Proposed: Move thread games back to MPSIMS where they're a better fit.

About This Message Board
1

As you probably all know, we had a recent discussion about the problem with thread games strangling out the discussions in the game room. Even though I, and other posters, made what seems to be to be an obvious and compelling case for a new forum or subforum for thread games, we’re told that’s not an option. Read the thread if you want a more full discussion, but I will summarize it thusly:

Thread games, in which you play a game by posting in a thread, tend to have very high posting frequency with very low content. Message boards bump the most recent post to the top. When all the content of a forum is a discussion, this works. Topics that are particularly interesting, or topical, or otherwise driving people to post to them frequently go to the top. However, this does not work well when you mix them with thread games, in which people rack up hundreds or even thousands of posts in a single thread in a short period of time by making very low content posts very frequently. With the game threads constantly pushed to the top, it drowns out other discussion. There have been points in the game room where there are literally 3 or 4 discussions on the first page, with the rest of it being game threads.

So the key point is that thread games and discussion threads are fundamentally different types of content, and do not co-exist well. The obvious solution, a separate forum for thread games, so that those who seek them out can enjoy them without the clutter of discussion, and vice versa, benefiting everyone, is off the table.

So I propose a solution that’s less optimal than that, but far better than the current status quo:

Move thread games to MPSIMS, the forum that the nature of a game thread most closely matches. MPSIMS threads tend to be chatter - relatively low content, relatively quick pace, often about whimsical or joking topics, often about off the wall subjects. A game thread like Haiku Madness is much closer in content to, say, the Monday Morning Post in MPSIMS than it is the game room threads NFL Week 4 or Wasteland 2.

A little bit of investigation backs that up. If you click the post count of a thread on the forum page, you will get a list of the people who have posted to the thread in descending order of number of posts. So you can see who is posting most to various threads. Grabbing some current example threads in the game room and the top posters:

thread games:

trivia dominoes
chesirekat 520
prof pepperwinkle 424
burpo the wonder mutt 262
annie-xmas 232
elindeil’s heir 179
biotop 147

free association
bullitt 2884
siam sam 1741
zeldar 1404
prof pepperwinkle 1190
picunurse 1130
labtrash 1014
elendil’s heir 988
carnut 975

count to infinity in pictures
buddha_david 940
little nemo 409
happy lendervedder 234
toucanna 169
elendil’s heir 162
prof pepperwinkle 140
silenus 121
eutychus 113

monty python non sequitor
elendil’s heir 908
bmalion 443
knorf 366
prof pepperwinkle 356
buddha david 187
bullitt 186
askance 182
burpo the wonder mutt 145

haiku madness
intergalactic gladiator 938
mean mr. mustard 830
annie-xmas 630
elendil’s heir 600
sternvogel 584
bullitt 519
the peyote coyote 411
fear itself 326
prof pepperwinkle 291
chesirekat 236

bakers dozen
elendil’s heir 3176
elvisl1ves 2191
realitychuck 2012
bullitt 1730
siam sam 1339
sampiro 1248
astorian 1236
northern piper 1076
sternvogel 981
annie xmas 776

actual game room discussion:

wanted: city of heroes players
skywatcher 203
master rik 140
der trihs 133
lok 127
brainiac4 97
maus magill 94
bosstone 93
balance 83

wow catacylsm
master rik 273
gnoitall 153
oakminster 93
nava 67
martu 66
lemur866 58
runestar 50
infovore 47

digital distribution sales
senorbeef 342
jophiel 149
skywatcher 50
left hand of dorkness 29
control z 26
kinthalis 24
capnpitt 22
terminus est 20

ray rice goe stubthumping
marley23 43
mhendo 38
digitalc 21
really not all that bright 18
iiandyiiii 17
fotheringay-phipps 15
aceplace 14

michael sam comes out
Marley23 41
Loach 25
Bellhorn 24
Great Antibob 16
Hamlet 14
Really Not All That Bright 14
ElvisL1ves 11
Stink Fish Pot 11

tennis 2014
Tabby_Cat 48
bldysabba 47
shijinn 17
Turble 17
Grumman 16
Jragon 13
Tom Scud 13
Hamlet 13

josh gordon, ultimate knucklehead
SenorBeef 28
Airman Doors, USAF 12
Hamlet 11
Red Wiggler 8
samclem 7
MOIDALIZE 5
Cubsfan 5
VarlosZ 3

What do we learn from investigating who’s posting to game threads?

