Trends & clusters
Every game is decomposed onto three axes read from its title and description — subject (what it is about), mechanic (what you do), format (how it is packaged) — then grouped by tag per axis. These clusters, not any genre label, are the unit a forming trend is measured on.
Subject
Mechanic
Format
A cluster is a canonicalizer bucket, not yet a semantic one. Clusters group on
a lightweight singularization of the tag string, so near-synonyms that are not
spelling variants stay separate — soccer and football are two clusters, as are
role-playing and roleplaying. Read a cluster as a trend allowing that a real
subject can be split across a couple of labels until semantic clustering replaces
string canonicalization.