Guys,
I've been flying solo with the GDW for the last year, but I'd like to step back and ask your guys' opinion about the philosophical view behind the GDW.
I view the GDW as a "rulebook swap", ie, "I look at your rulebook, you look at mine." About a year ago (+/- 6 months), a couple of things happened. First, we went to one week sessions, increasing the amount of calendar space we needed to fill. And second, we had several people "blow off" their sessions, often by people who never returned to the site again after signing up.
The latter phenomenon really irked me, and prompted us to add a new rule, whereby to get a GDW slot, you had to post feedback on other games up front. However, this has morphed into something I'm not happy with.
My hope was always that people who sign up would be people who want to participate in the workshop long term; people who'd become part of the GDW community, and offer feedback on other's games simply because it's a fun thing to do and because at some point, your game will go up and you'll get feedback as well. However, some people appear to view the 2 week requirement as the only feedback they ever need provide. They'll post their obligitory 2 feedback posts, have their GDW session, and then disappear until they want another session.
Now, there are enough people who do post regular feedback that in some sense we can afford people "taking advantage" of us this way without it breaking the GDW. And, filling 50 slots a year is a tall order, so in some sense, we need to allow people like this to have slots if we're going to have a fully-dense schedule.
However, I don't like this kind of behavior, and I'm very interested to hear whether you guys feel that I'm right or wrong to find this annoying. And to make it specific, I had a guy who asked for a slot about 1 month ago. He had a GDW session a year ago, and hasn't posted a comment on another game since. I told him, "get back involved in giving feedback, and we'll see." He never responded, but has since posted feedback on -- you guessed it -- exactly 2 games. I can only assume he will ask me for his slot now that he's met the requirements. I sort of want to deny this request, but I want to know whether that would be reasonable or not.
In a sense, I think it's really just a reflection of human nature, that some people will just do the bare minimum required to get whatever it is that they happen to want. Honestly, I'd really rather such people just post their games in some other forum rather than "using" us in the GDW, but it's quite possible I'm taking the whole thing too seriously.
I welcome your thoughts!
Thanks,
Jeff
Guys,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts; it’s very important that the GDW’s philosophy reflect the opinion of whole admin staff, and you guys have helped me in that way. I agree, the GDW is definitely “working” just fine in the sense that the schedule is almost always full and the games almost always generate discussion. My main interest here was to find the best way to go about encouraging/requiring some people to recognize that there’s more to the GDW than just getting your game reviewed. A couple of responses to the suggestions made:
I like the idea of changing the requirement from “2 posts min” to “substantial feedback”, as it makes the approval process more discretionary, and hopefully will encourage people to be more aggressive in posting serious comments rather than “I like your game, bye”. It’s a change I may make. The bottom line is I’ve tried to be as clear as possible that, look, this thing is a two-way street, but for whatever reason, most new users don’t see past the “have your rulebook reviewed” aspect; they think it’s a service that we are providing to people. It’s irksome, but it’s also reality.
To Darke’s point: yes, all of the admins (ie, everyone who can read this) has a guaranteed slot any time you wish. For other “members in good standing”, I think it’s a case by case basis. In my opinion, Tom Vasel wouldn’t qualify for a slot currently, but that’s an unlikely case. A better indicator might be someone like Lee Valentine or Joe Huber, who have posted a lot on the site but haven’t participated in the GDW at all. Would I give those guys a slot? Again, my answer is, probably not without some feedback coming in. However, your other point is pretty much the way it works out in practice: usually there’s at least a month backlog when someone requests a slot, so I’ll commonly say “post feedback for the next few weeks and I’ll hold [this slot] for you in expectation that you will”, and it usually works out ok.
I also appreciate the viewpoint that people who put up their games are contributing something of value to the GDW: giving us games to talk about, and a level of transparency in viewing their games that many designers don’t ever give. That’s an excellent point.
Seth’s observation, that those who don’t comment probably won’t generate comments in return, is quite apt. I’m always very quick to seek to comment on games by GDW regulars, or people who have given me feedback, whereas I’ll tend not to post feedback for those who I feel are “scamming” the system. So there’s definitely a self-correcting aspect.
Thanks again for your helpful observations. I suspect I’ll probably marinate on the suggestions a bit more, and likely leave things as they are for the near future. But you’ve helped a lot in terms of how to view requests for slots.
Many thanks!
-J