Just for the record though, I think games and sports are fine where they are.
I’ve made the suggestion before (I’m also Spartacus).
I don’t expect it to carry much traction, but I’d split out sports and games because while they’re both recreation, there is very little overlap between the two (please don’t bring up sports games and ruin my nice little imaginary world, thank you). Okay, you brought it up. Happy now? Great. Oh, now you’re bringing up that Cafe Society has all music, cooking, art, and other performances in it? What, you can’t leave well enough alone?
Shit, I’m starting to feel like the Monster at the end of the Book.
Anyway, as someone who never reads sports threads, I’d love the less cluttered look of knowing where to go to find the latest Doper game or what forum to hit when I want to learn about the latest video games and whatnot. I have asked a sports question or two as well, so a place for that would keep things a bit more tidy.
But what I really want is nested avatars.
The OP was CYA and you know it. The OP implied that not only was there virtually no over-lap, but those who did over-lap were insignificant, both in numbers and opinions.
In any case, the OP was insulting, demeaning and flat-fucking-wrong. 
This all is purely my opinion.
In general I have been opposed. While in my own case, I don’t really care for sports threads, the problem to me is that it doesn’t make sense to split up sports and games alone and leave together all the other arts in Cafe Society. Movies and TV sort of go together, but does music belong with it? Cooking? Art?
I don’t really want a fragmented experience where every topic has its own niche forum. The spirit of the forum divisions was to have broad sweeping categories, so that threads that transcended genres would have homes and you wouldn’t have to individually review a ton of forums at every visit.
Now, the Game Room was created because of some particular problems. Where did stuff about games and sports go? Well, depending on the type of thread, things got mixed between CS, IMHO and MPSIMS; there was no one place you could go to read all the sports threads. In addition, the respective forum moderators had limited the number of threads you could have of certain types. For example, on-board games had a considerable amount of ire from people who didn’t like that they took up valuable real estate; the number of simultaneous on-board games was limited; multiple threads about one game (but different topics) might be mashed together just to take up less space on the forum listing; threads about current sporting events were often simultaneously opened in multiple forums, then later closed/merged; and so on.
The Game Room wasn’t created just to create more division but rather to serve an area that was, frankly, underserved and irritating.
As for the lack of interest – bwuh?! There are nearly 500k posts in the Game Room. Not as much as the bigger forums, but you also have to consider its age. There’s plenty of activity in the forum. We have a strong gamer community here and a strong community of sports lovers, and I think they need a place to go. Sports goes with games a lot better than either go with art or film or cooking, or with debates. I say, lump 'em together.
Agreed, yes, no, no.
Back when I was agitating for the creation of what is now the Game Room, I argued that cooking belongs in MPSIMS, not CS. There is nothing more mundane than food; it may be the very definition of what mundane is all about.
For Cafe Society, I always pointed to Entertainment Weekly as the example of what belongs there. EW has sections devoted to Movies, TV, Music and Books. It (almost*) never has sports or cooking, because those topics simply don’t fit in.
*ETA: I think the Superbowl is an exception on both counts, when EW will discuss both the game and the food to make for the parties.
I don’t know if there should be a separate forum for sports vs games. It might be nice, though to see two separate forums, one dedicated to sports, games, and whatever, and the other for games that people want to play on the boards. Right now, if you look at the game room, on the one hand, you have threads about computer games and sports and stuff like that, and then also the death pool, trivia games, SDMB fantasy football and so on.
Now, there might not be enough posts to warrant two separate forums, but it seems to me, if you’re going to make a division, that’s what it should be, because those are pretty different things.
You want to put NFL threads in a different forum than NFL FF threads?
He also said:
This is no different from the people who come into sports thread to sneer at those Philistines who just like to “watch a bunch of grown men chase a ball around”. Both attitudes are insulting.
I’m definitely more of a sports fan, but I know plenty of people who are into both.
