How can we encourage more posts with comments here?
On this page, I see posts, but no comments. It's a see of death. The same is true of all game design subreddits. Despite this being a thing a lot of people find interesting, there doesn't seem to be any really successful community oriented way to talk about this type of thing.
What types of posts do you think we could make to bring this space to life?
Personally, I think in-depth reviews of games you've played a lot are the way to go. Say you're a grandmaster at chess. Give it a review. Have you played Monopoly into the ground? Critique it. I'd like to start discussing here to, what other ways are there to liven this up?
I also may start posting speculative designs. So, game rulesets I've come up with, asking for comments from others on what they think I should look out for.
Basically you need two active posters to make a conversation. One person who likes chess isn't going to do it. And you probably need more than two for redundancy. It's a discovery problem and a bootstrapping problem.
For example, I post accordion stuff to r/accordions and usually not here unless it seems like it would be interesting to a general audience. We don't have enough specialization for that and that's okay.
Personally, I don't worry about it. If I see a news or science or tech link that seems worth remembering then I'll post it here as a way of remembering it.
Oddly the periodic topics do seem to work, though. Posting a question as a prompt is a good strategy in general, and it seems to work even if posted by a bot.
Within the realm of communities, Tildes is still very young and very, very small. Heck, at this point I can still recognize well over 50% of the commenters by both writing style and username, and have a pretty good handle on whether we'd have a good conversation at a bar or a fist fight.
It's a bit hard to participate in this ~ because all the content is just external links. It doesn't feel like anyone is creating or working on projects. The links are probably nice, but they aren't really engaging. It doesn't feel like the target audience is the tildes community.
You can compare the posts with /r/gamedesign/ or even ~comp.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the sheer numbers standpoint, i.e. we'd probably need to get more people on the site who are especially interested in game design. This post has nine votes, the highest rated comment has 12, and the highest rated post on the subgroup page right now has 17. I wasn't around for the discussion for breaking out a dedicated subgroup so I don't know what the support was like, but it is something of a niche, after all.
You hit the problem right on the head. I don't think Tildes has critical mass for some of the niches that are carved out like game design. Even more broad topics/discussions seem to be dominated by a few users.
Somehow this post escaped my attention. Thanks for bumping it, /u/zonixum .
I'm a grandmaster at Tetris (in my particular kind, it's the official rank the game give you at the end of the game if you play well). I played it into the ground (and still not that good at it).
I might give it a go†. But it will take some time.
† Ok so I always wanted to make YouTube video on Tetris the Grandmaster with a Noah-Caldwell level of analysis and a GTMK level of production design. I already had the experience of explaining what TGM is through an moderately successful essay I wrote as a teenager, and an appearance on a (now defunct) french TV show. I already have a draft script but to my taste, it's too rambly, lacks connective tissue and probably wants to explain too much . In the latest episode of the Cortex Podcast, CGPGrey describe the concept of atomic note (and zettelkasten) as a tool for script refinement. I'm in the process of putting my thought about this video in Obsidian; this may help. Hell, even the reaction to this post might help.
Thanks! I love conversations about game design, but even in reddit, (which I try not to mention, as I think it's a good idea to avoid Tildes becoming a reflection of reddit trends) the game design posts are common, but discussion is few and far between.
User rated aggregate links are fine, but I love discussion, and I look forward to your post.
I don't think this problem is unique to Tildes. I've spent some time hanging out on the Game Dev Stack Exchange, and it's a similar thing there. While they do get many more posts than Tildes just due to their sheer size, they don't get nearly as many as you'd expect for a Stack Exchange site, and they generate far fewer answers than questions on the other Stack Exchange sites. Furthermore, the site would better be described as the "Mostly Unity Game Dev Stack Exchange" because most of the questions aren't actually about game development in general — they're about making some part of Unity work. (Nothing wrong with that given that it's probably the most popular game engine these days. But if that's not what you're looking for, it's less helpful.)
All of this is to say that it seems like the things people want to discuss about game dev are "how do I do X?" where X is fairly specific to their tools and current project. And those are also the least interesting posts unless you happen to be having the exact same issue or know the answer from having done it before.
