Lakoda - 29 July 2008 09:40 AM
Absolutely right JK. Although, such a site could just offer all the items a gamer would want and just integrate it into the non-specialized sites (like with a facebook app).
It’s possible. A gamer’s needs aren’t necessarily met best by the format that Facebook’s Wall offers, for instance. In my mind, a gamer generally comes online for two reasons:
1. To ask for help. Game sites can be huge support mechanisms for the games they discuss, putting an entire community’s collective knowledge at each player’s disposal. Instant feedback and rules-clarifications to help gamers puzzle out the answers they need.
2. To present some new content. Game sites also offer gamers the chance to share their ideas and new creations with the world, and (as part of number 1), to receive feedback and ideas for how to improve it.
Which is why I almost think that an ideal gamer’s destination, in addition to providing a good virtual tabletop ala Vassal (as BP kindly linked to) needs to provide a soap-box where gamers can share their ideas, experiences, and creations. You need a place for those who like storyhours to post the latest escapades of their parties, a place for gearheads to share and fiddle with new rules variants, a place for worldbuilders to show off their latest campaign setting, and you need to have a way to tie it all together so that you’re not just posting your opinions, but you’re adding your opinions and creations to the big community discussion.
My own non-technical thoughts out this would be to make the core of such a site very much like a wiki. Each member of the site would get their own “piece” of the wiki, able to use that space to create what they like. I recommend a wiki (especially a “WYSIWYG” wiki) because it provides a pretty decent balance between ease-of-use and robust outputs, as sites like Wikipedia have shown, but also because they strongly encourage interlinking of articles by wikiwords, and that sort of connectedness is essential in my mind.
At the “front” of these wikis, you’d have a main-page for each individual user which would be very blog-like. This would be where a member would ask questions or spew ideas, as this would be probably the most public soapbox a member would have access to. A relatively standardized set of keywords or tags would be critical here, to enable users to navigate the community and find what they want in addition to who they want.
These keywords would be critical because the welcome page for the entire community would need to be able to present all the latest blog posts based on their topic in a format similar to the forums. If you know that you’re interested in talking about D&D 4e, you should be able to navigate to it and see what sort of discussions are going on of various users’ posts. This is how gamers meet other gamers. And you need a way for really interesting posts or ideas or rules to be recognized by the community. In the past, I’ve suggested a Digg-style pseudo-voting system, where you’d make a really good post or rule a “favorite” or whatnot, voting up or down a particular article’s rating.
Another key is that while community keeps people at a site, it’s content that makes it grow. Jim’s been pretty astute with that on Dragon Avenue, keeping the front page going full-bore at an impressive rate. Essential to the success of a site like this would be SRDs which rules-tinkering would be built around. I point to The Hypertext d20 SRD for a great model on how this should be done: easy navigation to quickly find critical rules. SRDs like this would form the foundation for rules tinkerers, as the SRDs themselves would be more or less immutable, anyone could “latch on” and post their own variants, which would display as links in the SRD. So on this sort of site, an SRD entry on Diplomacy would include a hyperlink to an entry on Rich Burlew’s wiki with his variant Diplomacy rules under a “Variants” heading.
The other big key to it is the virtual gaming table that has already been described above, and this is easily the most difficult part of the entire site.
Finally, in terms of legalities and ownership, the Open Gaming License is great, but it might need a little bit of tweaking. For this sort of “share and share alike” community akin to the Open Source community (which in my mind is key to generating the content this site would need), there would need to be clarification for ePublishing on blogs or wikis. Making sure that the creator of a great rule gets credit is important, and this can be built into the site through cross-linking across articles (so that my variant of your 2d10 system for critical hits would link back to your original wiki post). Being able to generate section Section 15s would be a very useful feature as well. I also think that there would need to be new clauses that encourage asking permission to use open gaming materials (as is customary among OGL publishers now, if only for the sake of being polite and letting a creator know how his or her ideas are being used) and a clause that gives a member the right to publish for-profit an idea first (as well as the ability to wave that right and allow someone else to use an idea for their publications if you have no intent of publishing).
There’d probably need to be more, but this is what occurs to me off the top of my head.
. Wiki’s are overrated and overused!!!
