Howdy! For this month's newsletter I am talking about the recent news regarding Steam renaming the Clicker tag to Incremental. I think this was a very good change. I've suffered from this issue when browsing steam and I particularly like this solution.
The problem, as I saw it, is that active incrementals were clearly associated or at least related to the games inside the clicker and idler tags, but they themselves are neither idlers nor clickers. Informally I believe people were already stretching the definition of clicker to refer to any active incremental.
This confusion meant that us, as fans of incremental games, really just had to look at both tags. The issue with this is how many non-incremental idlers there are! There are desktop toys, idle creature collectors, and even virtual assistants that tag themselves idlers but are generally not what someone looking for incremental games wants to find. It's made finding all incrementals a task with a really bad signal to noise ratio. It's a problem cleanly solved by renaming clicker to incremental, as it is now unambiguous which tag(s) a game should have.
I've seen some suggest that renaming clicker was the wrong move; that renaming idler would have been better or adding a new tag. I don't think this is true. As I already mentioned, idlers contains a lot of games definitely not incremental, which are now still properly separated. Conversely, I cannot name a clicker game not also accurately described as an incremental game. Considering steam keeps a pretty well curated list of tags, I think this also justifies not creating a new tag, although I suppose my heart goes out for those looking for games specifically with a central clicking mechanics like cookie clicker.
My hope for this change is that all the games we collectively agree upon as being incremental will all be tagged as such, and idler will increasingly come to represent non-incrementals, and including or excluding the idlers tag sufficiently differentiating between idle and active incremental games, for those who still wish for that divide. Since this announcement I had to update how the plusone curation feed fetches new releases from Steam, and I've been able to save myself a nice amount of work by only looking at the Incremental tag.
Also, just as a head's up: I've updated the explore pages on plusone and they should be much more performant now when filtering or searching for games!
And if you want to see each week's releases, make sure to subscribe at https://plusone.incremental.social!