A lot of ground to cover here, and I haven't had the time to reply until now.
Mr Creosote wrote:After all, all those speed IF games were entered by someone. You can choose which death to die here.
We all have a limited amount of spare time to spend, and I'm truly grateful for each and every minute people decide to spend on adding information to CASA (or to do work on its backend!). I try my best to let them know that. Let there to be any doubt about that. I still can and should have an opinion about what is submitted. CASA has carved out a tiny niche for itself, which is classic 8-bit games. That does not mean that we shouldn't include other types of games - indeed we do, and I'm happy about that - but it
does mean that I'm extra careful to cater for fans of that genre. Because often they can't find the material they find here anywhere else.
Mr Creosote wrote:Final side note: what bugs me so much about how this thread went is that it mashes everything and their dog together...
That's what threads sometimes do. Given the paucity of debate in here in general, I think it would be a really lousy idea for me to insist that the various topics were neatly split up. I'm far more interested in hearing what's on people's minds. But that did necessitate (or hopefully at least excuse) an insanely long reply from me. If anyone fell asleep along the way, I can't blame them
Mr Creosote wrote:Nevertheless, I find the call to exclude or segregate quite naive, considering how many other games are in the database which probably also didn't take longer to write than three hours, but the author just didn't tell anyone about it. And then, it is suddenly about any game ever entered into any competition? ... Saying "I'm not interested in these games" is fair enough. Regardless of the reason. Putting their worth to exist, to be played into question, I find offensive. That's not just "an opinion" anymore. Ever heard of "live and let live"?
I can only speak for myself, but I have no qualms whatsoever about letting these games live or letting people play them. Go ahead, by all means. But in a reality where our resources are limited I do reserve the right to have an opinion on where people should place their efforts. Naive? Probably. I just don't see a clear way out. You keep pointing out all the decisions that I
shouldn't make - but it would be more helpful to me to hear about the ones that I
should.
Sudders wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 8:10 pm
You are absolutely right Strident. Not all competition games are tat. I just happen to have been exposed to quite few, which has coloured my viewpoint.
So! It looks, sadly, like stemming the flow is not possible... Is it possible to filter the random game selection?
If you have only been exposed to quite few, I'm not really sure where all the animosity stems from
Maybe try some more? Like others have written (including myself at some point), whether a game has been in a competition or not may not be the best criterion to judge inclusion or not from. Which is why I want to lay our rules out in a soft fashion. I don't want to place an general ban on competition games - a lot of them are excellent - but I do want people out there to use their best judgment. If they do have the choice between adding a one-room, one-joke game which is already covered by IFDb, or a forgotten TRS-80 title which nobody has heard of, well, I'd strongly suggest spending their time on the latter.
As for the random game: I mentioned it as a point of concern for those who disliked Speed-IF. It
might be possible to create a general filtering option, though it's outside the scope of what can be done right now (there are lots of things on my wanted list). But I just see the random game as a nice item to liven up the front page a bit. I've never seen it as a deal breaker for whether people want to use CASA or not.
And just to put in a little perspective (which we've talked about in private) - right now, we have 281 games tagged as Speed IF in the database. There are nearly
1,200 games in German and Spanish, which will be equally useless to all of our English-only speaking users. The random game is just the icing, not the cake. I think it's a nice feature, but even without the games you dislike, there's a large chance of getting something you're not interested in.
I'm more concerned with the usefulness of the genre system in general.