Unify European & LatAm Spanish tags

[davidmarchand]

There's currently 2 separate tags for Spanish in the Edit game → Metadata → Languages field, called Spanish; Castilian and Spanish; Latin America respectively, when there should only be one, simply called Spanish.

An example

If I want my Spanish-speaking, Latin American friends to find cool platformers, I might send them to itch.io/games/genre-platformer/lang-es, which currently includes Celeste, VVVVVV, and FEZ. Unfortunately, that link doesn't include A Short Hike, because that game was only localized to Latin American Spanish.

I could send them to itch.io/games/genre-platformer/lang-es-419 instead, which does include it, but then none of the other games I just mentioned show up, because those were only localized to European Spanish.

There's no link or tag that I know of that includes all platformers in Spanish regardless of dialect, and itch.io/games/genre-platformer/lang-es/lang-es-419 naturally only shows games that added BOTH tags.

An explanation

This doesn't fulfill any accessibility goal I can think of. European and Latin American Spanish are almost perfectly mutually intelligible, certainly at least as much as British and American English are. Anyone looking for games in one for accessibility reasons (can't read other languages) will also be looking for games in the other.

This would be analogous to there being separate tags for American English vs British English, and no overarching English one. While any individual game might very well want to support multiple dialects internally (Thank Goodness You're Here has both English and Dialect as options, for example, without Steam's metadata needing to reflect this) having 2 separate tags makes filtering and searching cumbersome, rather than accessible (besides still failing to capture any given language's hundreds of variants, like Storyteller having options for European, general Latin American, and specifically Argentine Spanish, again without Steam's metadata needing to reflect that last one).

In practice

I mostly use these tags in class. I want my Spanish-speaking students to have access to a large and current list of games made in whatever engine I'm teaching (and they're adults so the NSFW content is no issue). It's hard enough to get them to focus on a single resource, much less remember that the same link will offer additional examples if they add -419 at the end haha

It also affects community building. As part of other efforts to promote easy tools for new voices to get into game-making, people might want to both curate, say, a list of Spanish-language twines, while also displaying a link to all Spanish-language twines on Itch, which is harder when that's two separate, ocasionally overlapping lists.

Workaround

Tagging your games with both language tags so anyone'll find it regardless of which of the two they looked for, whether the game is localized to both dialects or not. It kinda works for any individual dev who's aware of the issue, but it doesn't scale easily enough to make searching more effective for the user who wants to find things.

Solution/s

My proposed 3-step solution would be:

1. Automatically assign the lang-es language tag to all games that currently have the lang-es-419 tag.
2. Rename the lang-es tag from Spanish; Castilian to just Spanish.
3. Get rid of the lang-es-419 tag entirely.

Alternatively, a new, overarching Spanish tag could be created and automatically assigned to all games that currently have Spanish; Castilian and/or Spanish; Latin America, but I feel that wouldn't be parsimonious in the slightest.

Additionally, the search results page could include new UI to find games that have one tag OR another, but again, I feel that's too much trouble for just this issue. (Maybe this is already possible with the right URL tokens, I'm not sure.)

P.S.

Steam also has this issue and all my Argentine game dev friends hate it haha but Steam doesn't seem as open to feedback.