The other types of topics that I imagine would be useful here are more general topics like strategies for making your game entertaining, algorithms or techniques for specific things you'd want to do (like generating terrain, or making a dialog system), etc. Unless you go and implement them and have a specific question, I'm not sure they're like to generate discussion either. I don't know what the answer is.
I guess the question becomes, what do you want to talk about in regards to game dev? I'm mostly interested in rendering techniques, and it seems like those are mostly handled by the popular game engines. Any articles about it seem to be either the very basics, or the hottest new thing that won't run on most users' hardware for another 5 years, and the math is over my head anyway. And by then, it will be a switch in Unity or Unreal, so no point in talking about it.
I'm also interested in rendering! I do GPU programming on the side. Do you want to use OpenGL, or an engine?
Here at least, I draw the line between game design, and game programming. Rendering is a programming question. I play a lot of board games, and I love seeing the commonalities between board game and video game design. However, most people don't play game mechanics critically. Reviewers will give critic points for visual style, plot, dialogue, etc. But, when it comes to gameplay, most people will think about it purely in terms of fun, instead of why it's fun. For instance, people love Korok seeds. The point of them is to make you interact with an open world designed to be a play pen. It makes players think of what they'll find in the world. Contrast this with Minecraft in which players find resources, which they are meant to destroy. It makes the first impulse of a player the want to break new things when they find it, which is a very minecraft thing to do.
I don't know. It's hard to describe what I think effective questions are, but I think the best posts are those which provide and also draw in. Some questions can be answered by a single expert user, but others generate discussion. I don't think of games as art, since every time someone points out a game, it tends to be less interactive, but I like discussing them the way you would a piece of art.
I used to use OpenGL. Now that it's deprecated on macOS I'm focusing on Metal, which I love. I find it much easier to understand and use than OpenGL.
So I like a few others I know lament the lack of constructive discussions on gamedesign. This was actually something I superficially mentioned in asking Deimos to join Tildes. The way I see it, Tildes share the some problems with reddit (reddit problems) when it comes to facilitating discussions.
One of those problems are how exposure of posts ties to age and votes. The implications being that high effort posts are discouraged. For example why would a person that wants to have an in-depth discussion about something start it and have it ultimately fade away. Not only that, the same discussion will most likely restart in a week or month and endlessly repeated. In that sense, there is not a constructive discussion being had. A forum that manages to retain previous effort made into a topic and having it built on top of older discussion in a pseudo-academic seems to have a lot to gain. Further since exposure also competes with other posts for votes, the overall quality is pulled down. Also consider that a high effort post probably needs more time and effort to evaluate so they are less likely to be considered at all.
Second reddit problem as I see it are how unfocused discussions are. While plenty of subreddits have " This is a place to discuss <x>..." there is often no indicator as to how that discussion is to happen. There is a myriad of different types of discussions to choose from. I believe this partially explains why places with an established culture can lead to good discussions, such as /r/changemyview, /r/patientgamers or even the house of commons(or even 4chan). It's not enough to facilitate for a discussion, because that is being too vague. The solution here can be to create a culture or elegant rules that has huge implications for the discussion. Another solution which some forums do is the tagging system, however they seldom go further than labels. It would be interesting to see a labeling a post completely dictating how the discussion is had. I think it should be clear that certain responses in a post labeled "debate" can become inappropriate in a discussion labeled " exploratory discussion". This is hard to go about without changing the website and/or heavy moderation of some sort however. This also leads into humanizing posters. If there is a certain etiquette, then you wouldn't get as many situation where the original poster get's picked apart by cherry picking their arguments, which often fails to take in the whole body of text holistically. This leads to a form reductionism as well and is very common on just about any forum.
These are the main reasons why I feel discouraged to post in places like these (although there are other "problems" as well). My impression is that the tildes users posts avoids these problems by maturity and being respectful. However without addressing these problems somehow I am worried that tildes won't end up any better than some other sites. So I am apprehensive about spending time and energy on building up a community. That being said, if there is a discord for tildes users with a games subchannel, please send me an invite.
Edit: This comment is misleading and is a result of frustration with other forums really.
