’re in the same vein.

Also add Novelty please!! I really love novelty games that are designed around big gimmicks: Orbitor 1, Baby Pac-Man, Nudge-It, Pinball Circus

13
#11 5 years ago

Yeah, great point. I think themes need to be in the form of tags. You could add up to 5 theme tags per game. Then search by one or more tags to find similar games.

#12 5 years ago
Quoted from robin:

Yeah, great point. I think themes need to be in the form of tags. You could add up to 5 theme tags per game. Then search by one or more tags to find similar games.

I like this idea. I was thinking that if you have too many categories that it may be difficult to find a game based upon category as a game could really reside in multiple categories.

However your idea of implementing tags means that a game would actually fall into multiple tag searches as it would reside in more than one category so if you run a tag search you may find your game under 'Supernatural' and 'Horror' if the game was BSD.

Gord

#13 5 years ago

Not to start controversy, but ‘sexy’ is a theme. Or ‘Adult Themes?’

#14 5 years ago

I think Adult would be fine.

Some other sub categories for the Mythology and history could be: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, American History, Cowboys, Native Americans

Others I thought of:

Beach
Boating
Swimming
Nautical
Combat
War
Rodeo
Bingo Machines
Theater
Dancing
Girls/Women
Farming
Cartoons
Railroads/Trains

all I can think of for now

#16 5 years ago

Looks like a solid start to me. I’ll try and get this implemented this week!

#17 5 years ago

Another possibility, @Robin, is to make a more generic ability to tag. One popular thing I've seen for an internal social use case was to let anyone free form tag things - and then people would +1 tags they recognize/approve of. Yeah, it had a bit of gamification to it, but overall worked kinda nice. The search engine was tuned to use the tag rankings for determining results order.

Then again, there's enough.. people on Pinside... maybe this is a terrible idea. .

Thinking more: it might be worth a generic tags ability; and then have a set of predefined (perhaps moderator defined) theme tags, feature flags (ie 4-player), perhaps others TBD. Given the crowdsourcing of applying those attributes, it could make the search pretty powerful.

#18 5 years ago
Quoted from Pwaka1986:

Hello fellow Pinsiders!
I've been thinking about this for a while and I'd like to see if anyone else has perhaps already done this. I pitched the idea of adding a new way of categorizing machines by their theme to one of the founders and he said they'd be open to adding that function if we compiled the list.
I'm talking about searching (Space, Aliens, Automotive, Racing, Medieval, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Based on Movie, Based on TV, Based on Game, Based on Comic Book, Music, Disaster, Cards/Poker, Billiards/Pool, Animals, Dinosaurs, etc.....)
I think this would be a great extra way to find machines you didn't necessarily know about.
Has anyone already done this before? !

You can do a theme search on IPBD using the advanced search.

#19 5 years ago

I have added TAGGING ability to Pinside's machine database. Look for the "tags" section when editing a game details:

Adding tags to a gameAdding tags to a game

And they will show up like so:

Tags display on the game's splash page as well as its details pageTags display on the game's splash page as well as its details page

You can also search by tag:

Search by tagSearch by tag

And it will show the games tagged with that tag:

Games tagged 'Pinside'Games tagged 'Pinside'

You can specify multiple tags (this is done in an 'OR' format, it will match any tags, not all).

All the theme/category suggestions that were made in this forum thread have already been entered in the tags database, but the cool thing is that the tag field also allows you to enter new tags. Once a tag was added, it becomes available for everyone to use. Obviously, the tags list will be monitored for abuse and we do keep track of who adds which tags.

Now, all that's left to do is add tags to the 2,500 games in the database!

Let me know if you run into any issues or if you have any comments!

#20 5 years ago

FYI, I am also considering adding a similar tagging functionality to forum threads. This will help locate specific threads. E.g. look for threads that have been tagged with tags 'tech', 'issue', 'display', 'system 11'.

#21 5 years ago

Sweet, I started to do a few and noticed that some of the tags I listed in my initial list weren’t in your list. I noticed alien, space, medieval, music weren’t in there when I tried to do medieval madness, attack from mars or Iron Maiden. But, pretty easy to do! Thanks again for implementing this!

#22 5 years ago

Might be a bit hard deciding on specific or general themes
for some of those 50s,60s&70s EMs
Like GTB CrossTown, SkyLine, Central Park, & Airport
WMS Suspense, Magic City, Doozie or Doodle Bug
or BLY Bus Stop, Expressway or Zip a Doo
Or CCoin Festival, Twinky and Dolphin

Maybe for some just say Americana in general

#23 5 years ago

Good ideas from everybody and thanks Robin for implementing this.

