Upcoming S-G Changes and Thoughts
So for like... 3 years?... I've been thinking of creating a sister-site to Story Games: One that focuses on Design.
I started to create a post here about why, the history behind the decision and all, but I figured that I better do a spoken thing instead: It's totally tl;dr.
The main reason basically boils down to: S-G is a community about play and games (and aimless enthusiasm for new/hotness! That's me in a nutshell), not about design as a core focus/competency. And yet, a lot of people join with an application message like, "Hey I like what I'm reading here, and want feedback on my design!", despite the fact that the Game Design Help area is private/hidden from the public. And yet, the discussions that happen in that realm are not pointless, and as game design discussions go they're pretty interesting (at least the ones I end up reading; there's a lot that I don't) so I don't mind. Still, it clutters up the play stuff.
There was also an issue of Teh Futur: I'd been saying that growth of S-G would require moving to a forum system with more "support": Yep, those ones that are like honeypots to spammers: The vBulletins, the SimpleMachines, and so on (I'd still aim for one which required Appliation/Approval steps: That's been the single element that's kept the community in the realm of "Healthy Without Requiring Constant Moderation, Intervention and Fiddling"). I was even thinking about going all Drupal all over this shit, but I'd need to test first: I'm concerned that, since drupal is a CM suite and not a forum-focused suite, that the forum stuff might be unoptimized/slow, and so on.
So I was thinking of making a rash move to jump forward to the Next Forum Implementation, Right Now ("Soon"): Basically dividing the forum into two "subforums": Games and Design (no "tons of little seperate forums" thing). However, I think I've come to a solution that will let us keep things on Vanilla 1.x for a few more years, and still manage the split between games and design. No need to go into detail here.
The usual questions abound, though: I'm not particularly interested in design-speak overall (I like to look at what people are doing, but tend not to step in with anything resembling useful advice), so how do I moderate? Do I look for guest mods? What are the standards for acceptable discourse? How do I manage the split so that I'm not simply ghetto-izing such discussions? And so on.
Topics of marketing are also interesting: While they are clearly designer-oriented, there is also an element of "what do the *players/buyers* of games think?" in some of these discussions. I'm particularly waffling on how to deal with those discussions, but perhaps in the end the original poster could post a thread on each "site", and on one side look for designer/marketer feedback, and on the other request advice directly from a player-audience.
Anyway, just some stuff on my mind recently.
-Andy
I started to create a post here about why, the history behind the decision and all, but I figured that I better do a spoken thing instead: It's totally tl;dr.
The main reason basically boils down to: S-G is a community about play and games (and aimless enthusiasm for new/hotness! That's me in a nutshell), not about design as a core focus/competency. And yet, a lot of people join with an application message like, "Hey I like what I'm reading here, and want feedback on my design!", despite the fact that the Game Design Help area is private/hidden from the public. And yet, the discussions that happen in that realm are not pointless, and as game design discussions go they're pretty interesting (at least the ones I end up reading; there's a lot that I don't) so I don't mind. Still, it clutters up the play stuff.
There was also an issue of Teh Futur: I'd been saying that growth of S-G would require moving to a forum system with more "support": Yep, those ones that are like honeypots to spammers: The vBulletins, the SimpleMachines, and so on (I'd still aim for one which required Appliation/Approval steps: That's been the single element that's kept the community in the realm of "Healthy Without Requiring Constant Moderation, Intervention and Fiddling"). I was even thinking about going all Drupal all over this shit, but I'd need to test first: I'm concerned that, since drupal is a CM suite and not a forum-focused suite, that the forum stuff might be unoptimized/slow, and so on.
So I was thinking of making a rash move to jump forward to the Next Forum Implementation, Right Now ("Soon"): Basically dividing the forum into two "subforums": Games and Design (no "tons of little seperate forums" thing). However, I think I've come to a solution that will let us keep things on Vanilla 1.x for a few more years, and still manage the split between games and design. No need to go into detail here.
The usual questions abound, though: I'm not particularly interested in design-speak overall (I like to look at what people are doing, but tend not to step in with anything resembling useful advice), so how do I moderate? Do I look for guest mods? What are the standards for acceptable discourse? How do I manage the split so that I'm not simply ghetto-izing such discussions? And so on.
Topics of marketing are also interesting: While they are clearly designer-oriented, there is also an element of "what do the *players/buyers* of games think?" in some of these discussions. I'm particularly waffling on how to deal with those discussions, but perhaps in the end the original poster could post a thread on each "site", and on one side look for designer/marketer feedback, and on the other request advice directly from a player-audience.
Anyway, just some stuff on my mind recently.
-Andy