Thanks!
Perhaps a rule should be made so that only game threads with a definite end point can be started. That way games like Mafia, Feud, Guess the X, etc. will be allowed but games like Pad Your Post Count With Movie Quotes won’t be. Once a game is over the discussion will eventually die down and the thread will fade away.
You missed a thread game. It’s actually 23-12. And I agree, that is a absolutely terrible ratio. There’s clearly a problem and I don’t know why the mods are ignoring it.
Meh. I’d prefer just separating the games out entirely. That’s a clear rule, easy to understand, and keeps the Game Room useful for discussion of games.
Alternately, moving videogames back under cafe society would be peachy, since they have much more in common with movies than with Guess My Number.
There are people who browse by individual forums? What a crazy world.
I don’t think moving video games back into Cafe would be a great idea. There aren’t THAT many of them and they would end up being too hard to find there IMHO. I think the Game Room is fine as it is, minus the Thread Games. All the rest of the crap (card, video, sports, etc…) together is enough to support a forum though none of that separately is enough to rise above the existing volume of the other forums.
The D&D setup thread is a game thread but the FF league and WoW threads are not?
Sorry. I didn’t actually review the contents of each thread and just bolded based on title. Either way I left the Family Feud thread off so my count is still good.
Why would a WoW thread (a discussion of a video game) be considered a thread game? And the Fantasy Football threads aren’t thread games because they’re discussions of football, the fantasy part is just the tissue that holds them together.
And I would say those are threads where people are discussing games played off board. They aren’t actually playing the games in those threads.
At least for the purposes of the most elemental form of this proposed split, the heuristic would boil down two a “yes” answer to one of the following two questions:
“Are the posters playing a game in this thread?”
“Are the posters discussing a game played elsewhere in this thread?”
Seems executable to me. I won’t comment on the wisdom or desirability of the idea. No opinion, can’t be troubled to formulate one, not particularly married to the status quo and not especially excited at the proposed change.
+2! I mean, +3! Wait…what number are we on again?
Anyway…
Seems like the main complaint is from people having difficulty sorting out the game threads from the non-game threads. So how about this – in the title of each game thread, add a tag such as (GAME) or (GT) or something like that? It would make the forum index easier to scan, not only for the non-game-threaders, but also for finding that damn Haiku Thread after nobody’s posted to it for three days.
It’s more than that. Part of the problem is that threads about games are quickly moved to the bottom of the pile by thread games, meaning they’re not noticed and ultimately die young.
I think the question to ask yourself, if you oppose moving game threads to a new board, is what harm do you think it will do? It’s not enough that one, personally, doesn’t see the need. There are obviously people who would be happier if game threads were moved. So, what’s the down side? How is the cost greater than the benefit?
I’m not against creating a new subforum for game threads, in fact I’d fully support it. It’s just that the mods have chosen otherwise, for now.
As for sports/v.game threads dying on the vine due to clutter, well… ISTR that The Game Room has never generated a lot of traffic, even before the game threads took over. In fact it’s still one of the least-active forums on the SDMB (leaving aside The Barn House, Straight Dope Chicago, etc.) I’m not entirely convinced that moving an entire subgenre of threads to another forum would change that.
It still makes no sense at all that video games were ever removed from Cafe Social. Cafe Social’s description is "Our salon for art, drama, literature, movies, music, comics, cuisine – all the artistic disciplines –* if it’s about creativity, entertainment, or leisure, it goes here.**"*
Which is obviously a blatant lie since video games are creative, entertaining, and meant for leisure, and yet was arbitrarily excluded.
I could go either way. I suspect it’s because the GAME room is a good place for video GAMES.
Like I said before though, video games are not a very hot topic in general and would die on Cafe if sent back there.
Although I don’t often participate in The Game Room or in thread games (ever), I heartily endorse the proposal to move the thread games into their own sub-forum. It could be called Thread Games, and would have it own ready-made theme song.
I blame the Cafe Socialists.
And many would argue video games is an antiquated term for what’s more accurately interactive experiences.
To lump story-driven experiences like the Last of Us in with board games and sports is silly.
Before you ask why something happens, you need to show that it does happen. And before you ask how to fix a problem, you need to show that the problem exists. In this case, it is factually, provably false that the problem described here exists. When I look at the Game Room, the first page goes back 48 hours, and it would go back further, except that the default forum settings are to only show the past two days worth of threads. The game threads aren’t pushing anything off of the front page; it’s just time that’s doing that.
People point to there being 22 in-thread game threads and 12 threads about external games, or whatever, and say that that indicates a problem. But it’s not like getting rid of the game threads would mean that we’d have 34 threads about external games. If we got rid of the in-thread games, then what we would have left would be 12 threads about external games and nothing else. It’d be a ghost town. If anything, the fact that the in-thread games outnumber the other threads would indicate that it’s those other threads that are the ones getting in the way, since clearly the in-thread games are pretty popular.