The Interguild basically started as a way to get people who enjoy HATPC to get together and share levels; right? And then the main function of this new site is to provide services to the different creative games. But right now you can only use the Interguild for games that we've declared as official and games that have their own little section on this site.

So my idea is to be much more open and create a system where new games can be added easily by members. It'll work like this: each part of the site is based on a category system, where each category represents a different game. Members will be able to use some type of submit form to add a new game to the site. Then the mods will have to approve it-- in this part, mods should be very liberal in accepting games. The only reason it should be disapproved would be for total incompatibility with the site (like if it doesn't even let you make levels or anything with it) or if it's completely inappropriate for younger members.

However, there will also be two main types of games. One type will be for the Chosen Games, where we deliberately devote an entire chunk of the site for it, publish guides, make a set of boards for it, and hold official competitions for it. And the other type will be for everything else. All those other games will share a forum board or two, maybe also share a competition category, but I'm not sure how we'd manage user-made guides and stuff.

This idea is awesome. It has so much more room for development and growth, and it makes our current system feel like a restraint. But the major problems with this idea is organization. With users requesting the games, we'll have a lot of games on here in a good amount of time. The fact that you have to get the game approved by a staff member slows down the process-- which is good so that we don't have 50 billion games added overnight or something and to help people keep track of everything if we suddenly get a spike in members, who might give us a spike in submissions. And the distinction between Chosen Games and non-chosen games will help us keep the popular games from drowning the other games. I might also create a game-category thing in the boards for the other games just to keep it all organized in the long-run.

so what do you think? I like this idea, but I'm not sure about, though....

What I'm able to grip seems good, at least...

but you have no thoughts on it?

I'm just trying to come up with a way for this to work, and since I thought it up in a few minutes, it may be an incomplete idea, so I was expecting some good arguments.

My suggestion is to not dedicate categories to single games, but rather clusters of games.
Like we'd have one category of Will Wright games. This would have a board for the Sim City games, a board for the Sims games, a board for the Spore games and a board for the other Will Wright games.
Then we'd also have a category of internet games or something, with HatPC being one board, N-Game being another, Line Rider being one, etc.
This means that we won't have seperate boards for Level Making & Rating, Competitions, Videos and General Discussion, but rather one single for LM&R and GD combined, having one board where all competitions go and having the videos seperate.

So basically my suggestion runs down to a forum index like this:

The Interguild:
-Announcements
-The Interguild in General (we need a new name for this, perhaps Interguild Planning or something)
-Newcomers
-Random Offtopic
-Interguild competitions
-Interguild videos

Aeon and possibly future Interguild games:
(I won't suggest boards here, as I feel this section needs a massive overhaul)

Internet games:
-N Game
-Line Rider
-Hannah and the Pirate Caves/the Neopets games (it might be a nice idea to merge these)
-Other internet games
-Internet game competitions
-Internet game videos

Will Wright games:
-Sim City
-The Sims
-Spore
-Other Will Wright games
-Will Wright competions
-Will Wright videos

Game hacks and patches:
-General hacking discussion
-Open projects
-Finished projects
-Game hack competitions
-Game hack videos

and so on.
New games to be added to the site can be suggested in a thread in the Interguild in General section.

that's basically a further categorizing of the games. But that does sound like a good idea, though. Splitting them up on theme would be very helpful in terms of organization. But should we base it on genre or on themes like you suggested? or maybe both? somehow..

oh, forgot to mention this: I'm not sure about that because then games would be shot down just because certain people may not like them. Even if some random five people want something like Fairy Caves on the site, it should get approved no matter how much I may not want it to be on it. The idea is to be so liberal on the games that no discussion is required.

I approve of Jell's idea, but maybe we should mention which games are freeware and not.

Then we should add to the opening post some big announcement saying:
This thread is not for the discussion of new possible entries. You may only suggest them here.

But if you can get that submission form to work properly, it would be grand.

yeah the submission form will work similarly to the video archive submit, where everyone gets an alert telling them to approve it.

What we will need a thread for is for deciding the Chosen Games. But would that be a staff-only discussion?

I don't know. I don't think the community will appreciate it when we leave them out on decisions like this. And it is highly possible the staff members will have a totally different view on those games than the majority of the community.

But I say we should let this idea sink in for a week before deciding anything. Those who aren't online every few seconds should get a chance to have their say as well.

yeah and besides, it'll take a while to set it all up. And I'm not willing to start working on something that might not get approved.

The idea for the staff to decide is because hopefully we can trust them to make reasonable decisions. I don't think we should make a game Chosen if its popularity might not be long-lived. This will avoid a small group from influencing the decision.

That should all be discussed after we've made the basic outlines. But first I want to know how Quirv, Do and CSD feel about this.

  

1.  What's up with the sim city ones

2.  i could help with the line rider!  

3.  What about the kinda bad Free rider?

Bmwsu, you shouldn't have really big quotes with little of your say in your posts. I think Teo got told-off of something like this.

P.S. I wonder... maybe we could have my Catplanet as a Interguild game for those who are interested. But, of course, I just want to say here that Catplanet could just be a game for people that need a little imagination time, or for people who quite like cats. I'm not saying everyone should play it, only feel who feel like it or something. But this is just a suggestion.

Catplanet isn't a tangible 'game' anyway, so... no.

  

I think that this summer we should get serious about it if enough people say we should do it when we have the time.  

hopefully we won't have to wait til summer. I'm trying to get as much stuff done before then as I can. We'll see, though..

I would love to have it get more popular and put more games on it!  But it might be confusing with so many people to meet.

I don't think our popularity will rise drastically one day. We'll probably start of slow and then gain momentum.

I know.  But say someone went on vacation for a couple of weeks.  Then they would have a bunch of people to get to know.  But that's not a problem.

hey where did my post go?

What do I think? I dunno. You guys can do whatever you want, and I'll talk about whatever I feel like talking about. These endless discussions have lost my interest.

sounds like most people like this idea. not a single 'no' yet.

maybe we should start acting/planning on this idea. It's been up for a while and pretty much everyone's been online since. here's a list of people who support this idea so far:

acceleron_3000
Isa
Jell
bmw? well, he didn't oppose it either...
catta
evansun's lost post
csd
quirvy probably saw this already but he chose not to care
jebby, via chatbox

sounds like it's approved to me. the sooner we start this, the sooner we'll get more games on the site. It's been a bit more than two months since this site has been out and I don't feel like waiting much longer to get another game on now. I also said my giant to-do list was slowing me down, but I think this system has the potential of running itself (through the members, that is), and that means less stuff for me to do about each individual game. So if I get it up, then we can add games while I keep working over the site. instead of waiting for me to get work done before everytime we add a game.

if we do decide to work now, I'll try to get it done by the end of my Spring Break (I think it's the last full week of March). that date is super important b/c once my spring break is over, then the 4th quarter starts and that means a TON of more work. So it's best that we start this as early as possible.

  

Bingo!

I don't even really know what this board is about, but it looks really boring, so I decided to leave it up to you guys instead.

Unless you wanna give me a 3 sentence summary of what this is about...