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sleaze: Then maybe starting or bumping up a thread on 'narative structure in X-game' might be an idea.
Great. Where? I wouldn't want to start it in COnversation for the reasons given earlier. Headshop would seem to be the only real alternative, but then it's still not a great fit. Maybe if the thread was 'Narrative structure in videogames' then it'd work, but a thread about a specific title or small series seems to me to be too limiting to work very well in that part of the board.
Flowers: I don't think anyone is arguing that
This ties in with what both Tom and GA have just mentioned, but in a funny way, I am. Tom sez there's an anxiety... to do with the kinds of conversations people have around gaming, and I think he's right to say it. I'd be very worried about the likelihood of a gaming forum eventually becoming full of, well, stupidity. There's a specific type of stupidty that infests gaming fora - imagine if threads about films always ended up breaking down into arguments about whether Paramount are better than Universal, or Cineworld better than UCI, and you'll get the idea.
We'd have to protect against that, somehow. I'd hope that the culture of Barbelith would prevent that sort of thing from happening, but there have been painful hints of it in the threads in Conversation before now. The only real solution that I can see would be proactive moderation - leading by example - which would require the mods in that area of the board to be much more involved in creating new discussions than we probably are elsewhere (I know that I could certainly improve my track record on this where Music & Radio is concerned, at least).
Smoothly: d be interested to know, how many games have been discussed in those videogames threads, and roughly how many posts have been written about each? I suppose what I’m asking is, could you reorganise the posts in those threads into separate topics for the different games or subjects? What would you lose by doing so?
Too many games for me to go through the threads and count them, I'm afraid. There have been a few moments in them where a discussion about a certain title seems to be breaking out, only for it to die soon after because of the general nature of the threads - we went for a couple of pages talking about Skies of Arcadia before something else popped up and basically (and unintentionally, I'm sure) killed that train of thought.
On a related note, having it all stuck in one or two threads also makes it difficult to return to a particular topic later on. Not everybody plays the same game at the same time, but by the time one person is playing it the thread's moved in so many different directions that they may not feel there's any point in talking about it again. Paleface recently mentioned the last Zelda game, for instance, and there's potentially a lot to talk about that the rest of us hadn't already covered there. If it had its own thread, it'd be much easier and much more appealing to bump it back up.
On the issue of including sport> difficult one. Sport and videogames aren't the same thing. I know that there's a narrative in every sports match, but there's a marked difference between the narrative in, say, a game of football - where the story's being written as the game progresses and is totally driven by events - and the narrative in something like Deus Ex, where there's an actual writer hiding behind the scenes, dictating the story's ultimate direction. Games are a strange sort of amalgam of traditional sports and films. But if it meant that the forum got created, then I'd have no real complaints with sport being a part of it. Hell, there's a thread idea for it right there.
Tom: Certainly over the last few years there have been numerous discussions about the quality of threads in (particularly) Comic Books / Film, TV & Theatre and Radio & Music and whether they're any better than people could have on any other board on the internet...
Now you look at most sites around gaming and the discussions in those fora are pretty banal. They're all about how you do something in some room in some game, or they're about what particular force power you need to kill Darth Traya and a large proportion of them use l33t speak. There are not an awful lot of people out there who want to engage in the kinds of discussions that some of hte people on the board have suggested might be their ideal - ie. ludology, cultural stuff, aesthetic critiques, politics-of, new developments in, interaction and participation. These subjects would be great for Barbelith. But the question is, would those be the conversations that we would be getting?
(Apologies for mass quotage there, but it helps me keep track of what I'm talking about.) This is where I think Barbelith and a games forum are almost made for each other. Games offer more topics of discussion than films or comics or music, imo. More discussion of issues that haven't already been discussed to death, at least. There's technical stuff, there's cultural stuff, there's the "ooh, I'm really looking forwards to this" stuff. Crucially, there's stuff there that nobody else, to the best of my knowledge, is talking about. Certainly not in this sort of environment.
And it's odd, surely, that Barbelith - supposedly for cutting edge, forward-thinking and future-happy weirdos - is currently ignoring a medium that's finally finding its feet as an artform (an artform with massive cultural popularity, at that) in its own right.
I think we should probably hear from more people before deciding on this, though, as I'm slightly scared that I'm making it sound like I'd start a million and one threads right away, proving the forum's effectiveness from the off, whereas in reality I'm much more of a contributor than an initiator. I'd definitely give it a go, though. |
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