I'm not sure why you think the first problem would be holding Tildes back, because the default sorting method here is "activity". This behaves almost exactly like forums, where new comments bump the thread back up to the top of the site/group, so long-running discussions are encouraged. We regularly have threads stay active for days with ongoing discussions, and there are multiple weekly scheduled threads that have new comments all week.
The voting on topics is completely irrelevant unless someone specifically chooses to sort by votes. The default Tildes behavior has absolutely no connection to votes at all.
Ah, that's embarrassing, excuse my ignorance. I came back to Tildes after a while and made some assumptions. I worded this poorly as well. It is reassuring knowing that this something that you have thought about.
No worries, I appreciate you writing out all your thoughts about the issues anyway. I definitely agree that Reddit's lack of an activity/bump-like sorting method was always a problem there, that's why it was one of the first things I made sure to add for Tildes. I always hated that threads were practically guaranteed to die after 24 hours, and that almost nobody would ever see your comment if you posted in a thread more than a day old. Like you said, it makes it a lot harder for in-depth threads to foster any kind of discussion, especially in smaller communities.
Overall though, a lot of the issues really just come down to needing to hit a critical mass of users interested in any given subject before the communities and discussions are able to become self-sustaining. That's really difficult and mostly just takes time. If you look at /r/gamedesign on Reddit as an example: the subreddit was created in June 2008, when Reddit was 3 years old (user-created subreddits didn't even exist before that). But if you look at a snapshot of it from August 2012 on the Internet Archive, over four years after it was created, it was still only getting somewhere around one submission per month, and half of them look barely relevant.
The early phase for communities is hard. It often needs a few dedicated users that are willing to just keep posting content and trying to start discussions even when they aren't getting much of a response. Most people don't want to be the ones initiating discussions, but are happy to join in when there's already one going. Once a community reaches a certain point it starts to feel like that's something that happens naturally, but it's tough to get there in the first place.
The first problem you point out is one that I hadn't really given much thought to, but raises some good points. One of the advantages of old-style forums (there's probably a name for these but I can't think of it) is that you often have threads that live for a really long time and have a lot of previous discussion built up in a single post. One of the frustrations of those, though, is that you often get hundreds of pages deep in a post so people don't bother to read the whole topic. I think some of that would be mitigated by threaded comments in the style that Tildes uses, but not all. It can also make established posts/threads really intimidating for newer users to contribute to. I've experience that myself. People also get touchy about users necro-ing big, old threads in forums like that.
I didn't really have much to add to what you were saying, it just provoked some thought about the differences in approach to discussion between newer, reddit-like sites and older forum-style sites. I have some good memories of time spend in forums like that, but they weren't without their disadvantages.
That has struck my mind as well. Reddit threads can get very long and I wanted to see someone forcing a limit to how many responses the original post could get. I always imagined something like when you edit a google document and you can mark text and add comments. What if a commenter had to mark some text in order to respond. If you want to respond to some already marked text, then there would be some kind of system (more up/down-votes?) to get the best, let's say counterargument in this case. The main idea being that you each digressionary thread in a post would stay focused (and constructive/deconstructive) and things wouldn't get repeated as much. Probably would just become an amazingly convoluted quotation system though.
I think we can make some progress here. The biggest issue with these megathreads is that most of the comments are either drek or tangents that don't add anything to the discussion. The combination of the labels for exemplary and offtopic/joke/noise helps sort the wheat and collapse the chaff. That'll extend to collapsing entire chains of unproductive discussions. There's also a lot of back-and-forth between two specific users with deeply nested replies (usually arguments) and I'm not sure the rest of us who aren't involved care or need to see those chains. Tildes already has a timeout feature for when that happens to blunt it a bit and slow down those conversations. The reply box being at the bottom also helps - it makes it more likely people will read other comments before replying, and that if they reply it'll be to an existing comment. Should cut down on the knee-jerk top level comments in the long run.
Threads here need to get a lot more busy before we'll need more than that, but there are solutions possible for when it does. I think of it like every thread is a bonsai tree that just needs the proper pruning. The task is to invent the shears that make the pruning possible, find a way to water the tree, and keep the soil fertile.