What are you guys up to? Are you tracking these games down and beating them? Buying them? Killing them? Boba Fett? I've perused but I'm not sure what's going on...

TL;DR - The The bounty system is set up to encourage users to play certain games during a certain time period to earn bonus points (and, of course, to play through a game in their collection!) It's sort of like a book club for games.

This feature tries to meet two goals: 1) encourage community participation; 2) encourage users to play through / finish games! For the first one, it puts certain games at the forefront of the site (i.e. the Home page, Twitter, etc) and each bounty has a corresponding forum thread. This provides a way for users to talk about the game as they play it, offer guidance, motivation, etc.

Although there aren't any rules, per se, in game selection, I generally abide by the following:

• Focus on games that don't have any completion times
• Look for potential new releases that active users pick up (and just in general, try to focus on games that active users own)
• Coincide with certain gaming events, for example, there was a Street Fighter bounty for its anniversary a while back
• Have a monthly theme with a separate set of games that fit said theme (this was only recently implemented as an "official" feature and has now been separated out on the Home page...before, it was just kind of a mess)

The process is fairly simple: 1) Accept a bounty, which creates a playthrough for tracking your time; 2) Enter time as you play the game...if you want...some games do this for you, so it's optional; 3) Enter a completion to complete the bounty, which will require you to enter a time.

You can opt out of a bounty at any time, though there isn't a penalty or anything for not completing one. I've left many bounties incomplete hehe :P

You may have seen your Completionator points before, and you get those for a variety of things, including entering completion times. Each bounty provides a bonus on top of the standard points for a completion time, so there's an incentive there...although the points don't really do anything, they're just for fun :)

The bounty system was built before the missions stuff (which you may not be aware of yet :D), but both work very similar, except missions don't have a time limit and you're assigned them, rather than accepting from a small pool.

Overall, the bounty system is a neat idea, but our community is really too small to fully utilize it at this point...but hopefully one day we'll get there!

Sounds like fun. I just joined forces with some dudes to form a game club podcast in addition to the podcast I'm already a part of. If not for all that gaming responsibility already, I would be totally interested in jumping in and helping fill out some numbers and discussion. Maybe one day I'll jump in if I see a game in my wheelhouse.

Thanks for the explanation, love what you do around here.

If your group would like a way to track progress / interact / whatever, let me know! I'm always looking for bounty games that others are interested in playing and would be happy to oblige :D If you're interested / have any ideas, it might be neat to link / embed the podcast episodes or something.

Very interesting! I'll think it over and discuss it with them. We were looking for a community platform.. this could be the place. We'll be in touch!