Gaming Community Problems?

[gamegnat]

Hey everyone,

A buddy and I are doing a bit of research on problems that people have with existing gaming communities. We love that communities like this thrive, but we want to know if an even better platform can be built.

So, we'd like some help from everyone. If you would, check out a really short slide presentation here:

http://www.slideshare.net/gamegnat/gamegnat-what

It's only six slides, and shouldn't take much of your time at all. While going through it, think about how accurately the slides portray the situation. Did we hit on some major problems? Did we completely miss? Or do they not matter to you at all? Any and all information is incredibly valuable to us.

Feel free to either reply to this thread, or you can contact us however you please (check out the presentation)!

Also, I'd love to be able to contact people who respond later on to ask their opinions on developments, etc. If you would be willing to let me do that, please let me know you contact info via PM (Just as well, you can tell me that you'd prefer that I contact you via these forums).

Thanks!

 

[Saltyk]

So are you trying to build your own game reference/review site?

You mentioned quality control a lot, but that could be difficult and easily become outright censorship. Also organizing 10,000 different pieces of information would be very difficult. Think how many press release there are for one game between the time it is announced or rumored and the actual release. It could be done, but wouldn't be cheap.

 

[gamegnat]

While a site may be built in the future, we're more interested right now in seeing the types of problems people have with existing sites.

Regarding the difficulty of organizing information/creating quality control: crowdsourcing (think Reddit). The solution is not perfect; Crowdsourced content is still subject to community whims and memes, but it seems to be a popular and successful option.

Thoughts?

 

[Gindil]

I could post a huge thing:

Why do I want to go to a few gaming sites? I come to Escapist to debate piracy (albeit, it's because a LOT of misinformation is passed around), check out a few reviews then leave.

The extras sometimes feel tacked on. For example, Genre Wars is its own little space. Why not integrate it into a person's profile so it's still relevant? Not force fed to them or part of it's own subspace.

Sometimes, if it's not on the first page, I don't even know it's out there. While links at the bottom help aggregate this, there's little to no dates so I can't tell WHEN news is old or new.

Do you want videos? If so, will they be user uploaded or what? What is the incentive for a person to do so? How about news? Will it be the community that puts up new news or will there be dedicated authors?

These are just some of the questions I would suggest you look into before putting up something and seeing if it sticks.

 

[gamegnat]

I agree completely with the need to ask some of those questions. Putting something up and seeing if it sticks is the absolute last thing we want to do, hence this thread.

To answer your questions and to give you a better idea of what we're THINKING (as opposed to what we've decided on):

Videos? Very likely. More likely that they will be embedded videos (hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, for instance).

Incentives? Likely the same incentives that people get for their current submissions to sites like YouTube: recognition.

News? Aggregated from various sites automatically. Filtered based on user inputs. We'd love to allow user-submitted content (i.e. individual's reviews, gameplay tricks, etc.), but we're not sure whether or not this would be feasible in an initial release.


Thanks for your post, by the way. All of this is very helpful. I was particularly interested in your assessment of "the first page", in that you don't find it unless it's readily available. This is the kind of stuff that we need.