All I want for Christmas is a tagging system

[captainhairy]

I love the newest version of the Steam client, but there's one thing (OK, more than one thing, but for now let's focus on this one) that bothers me: Categories are a pretty useful idea, but with a simple tweak they could become SO MUCH MORE.

Just allowing each game to be listed under more than one category would make my library so much easier to navigate when looking for something to play.

With this change, it would also be nice to be able to more efficiently manipulate categories, such as drag-and-drop category adding, or perhaps a simple checkbox list on the game page itself instead of in a seperate dialogue box, making organising things after buying a bundle pack or something a lot easier.

Say you just bought the ShootBangKill Ultimate Collectors Edition, which contains all 11 ShootBangKill games and their many expansion packs, it is one hell of a chore to right-click, find the 'Shootan Gaems' category, select it and hit OK for each individual entry, as opposed to simply selecting the top game, shift-clicking the bottom one to select them all, then dragging them into the right category.

[upbeatlinux]

icculus built a web app that extends this idea:

http://steamtags.icculus.org/

[captainhairy]

Yeah, that's a decent start at least, but integration into the client and more emphasis on different ways of interacting with the tags is what I'd really like to see, for example, tab-complete for tags, auto-tagging based on Steam's own categorisation system (deletable of course, if the tags are incorrect or just not in the style of the user's tagging system), drag and drop functionality (with things like shift-dragging for copying into more than one tag, that kind of thing).

I mean, optionally using Steam's current categorisation system alone would be a big improvement. Games are listed in more than one genre, and have things like single or multiplayer, developer and publisher, release date and so on listed in their details on the store page. Bringing those into the client properly would be a big step forward.

[Desi]

I agree. The Steam client at the very least needs an expanded category system, where games can appear in more than one category, and you can assign games to a category by dragging into a folder (or ctrl-dragging, to make a copy in a second or third category).