I think that the problem that’s underlying this whole clusterfuck (with all due respect to everyone involved) is that those thread games are contrary in spirit to how this place is run in general.
I don’t mean to say that it’s my opinion that the thread games aren’t worthy or whatever – some people like them and that’s about the best that can be said about most of what goes on here – but this place is steeped in a culture that’s all about taking discussion seriously as discussion. It’s a culture that doesn’t want pictures and avatars and doesn’t want fancy smileys, and stuff like that. And it discourages “post count parties” to such an extent that there was a thread closed a little bit ago where the conversation was totally fine but the title made it seem too much like a celebration of posting for the sake of posting. Threads in GD get closed for not having enough gravitas. Threads in bloody MPSIMS get closed for being too silly. The board is run as though everything needs to have a meaning.
These thread games ain’t like that. As far as I know from the rest of the boards, there is no individual human being called Professor Pepperwinkle. From the Game Room, though, I know that he plays lots and lots of games, and is very often the most recent poster to eight threads in two minutes’ time. Other times it will be a different name, but the same thing. In any other context, that’s exactly the kind of stuff that gets smacked down around here. People are told “maybe cool it for a while” if they’re starting threads everywhere. If somebody gave a one or two word response to every thread in Cafe Society – quoting posts and saying “Lol” or “wat” or something – I guarantee somebody would have something to say about that. This place just does not move that fast. In the Game Room, that isn’t how it works, because they’re playing games. It’s inevitably going to be jarring no matter where that’s happening if those threads are interspersed with threads where all those social norms do apply. They’re a different form of content, not a different topic.
None of it matters. They aren’t hurting anybody. But they’re not in the Game Room because they have anything to do with Game Room discussion, so labeling them differently within that context doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter what color shirts the friggin’ ladies doing Body Pump are wearing when they’re on the basketball court at my local gym; I don’t need them labeled differently. They’re just out there doing something that isn’t what I’m doing out there.
The forum is not a discussion forum with a few game threads shoehorned in. Even if it was originally intended as this, it is, in actual fact, a game thread forum with a few discussions. This very fact is exactly what’s causing so many complaints. If one wants to separate out those two kinds of threads, it makes more sense to move the discussion threads elsewhere, and leave the thread games right where they are.
But none of this will be able to satisfy the people who want, say, discussions about sports. The fact that they’re having a hard time competing with thread games is not a cause of the problem, but a symptom. The real cause of the problem is quite simply that there aren’t a lot of people around here interested in discussing sports. Put such threads in a forum by themselves, and the forum will wither for lack of activity. Put them in with anything else, and the anything else will drown them out. The best possible situation for them is to put them in with something else that’s sufficiently low-activity that it at least won’t push them off the front page, and that’s exactly what we have now.
I would suggest that if you think there’s an appreciable difference between moving game threads to a new “game” forum and moving sports and video game threads to a new “sports and video game” forum, your focus on a perceived competition between the two is greater than the average participant in this discussion.
Honest question - why do you think they fit the Game Room better than MPSIMS? Most of the comments are from people who want them moved, and I’d appreciate the perspective of an active participant in these threads.
Of course, the fact that most comments are from people who want them moved is an observation of a self-selected sample. People who are fine with the way things are usually do not send us a PM saying “you know what, this forum works well and I see no need for radical change.”
This is very well stated, and I agree with leaving the game threads in the Game Room. Since the majority of complainers are ones who are unable to locate their sports discussions, mark those [SPORTS].
But the fact that the game threads is pumping up the post count number of the game room threads is meaningless. This board does not bank on the raw post count of its users, but of the merit of its content. A game room that has 950 posts like these and 50 actual discussion posts per day is not healthier than a game room thread that has 0 thread game posts but 100 actual discussion posts.
In no way are game threads propping up the game room. They’re like weeds, they’re overwhelming it. Only if you are using the most superficial observation to say “oh, look, a thousand posts a day out of the game room, looks pretty healthy to me” can you possibly conclude that.
People interested in discussion are leaving the game room because it’s too obnoxious to deal with the game threads. We’re actually losing real discussion and those topics are fading from the boards. That is far, far more unhealthy than any perceived loss in activity due to moving around some low content, high post count threads.