  1. A handful of people are monopolizing the valuable space at the top of the game room forum by bumping threads to the top thousands of times in a short time span
  2. There’s very little overlap between thread game regulars and game room discussion regulars. Don’t just use those lists above - those are just examples. Look yourself. Open the game room, and see who’s posting to game threads vs discussion threads.
  3. The people who are posting to thread games, when they aren’t doing that, are predominantly MPSIMS posters. This makes sense, as I said - the content of MPSIMS tends to be a lot more similar to thread games than the content of non-thread-game threads in the game room.

The powers that be think that we’re getting positive traffic flow from the thread games, that people come to the boards for the thread games but then stay for the discussions. I doubt that this is true to any great extent, but if it is, this clearly shows that the people who are attracted to the boards for thread games would be much more at home at MPSIMS than the game room. So even if you think that you’re driving traffic to the board, then drive traffic to the forum that’s most like the things that brought them here - MPSIMS.

Thread games are strangling the game room. Not only are they not bringing in new people to sports and game discussion threads, because they’re generally a very different group of people, but they’re causing people to give up on that forum because they have to sort through a lot of clutter to find any discussions. Yes, the traffic numbers for the game room would be lower if you moved thread games out of there, but they’re artificially propped up currently by thread games that don’t belong anyway. If we would stop strangling the game room with spammy thread games, I suspect the actual discussion of games and sports would increase.

So, this solution would
A) Not require an administrator or change in the board structure, which is apparently a huge intractable problem, but rather simply shift around a type of content to a more appropriate existing forum
B) Put game threads in the forum where they’re most similar to the other content, so that they won’t dominate and crowd-out a disparate type of content in the same way, since MPSIMS tends to be more like them than any other forum
C) Any new traffic that actually may be driven to the boards by the thread games would be more at home, and more likely to enjoy the content of MPSIMs and stay, than they would the content of the game room
D) Rescue the game room forum. Not being smothered by all the spam would encourage the actual discussion threads in there.

Literally the only reason that thread games are stuck in the game room is that “the game room” and “thread games” have the word game in them. They do not share a kind of content, they do not share a similarity of discussion, they don’t share anything really. MPSIMs is a much closer fit.

It’s a compromise position I think pretty much all of us can get behind. It improves the situation for everyone and does not require a new forum.

2

I agree. The forum description even says, “From harmless diversions…”

3

I just want to applaud Senorbeef’s post and the work that went into it. Minor nitpick, since this is the SDMB after all :slight_smile: - what you have marked as tennis 2014 is actually The Hearthstone thread.

4

The thread games used to have much more discussion. The Death Pool certainly still does. The Feud and Madness games, when they were popular, would have Dopers raising questions and explaining their decisions. Above all, they had a definite life span wherein they would naturally fall off the front page.

Now we have never-ending so-called games where you can just post whatever random thing comes to mind. They require no discussion and, it seems, actively discourage it. They have no natural life span. You might as well make them stickies by the way they’re permanently locked to the top of the forum. They certainly appear to be mundane and pointless to me.

5

I agree. The recent tagging debate has brought me back to the Game Room after a long absence. I’ve avoided it in the past because of the difficulty of finding threads about games versus these game threads. Moving game threads out of this forum would make me much more likely to contribute in the future.

6

I’m like, king of the damn game room. I run all sorts of contests during football season, I run the steam community group for the SDMB, I try to organize specific multiplayer gaming sessions for SDMBers, and participate in a wide variety of sports and game discussions, and yet I’ve found myself going less and less because it’s really frustrating to have to read an entire page of thread games that I have no interest in over and over again to try to find some hidden discussion in there. If I, as active as any non-thread game game roomer am getting too fed up with it to go in there, and I have been going less and less, I’d imagine there have to be hundreds of people who quit before me.

The thread game people aren’t even the game room crowd. They’re the MPSIMS crowd. There’s very little cross pollination. The majority of people who go into the game room are looking for discussion, but they only post a tiny fraction as much as those playing game threads, where literally a few dozen people are making thousands of posts per week, each one of them bringing a game thread to the top of the page.

Paradoxically, the powers that be feel that this somehow is saving the game room, that it keeps the forum post count up, but it’s only artificially inflating it by having some post count parties in there. Real discussion in the game room has been on a steady decline and eventually will be snuffed out without some sort of intervention.