Had a exploration session on adding & searching new tags. I was testing this out on the #pinside-test-machine and figured out that you can add new tags via the following:

1) click the edit link next to Tags on the Splash tab of the game
2) start typing tag word in Searchwords Tags field
3) if tag exists then, click it and save
4) if tag does not exist, then type full tag word, click out of the list selection and hit tab or right arrow

Note: You cannot search or add the same tag to a game that already has that tag associated with it. Once the tag has been entered for one game it is now in the database and can be added to other games and searchable.

Happy Holidays!

#24 5 years ago

Cool, thanks for getting that done! I did find one minor bug though. Seems like the tags with spaces aren't working. Example would be "Amusement Park" versus "Amusement-Park". Both are options for adding a tag and searching. When I added them both to RCT it looked like it worked, but when I went back only "Amusement-Park" was there, and when I searched "Amusement Park" it didn't find anything. Same thing with "Roller-Coaster" versus "Roller Coaster", thus the assumption all that have spaces aren't working. Didn't test any further though.

1 week later
#25 5 years ago

.

2 weeks later
#26 5 years ago

One interesting way of displaying these tag relationships among games- e.g. to find games other people think are similar and share tags, would be to create a grouping algorothim that creates a phylogeny tree- games that share many tags will be grouped together.

Initially this will be underpowered and not work well- but if you have a few tens of tags per machine and had 2500 machines it would be a super cool way to see how games are related! Happy to discuss more. This is a powerful way of finding relatedness and grouping similar together. Geeky- but I bet it works well. Just need to let a bunch of pinball geeks run wild with tagging games using descriptors- especially if there is a core set of some few hundreds of tags. This would not work as well if everyone used slightly different wording- so I like the idea of maintaining some core set of tag word descriptors. It can be arbitrarily large- just makes it so that you dont miss the relationship between english synonyms.

Promoted items from the Pinside Marketplace
From: $ 33.00
Gameroom - Decorations
Rocket City Pinball
Decorations
$ 27.50
Boards
Pinball Haus
Boards
6,500
Machine - For Sale
Omaha, NE
6,350 (OBO)
Machine - For Sale
Los Angeles, CA
$ 90.00
Playfield - Toys/Add-ons
pinballmod
Toys/Add-ons
$ 24.50
Playfield - Protection
ULEKstore
Protection
From: $ 99.99
Cabinet - Other
Lighted Pinball Mods
Other
7,750 (Firm)
Machine - For Sale
St. Louis, MO
$ 64.00
Lighting - Under Cabinet
Lermods
Under cabinet
$ 100.00
Electronics
Led Pinball
Electronics
$ 359.00
Playfield - Other
NO GOUGE PINBALL™
Other
$ 69.99
Playfield - Toys/Add-ons
Lighted Pinball Mods
Toys/Add-ons
$ 19.95
Electronics
Lermods
Electronics
$ 59.95
Playfield - Toys/Add-ons
pinballmod
Toys/Add-ons
$ 29.00
Gameroom - Decorations
Pinball Photos LLC
Decorations
From: $ 399.95
Boards
PinSound
Boards
$ 14.95
Playfield - Decals
Pinball Pimp
Decals
$ 69.99
Playfield - Toys/Add-ons
Lighted Pinball Mods
Toys/Add-ons
$ 34.00
Playfield - Other
Pin Monk
Other
$ 1,059.00
Flipper Parts
Mircoplayfields
Flipper parts
$ 150.00
Displays
Digipinball Shop
Displays
$ 427.00
Cabinet - Sound/Speakers
PinWoofer
Sound/Speakers
From: $ 55.00
Gameroom - Decorations
Pinball Photos LLC
Decorations
From: $ 27.95
$ 49.99
Cabinet - Toppers
Lighted Pinball Mods
Toppers
$ 54.95
Eproms
Pinballrom
Eproms
From: $ 218.00
Lighting - Backbox
Lermods
Backbox
€ 47.00
Playfield - Toys/Add-ons
PPmods
Toys/Add-ons
$ 20.00
Playfield - Protection
Pinhead mods
Protection

Reply

Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.

Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!

Donate to Pinside

Great to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!


This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/searching-for-machines-by-theme and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.

Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.