I would like to write a long and detailed post about the future of the Survival Horror video game (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clock Tower, etc.) I want to talk in detail about the nuances of these games, including the aesthetics, the pacing, and the music.
I do not believe a thread like this belongs in the Game Room. It will be in large part about the artistic qualities that go into an interactive entertainment experience, and intended for all the people who paid attention to the subtleties of the original survival horror genre. I do not believe this has anything in common with:
NFL Yardage Pool Competition 2010
Bakers Dozen (41 pages)
Trivia Dominoes (118 pages)
SDMB Big League
SDMB FF Dynasty League
SDMB Poker
etc etc. The Game Room forum is swamped with these “forum game” threads with a billion pages each that keep getting bumped to the top.
I have reason to think that if I spend a long time writing out a highly detailed post about survival horror video games, it will sink to the bottom of The Game Room and get very few views and replies. In general, I have found this to be true about video games. The Game Room has proven itself to mostly be a thread for “forum games”, the kind that have nine billion pages and keep getting bumped rapidly over and over again by the people who are playing them. Most of the rest of the discussion seems to be about sports.
All of the things I plan on writing about could just as easily be written about movies. If I did a thread on the nuances, aesthetics, music, and pacing of Stanley Kubrick’s movies, it would go in Cafe Society, of course. If I did a thread on the nuances and aesthetics and pacing of John Carpenter’s movies it would go in Cafe Society. Yet if I do the exact same kind of thread about a genre of interactive entertainment, I am expected to put the thread in the sports-and-games-heavy Game Room even though what I am talking about is ultimately “artistic” stuff.
I don’t have any issue with it, but want to point out a few things:
The second word in “video game” is GAME.
Your list consists of (as of this posting) the 15th, 5th, 16th, 14th, 9th and 12th threads, while three of the top five threads are about video games.
The reason threads sink to the bottom of a forum page isn’t because others dominate the landscape, it’s because not enough other people find them interesting enough to respond*. The Game Room isn’t a very busy forum, aside from a handful of Mafia games that are constantly active. The 50th thread in the Game Room was last posted to at 1pm yesterday. The 50th thread in Cafe Society was last posted to at 5:40pm yesterday.
You’re overestimating the “forum games”. Of the top 20 threads, 4 of them are forum games. 7 are about sports (two of which are about Dopers playing poker with each other). 3 are about fantasy sports. 6 of them are about video games (not including video poker).
*I’m not saying your proposed topic doesn’t sound interesting. But I will say that it’s bound to garner discussion from a much smaller group of people in either forum. And there are far more people with a passing knowledge of most media than there are of people who play mafia - thus Cafe Society gets far more traffic, far more threads, and will sink a low participation thread far faster than the Game Room.
If you started it in Cafe Society, I’d move it to the Game Room, because it’s about a game. The fact that you’re writing about the aesthetics of the game doesn’t mean that it’s a Cafe Society topic.
I disagree. I know I go into the game room about a tenth as often as I go to cafe society, so a topic like this that I might find interesting might never even be seen by me. Why do I not go to GR very often? I don’t care about sports, I don’t care about forum games, and they make up a large chunk of the board.
Yes, they are video GAMES but topics about GAME shows still go in Cafe Society, don’t they? Or should anyone talking about Jeopardy from now on post in the Game Room? What about competition based reality shows? Those are basically an extreme form of game show, guess Hells Kitchen threads should go in the Game Room too.
Some games, like Madden or twitch shooters or stuff like that, sure, maybe they have more in common with sports than TV and movies, but games like the topic creator is talking about, they’ve got a lot more in common with movies, TV, books, than a guy throwing a ball around.
Yeah, I’m always finding 2 week old threads in the Game Room I want to reply to and then I feel like that ship has already sailed because no one does that in the other, fast moving forums.
Then frequent the forum more. If you’re interested in video games, why AREN’T you going in there? Currently, one-third of the first 150 threads are about video games. That’s easily the second largest chunk in the forum.
This is almost a half decent argument. But there’s nothing interactive about reality television, and it completely ignores the “television” aspect of it. The medium of “Heavy Rain” is a video game. The medium of “Hell’s Kitchen” is television. The forum descriptions make it incredibly clear where the two of those (totally different) genres belong.
There’s currently a thread in the Game Room that’s almost 4 years old, 6 pages long, and is a constant discussion of the artistic merits of video games. In a forum specifically for “games and sports of all sorts, including video games, board games, party games, role-playing games, cards, and puzzles” it fits right in. In Cafe Society, it’d have fallen to the 2nd or 3rd page multiple times. YOU may have participated in it, but that doesn’t mean it’d have done well with the rest of the CSizens.