7

Perhaps I’m biased, since I have no interest in those threads, but to me they are nothing but post count padding. And as I said before, I wonder if it’s really the right kind of traffic on a board that for years has had server issues, database issues, and a long-time ban on things like pictures, avatars, and attachments in the name of look and performance (which I’m for, by the way.)

At this point, get rid of all of the labels, even the first system implemented a couple days ago. My brain is already pretty good at mentally skipping over the chaff to find the wheat and it’s not so bad if the number of threads displayed at once is increased by the user.

8

I suppose one of the things we have to think about is that thread games’ll do the same thing to MPSIMS. Which, of course, is why my own suggestion is to move the sports and video game discussions to Cafe Society, where they fit perfectly well under the ‘Entertainment’ heading.

9

I vote to keep Game threads where they are now.

10

I rarely go to the game room forum, a large part of the reason is those game threads. I too wonder why they don’t count as post padding.

I think MPSIMS is a better fit.

11

I agree that thread games are a much better fit in MPSIMS, in the abstract. I think the problem, as **Beef **alluded to, is numbers. MPSIMS already gets a lot more traffic than the Game Room, and moving the game threads would lead to one even more overstuffed forum sitting next to a relatively empty one. At the least I think we’d need to look at and consider the numbers before moving the game threads.

12

Well argued. I agree they should be moved to MPSIMS.

This also means the game threads won’t overwhelm the rest of the forum as much. I think they need to be in a faster moving forum.

13

I agree that there’s a problem with too many game threads in The Game Room. It crowds out actual discussion of sports and games. There’s too much noise to wade through.

14

I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I will: different people like different things.

15

We already did move them to their own place. That place is called the Game Room.

16

If we define a thread as “active” if there has been at least one post in the thread since the beginning of the day Tuesday (Eastern time), I see this: there are 29 active MPSIMS threads and 24 active [GAME] threads, i.e. game-playing threads. That’s way, way too much traffic. Stuff will get lost, and we don’t want a forum to move so fast that stuff is hard to find, or where lost of things are pushed to the bottom where nobody sees them. As I recall, most of the [GAME] threads were originally in MPSIMS and this was a problem at the time - and back then there were fewer of those threads because there wasn’t a dedicated space that encouraged people to play them. So that’s a no-go. I do think that right now we have too many tags, which creates visual clutter. And having some threads labeled [GAME] and some labeled GAME is confusing. I think the best solution is labeling just one type of thread, and my experience is that it’s usually easy to tell if a thread is about a sport or a video or board game. So labeling threads where games are being played makes the most sense to me.

17

I can see them as a sub-forum to either MPISMS or The Game Room. On one hand they are games. One the other hand, they’re almost inherently for just passing time (or wasting it).

But the distinction should be made, regardless, that these threads are not discussions and relentlessly pad and fill up any forum like all the bits of meh in a box of Lucky Charms with no expiration date—and face it, we all really just want the marshmallows.

18

What do you think of moving the video game and sports discussions to Cafe Society?

19

Are you replying to anyone in particular? Because your post doesn’t really address any of the points mentioned.

“Their own place” is particularly vague and rather inaccurate. If you mean “the place we’ve decided to put games”, then it is accurate, but completely unhelpful and tautological. If you mean “a place by themselves” (which is one interpretation of “own place”), that is incorrect, as they currently share a location with discussions about sports- and video games and board games and card games - the key point being discussions. If you mean “the place they best belong”, then you’re going to have to provide some justification beyond the word game.

I do have one question with regards to the OP: does it take an administrator to change Forum descriptions (on the main page), or can a Mod do that?

20

Those things were in Cafe Society before The Game Room was created, and it seemed to me that people didn’t like the fit - there was something of a split with sports fans on one side and movie/TV/etc. fans on the other. (As someone who enjoys both, I have trouble understanding the animosity, but oh well.) So a significant number of posters didn’t like the fit. We created The Game Room to accommodate all game-related stuff, and as some of the mods have pointed out, the forum is kind of a grab bag. But I don’t think we have to move stuff back from whence it came to deal with that. I think some judicious labeling would do the trick. I’m particularly wary of moving sports threads anywhere else because over the years I think those threads have developed their own sports bar-style tone. There’s ribbing of fans of rival teams, for example, and in Cafe Society I think that would look out of place.

You need admin privileges to do that.