Nintendo's Switch 2 keywords collide with library standards
News that the next Nintendo platform will lean on proprietary “game key words” has landed with a thud among archivists, librarians, and anyone who cares about cultural memory. In Japan, the National Diet Library (NDL) has already said it will not adopt Nintendo’s new tagging scheme for its records, framing the feature as unfit for long-term bibliographic work. That might sound like a niche cataloging spat, but it goes straight to the heart of preservation. When a platform holder substitutes open, well-documented metadata with a closed, mutable list of promotional tags, it reshapes how future readers and researchers will find the games of today. It risks turning living culture into a black box, legible only on Nintendo’s terms while the platform is active, then opaque once storefronts shutter and documentation drifts offline. The stakes are practical, not just philosophical: discovery, accessibility, and accurate citation all depend on stable metadata. If you have ever tried to locate a specific version of a game, a patch timeline, or a DLC dependency, you already know how fragile that chain becomes without trustworthy, interoperable descriptors.
Main Part
At a surface level, Nintendo’s “key words” sound harmless: a curated, platform-wide vocabulary attached to each title to improve search results, content guidance, and storefront navigation. In practice, they function as a controlled list managed by the platform holder, not a public standard vetted by the library and archival community. Instead of a descriptive blurb or a clear genre and subject breakdown, users see a handful of terse tags whose internal definitions are invisible to the outside world. Are these terms versioned? Can they be deprecated or remapped without notice? Do they differentiate platform features, content themes, formal mechanics, and audience guidance? Without published documentation, the tags become a moving target. They may be optimized for retail funnels and parental tools, but they are poorly suited to authority control, cross-lingual mapping, and scholarly search. Substituting deep description with opaque labels undermines the very richness that makes games discoverable beyond hype cycles.
The NDL’s refusal is not a snub of games; it is librarianship 101. National libraries rely on transparent, stable taxonomies—NDLSH subject headings, NDC classifications, MARC21 fields, ISBD description, and authority files—to ensure that records can be maintained and linked for decades. Proprietary, undocumented tags fail on several fronts: governance (who decides a term’s scope), persistence (how changes are tracked), interoperability (how to map them to NDLSH or LCSH), and licensing (whether they can be reused in public catalogs). If Nintendo tweaks a keyword’s meaning, the historical record fractures. Worse, these tags blur promotional framing with descriptive intent, muddying provenance. The NDL must create durable records for legal deposit items that can be understood independently of a platform’s lifecycle. With patches, DLC, and regional SKUs already complicating the landscape, libraries need more, not less, rigor—think stable identifiers, version notes, checksums, and clear relationships between base titles and expansions. Closed tags add friction where clarity is most needed.
Preservation is not only about the code; it’s also about context. Scholars studying design trends, accessibility features, or cultural themes need subject headings that distinguish mechanics from motifs, narrative topics from content ratings, and platform affordances from monetization models. Retailers, too, benefit from shared vocabularies that travel across storefronts and languages. If Nintendo’s keywords become the de facto metadata on boxes and product pages, while public institutions ignore them, we end up with a split ecosystem: a platform-centric silo for commerce and a separate, labor-intensive bibliographic layer for research. That duplication increases cataloging costs and invites drift. There’s a clear alternative. Publish the keyword list under an open license, fix it to stable URIs, and provide change logs. Map each term to NDLSH and other standards, expose it as Linked Open Data, and invite peer review by libraries, rating boards like CERO, and preservation groups such as the Game Preservation Society and the Video Game History Foundation. Pair that with versioned title IDs, public APIs, and deposit-friendly documentation for patches and DLC.
Conclusion
This clash is a chance to do better, not a dead end. Nintendo can keep the usability gains of succinct storefront tags while anchoring them to the wider knowledge graph that libraries and museums depend on. That means treating keywords as a public, documented vocabulary with governance, versioning, and mappings to established standards. It also means ensuring that core facts—release dates by region, title IDs, edition details, update history, and support status for online features—are published in a way that survives the platform’s commercial sunset. Players benefit from richer discovery; developers gain clearer visibility for their work; historians and librarians gain tools they can trust for decades. The NDL has drawn an important line: promotional shortcuts cannot substitute for archival rigor. The path forward is collaboration, not isolation—align the platform’s metadata with the public record, and the next generation of games will remain findable and comprehensible long after the Switch 2 is a museum piece.