Absolutely. I personally can’t stand sports, and also work in the gaming industry. I’m not defending his entire post at all, only the portion I quoted.
Well, I want to put threads where people talk about sports and games in a different forum than threads where people play games.
Are you suggesting that the two million plus people who buy a new copy of Madden every single year are probably not really into sports? Because that seems to be somewhat of an extraordinary claim.
I agree that if there were to be a split (which I disagree with) it should be a split between on-board games (Mafia, Death Pool, whatever) and discussions ABOUT games (NFL, D&D, Call of Duty, WoW), I could also agree that video games have more in common with Cafe Society than anything else. Dissections of the plot, etc. really seem to belong there. Hell, a lot of Cafe Society threads that start with “give me examples in media of <x>” get a lot of video game examples, and one can be hesitant to post them because “this isn’t the forum for those things.” However, from what I understand (and the little I remember from before the Game Room existed) was that Video Game threads got buried so quickly (though board games contributed) that it was almost impossible to catch one before it died. However, if you make the split you have a forum for… sports. And while sports is popular, it is in no way popular enough to warrant a board to itself, the SDMB simply does NOT have boards that specific. Even the relatively specific “Elections” board has a wide variety of topics to be discussed, more so than sports, which while I’m sure has stats, betting, and team praising, isn’t nearly as diverse (unless you get into the gritty detail that you may as well be in an entire board dedicated to sports).
No idea how you arrived at that suggestion. I was speaking purely about the amount of videogame-sports talk on this forum–I thought this was clear from the context of my preceding post which noted the relatively small amount of Madden discussion.
I wasn’t talking about this board specifically when I brought up Madden, but about the general overlap between video game fans and sports fans. I don’t get the impression that the OP’s generalizations were limited to just the posters on this board.
You might be right. If that’s the case, it’s definitely an incorrect statement, as Madden sales do prove, as you pointed out. If he was talking about the board, I would say that applies on the context that there isn’t much sports-videogame talk, but I’m sure there are people interested in both despite such.
If we need rearrange any forum, it’s MPSIMS. There are posters that post mundane things, and there are posters that post pointless things; the two don’t always overlap, but that’s not my point. My point is that it is also a forum for what “I must share” and it’s a pretty poor descriptor. There is currently a thread titled “Does This Look Like A Dick To Y’all?” and I don’t believe that is something anyone “must share”. Why exactly must that be shared? What will be the dire consequence if the dick on ther wall goes unshared?
Allthough it does not possess the quality of “must share”, whether or not the wallstain does indeed look like a dick could provoke some discussion. It is this discussion that causes me to propose that threads that do not possess the quality of being “must share” should be folded into Great Debates, a forum that has shown time and time again that the level of discourse is perfectly suited for the discussion of dick walls.
I don’t play sports-related video games, so maybe I’m off base here, but how much is there to talk about when it comes to sports games? Particularly Madden which, as I understand it, is fairly notorious for coming out with “sequels” that are nothing more than roster updates and graphics tweaks. It seems to me that the sort of discussion you usually see about video games (plot and characterization, cool set piece action sequences, puzzle solutions, and so forth) don’t really apply to sports games. If the mechanics don’t really change much between iterations, how much of the game is left to discuss?
Is that a serious question? You don’t think there are highly active messageboards devoted to Madden?!
Yes, it’s a serious question. But I’ll allow that it wasn’t necessarily a *smart *question.
Fair enough. There’s the endless debate about player rankings and team rankings, of course. There’s the eternal argument about “cheese” tactics, what they are, whether or not they’re unfair exploits, and what to do about an opponent who uses them. There’s discussion about both strategy and tactics, from the simplest of what plays (on offense and defense) to call in what down & distance situations to what pre-snap adjustments to make.
There is an almost endless amount of stuff to debate and discuss regarding Madden, but it’s easier just to glance at the Madden forums on ea.com. The “Madden General Discussion” forum has a quarter million posts in 30,000 threads.