NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

I know we've talked about reviews before and there isn't a huge interest in having those here, which is fine. However, I find myself often wanting to share my thoughts on a game, be it a "review" or just here's what I thought about the game or what it meant to me in terms of nostalgia or what have you. There are other things like difficulty (which we're now collecting), story quality, etc that might be nice to summarize up for a game.

Right now I'm calling this idea "Game Thoughts" (I originally called it "Gamer Thoughts", not sure which one is more appropriate), but I'm not crazy about the name.

Anyways, it'd pretty much be a text box where you can enter some stuff about the game. I could have it work similar to forum posts in that you could bold, italicize, etc, if that would be useful. You could enter whatever you want about the game, it could be a review or it could just be a description of the game in your own words. It's up to you!

The interface would also allow you to optionally select any number of pre-defined "tags" (poor term there since we already have tags and these would NOT be associated in any way) to indicate the game had a great story, a terrible story, or whatever (I don't know what these would be yet, I'm certainly open to any input here).

Additionally, you could enter / edit your rating and difficulty that can already be entered on other screens.

There would be a new page that would contain all of the games that you've entered your thoughts on in a pseudo-review format. When noodling with this idea, I was reminded of a neat site that I've used from time-to-time: http://videogamecritic.com. Here's an example: http://videogamecritic.com/satac.htm?e=25333#rev2840

As someone who likes to play games to 100% completion (Usually well beyond simply earning all the trophies/achievements) whenever possible, I tend to examine/review games from that perspective.

Anyone can play a game for a couple of hours and talk about the controls, gameplay, graphics, etc... but for someone to dump 200+ hours into an rpg for a single play-through I always thought it would be kind of neat to have a site or youtube channel, etc... to leave reviews of that nature, covering aspects like miss-able content, how grindy/punishing the mechanics can be for completionists, that sort of thing. The main issue of course is that it's an extremely niche subset of gamers who would be interested in that kind of content, which is the primary reason I've never pursued it.

As it is now, I've been half-heartedly writing game comments/reviews of this nature (usually, not always) on games I've completed in my collection, either in the playthrough description, or as a game note. Sometimes both. Would a more "public" means of displaying my comments be something I'd do here? ...I don't really think I would. There's not a whole lot of traffic or means for feedback on the site to really know if it's worth taking the time to do something like this, especially if it ends up being a pseudo-review system that you can find just about everywhere else with a larger audience.

It's a cool idea, but I just don't see huge potential for a comments system per game as of yet when there's not a lot of communication of any means on the site's existing features. There's barely any forum chit-chat as it is beyond the usual suspects. cough

Unfortunately, you're probably right in that we don't have enough traffic to justify spending time writing content that won't be seen by very many people. I like the idea and often find myself wanting to share my thoughts on a game after I finish it or give it up. Since I don't really submit reviews anywhere else, those thoughts just kinda fade away over time, which kinda sucks. There are plenty of places to review games, so that's why I wanted to go for something a little different. Since this wouldn't be branded as "reviews", it could really be anything. Talk about why you hated a game so much you stopped playing two hours in. Talk about how nostalgic it makes you feel when you play it. Or, of course, give it a traditional review.

This is still something I think I'm going to pursue in the near future (i.e. within the next six months...maybe) since those thoughts will continue to fade and it's not really a huge time investment from a development perspective.

I think the bigger issue at hand is how we can get community participation and just grow the community / userbase in general. My general development philosophy is make something cool and intuitive and users will find it and use it (so no need for marketing). That's not necessarily the best approach, especially when dealing with such a niche website to begin with. I feel very confident about the features we have and the quality of the website overall, I think part of the problem is communicating all of those features to everyone.

And that really gets to what I think are the two main issues we have: 1) getting users to come back and visit somewhat regularly (not necessarily daily for everyone, but weekly or monthly at least); 2) educating users on the many features the site provides. For the first one, the only thing I can think of is the motivation emails I mentioned elsewhere. That would at least keep some line of communication open, unless the user opts out, of course. I've also considered sending a post-registration email, maybe 3-7 days after registration, to share some of the more advanced features with them, in case they missed it (so that kinda covers both issues).

For the second issue, there's the above email, but also adding a more useful FAQ page, potentially adding something to the home page to explain all the different stuff (screenshots, even), rather than just bullet points. I could also add help icons / tooltips / popups throughout the site to explain what stuff does and shortcuts. An example I thought of today was when you're entering tags, you can hit Enter when the textbox is empty to submit the form. I highly doubt most users know that, so it could be included in an optional help tooltip or something.

If you guys have any thoughts on how this could be presented or if you have any ideas how to engage the community or find new members, I would love to hear them!