No, that’s simply not true, and you have no evidence from which to say that.
You’re saying essentially:
Discussion of video games
Discussion of sports
Discussion of role play games
Discussion of card games
Discussion of board games
Discussion of war gaming miniatures
Playing a game within a thread by posting to it
You seem to think the odd one out in that bunch is sports threads. But that is a totally arbitrary distinction on your part. The key point is that all of those subjects are discussions, and the last one is a non-discussion. Furthermore, by its nature, the last one generates many many times more posts than the former, not because they have more content, but because they encourage a low content, high posting post style. A style that, if it existed anywhere else on the board, would be locked and banned.
Discussion of sports is just another type of discussion of games. Different types of discussion have much more in common than non-discussion. And because of their nature, non-discussion tends to drown out discussion.
As far as Chronos’ original point? It doesn’t matter Create a new GAME DISCUSSION forum and say that video games/sports/RPGs/etc go there, and fine, we’re there. Or make a new THREAD GAMES FORUM and decide that the discussions stay in the same place and the thread games move, fine, whatever. It literally does not matter which of the things keeps The Game Room and which gets its own new forum, because either way, they’d be separated, which is the important part.
It’s just sort of obvious social engineering 101-type stuff that if you’re presented with a list of options, the first five you see are going to influence your behavior more than the sixth one.
Fewer people will post to a thread that is halfway down the page than to one that’s at the top of the thread. Nobody is “complaining” that they’re “unable to locate sports threads.” When the first page load of a forum is, most of the time, a list of very similar rapid-fire low-content game threads, that influences what else happens in that forum. Nobody’s making personal attacks about the merits of the threads. That’s just how the world works.
I suggested two sub-fora for The Game Room: Games, and Sports/Game Discussions. I basically got shouted down by a mod and a couple of others. It seems like the simplest solution to me, as the game threads will clog up any forum they are moved to. I don’t understand the resistance to this idea, but perhaps somebody can enlighten me.
Yes, the whole idea of “back to top” posting for threads relies on the idea that content is generally equal. The topics will vary, but threads which get more post, which will tend to stay near the top, leading to them to be more read and more active, get there by being more interesting, topical, or otherwise active discussions.
Game threads, by their nature, short circuit this mechanism. The posts at the top of the forum are no longer there due to merit and interest of their discussion, but simply because the nature of a game like Count To Infinity is going to inspire very rapid fire posting.
Which is why they should be segregated. Then they could compete against other threads of the same type, other play by post games, rather than discussions, which work fundamentally differently than they do.
Monopolizing the top of the forum list is not a trivial problem. It’s at odds with the way message boards are supposed to work.
Subforums aren’t really a solution to anything. For all practical purposes, a new subforum is no different from a new, separate, forum. In either case, if you’re seeing one, you’re not seeing the other.
And the threads just about discussions of games, if left to their own forum, would be as dead as The Barn House.
Does that really matter? People will still want to discuss baseball and football and the newest GTA at the same rate as always. How does it hurt the board is that one forum in general that features those is particularly slow?
There are currently (as of my beginning this post) 14 non-game threads in the game room that have been posted in since midnight tonight.
By contrast, there are 17 threads in MPSIMS that have been posted in the time period, except we’ve got game threads (or threads that are very close cousins to game threads) there. Sequential thread titles, a “pure silliness” thread, and so on.
So yeah. False. A Game Room *sans games *would be just as lively as any other forum here.
Moving board games to MPSIMS would clog that forum up even more than the game room is clogged now. The fact is, there just aren’t that many sports or video game threads, at least a lot less than there are personal life and random stuff threads. If anything Cafe Society needs to be split up. Sometimes a thread at the top of CS will drop to the middle in just a few minutes.
My fantasy is for there to be three fora:
1.) Message Board Games
2.) Music Movies and Video Games
3.) Other entertainments (Including sports)
The fact that game discussion SEEMS sparse in The Game Room is a result of the corrosive effect of the post-padding game threads. Interesting topics keep getting pushed down the page so the thousandth person can make a one-line post in “List TV shows without an ‘e’ in the title!”
Right, because there are people who don’t like them. I don’t give two shits about sports, so those should be quashed as well, right? A nuclear option doesn’t serve anybody.