# Game Development Topics: A Tag-Based Investigation on Game Development Stack Exchange
## 8 Discussion
### RQ3 Discussion  
In a software development context where software is often the meeting of demands/requirements for a domain with the available technological offers, it is particularly important to analyse how well different requirements or concerns mesh (concept-concept), how well different technologies answer these demands (tech-concept), and, finally, how well these technologies can work together (tech-tech). Our analyses of pairs of tags and their findings provide a first step towards tooling that could help project developers, maintainers, and managers decide on which choices provide better community support.  
To further our understanding, from an academic research perspective, of the interactions between tags, we conducted a preliminary additional investigation into combinations of tags. We looked into cases where questions were tagged only with concepts, only with techs, or with a mix of both. We found that about 22% were tagged with only concepts, 22% were tagged with only techs, and 56% had a mix of tech and concept tags. Questions tagged with only concepts are outstanding in a number of ways: in comparison to the other questions, they are slightly less viewed but have scores that are on average 2-3 times higher. Moreover, their failure rate is slightly lower.  
To obtain a better understanding of the data and the tag combinations, we took interest in the top 100 questions by score. There were six tech-only questions, and they all received accepted answers; a few examples: _\"What is Vulkan and how does it differ from OpenGL?\"_, and _\"What happens when Time.time gets very large in Unity?\"_. Only seventeen questions have a mix of concept and tech tags, two of them without accepted answers. Examples of answered mixed questions include: _\"How can I create a \"see behind walls\" effect?\"_ [tags: _Unity, shaders, graphics effects]_, _\"Is UDP still better than TCP for data-heavy realtime games?\"_ [tags: _c++, networking, udp, realtime]_. The two mixed questions without accepted answers are: _\"How do you handle aspect ratio differences with Unity 2D?\"_, _\"Why do tutorials use different approaches to OpenGL rendering?\"_. Regarding concept-only questions, 60 questions out of the 77 received accepted answers, including _\"How can I store game metadata in a png file?\"_, _\"Why is it so bad to optimize too early?\"_. Concept-only questions without accepted answers include: _\"How to avoid players getting lost in and/or bored by the meta game?\"_ and _\"What is an optimum failure rate that will keep people coming back to my game?\"_. The vast majority of top scoring questions are relatively open-ended or asking for opinions, and we could not uncover any clear pattern that distinguishes questions that receive accepted answers from those that do not.  
The above analysis highlights that questions that are detached from specific technology offerings generally score higher than those which are tethered to a given technology. In a way, it is not really surprising since answers to these questions may help developers, regardless of the different technology choices they may have already made. Nonetheless, we could not find in the data strong indications that questions focusing on concepts get significantly higher community support.