Suggest of changes in the forum

Thanks (on behalf of the whole community, including you) for the kind words. The BGDF certainly rocks!

I agree that Game Design is pretty lumpy, and I think your separation makes sense. I'd like a bit more input before changing anything, though... any other thoughts on how to re-organize it?

-- Matthew

Nah, I love that kind of thing. :)

I worry that game mechanic and design principle topics would overlap, as "design principles" might include any thought or discussion that covered multiple mechanics. However, a "New Game Idea" would probably corral a lot of first time posters to a single forum (myself included a week ago) where more general advice was needed/wanted.

Though, and while traffic might increase significantly, I'm not sure how splintering these discussion points will help in organization. It's almost always easy to know which thread is about a specific mechanic or a higher-level post and which is a thread about "my new game will make me millions; what do you think?"

With my (albiet very limited) experience so far, I'd suggest a bit more radical change. Replace the Quick Forum with a registered users-only "New Game Idea" forum, combine Game Design and Game Play Testing into "Mechanics", and merge "Ask the Expert!" into "Game Publication." I know each forum is slightly different, but they seem to overlap enough of the time in concept where it would create a simpler "front page," without removing functionality.

Disclaimer: while I could be way off and showing my newcomer colors, if you're considering reorganization it's always good to look at and justify the existance of everything.

Maybe a #0 Forum can be General Game Ideas where people can post ideas and mechanics or whatnot that don't actually belong to any game, or can post other questions that don't pertain to any particular game.

As a slightly unrelated subject, I might also propose having a specific forum called "I have an awesome new idea for a game that is totally unique, all my friends love it, and now I want to know how to patent it and make money off of it."

I am only half kidding.

It's understandable that people would have these questions, but they comprised such a high percentage of the posts at the BoardGameDesign yahoo group that I lost interest in that group. This group, on the other hand, was a complete breath of fresh air...people who wanted to talk more about the craft of game design than the business of game design. It was (and is) great! But, it seems recently that we're being inundated with the "how do I protect my idea/sell my idea" kind of posts. It's fine for people to be seeking answers to these questions, but they seem to completely bypass the archives and FAQ and go straight to the forums, unaware, perhaps, just how often such questions come up. Having an absurdly over-the-top forum name might corral these questions a bit, as well as hopefully encouraging people to look at the archives rather than asking the same questions again and again.

Incidentally, not sure if this is easy or hard, but it would be fantastic if the "new forum posts" window could be individually tailored to exclude certain forums. Speaking exclusively for myself, I find the "how do I sell my game" posts to be a distraction from the content that really interests me, and it would be great if there was an easier way to avoid it. (I know, I know..."just don't read it!" I seem to just read everything that comes up in that window, but it would be nice if the system forced me to avoid stuff I wasn't interested in...)

Just some more thoughts and observations...with absolutely no disrespect meant to the "how do I sell this" posters -- I was once in the exact same position!

-Jeff

I know, I know, which is why this discussion sorta feels like "should we have 8 glasses a quarter full or 4 glasses half full," and I keep thinking, "it's still the same amount of water."

To clarify, I meant the "front page" of the forums, not the front page of bgdf.com and a "simple" forum front page would most likely equal "easier for newcomers to find the right place to post in."

Before you guys go changing things on me, let me chime in a bit :D .

I think the game Game Creation sections of the forums flow rather nicely. The thought behind it is that the forums flow in much the same way as the process in designing a game would. I.E. First you Design the game, then you Produce the prototype, then you Playtest the prototype, then you Publish the game. If you go and look at the forums, this is how they flow as well. So in theory, you could start out discussing your game in the Design forum, then you could advance your game through each of the forums that correspond with each step in the creation process.

So in that respect, I'd like it to stay the same. However, it might be a good idea to include a forum before design (call it idea incubator or some other such nonsense) where you could discuss a loose idea before actually tackling anything concrete. The main problem I see with this is overlap. Eventually you're probably going to take that idea and start discussing how to actually implement the idea. At that point, it then becomes fodder for the Game Design category instead of the Idea Incubator. What do you do in those situations? Start a new thread in Design or risk 'contaminating' the Idea Incubator subforum? I guess either way it doesn't matter to me. I do find some of these threads announcing super terrific new games to be somewhat distracting as well (not to mention I think they subtract from the overall legitimacy of the site). Perhaps we could even detach such a proposed forum from the creation subforums altogether, perhaps even move it to the users games subforums.

Just my thoughts, carry on.

-Darke