b, to the extent any of your interest extends to the nuts-and-bolts of how forum community works, you might want to have a look at my Site thread at WPC,
Ok I've read it. It was illuminating as to dynamics over the past 10 years. I myself have participated in, led, or tried to lead
many commmunities over the past 20 years, both online and face-to-face. They have life cycles. A hard thing about face-to-face communities, is that people move away for career reasons, sometimes even romantic reasons.
I find that communities are sustaniable when they have a
shared cultural interest that doesn't require
too much work out of lay members to participate. For instance the backbone of the Asheville Skeptics is we drink beer / eat pizza on Wednesday evenings and talk "stuff" without any structure to it. It's a social call. I
try to force a topic of conversation to "something actually Skeptical" at least once in the course of an evening, but I don't always succeed. We also have a once-a-month semi-formal lecture presenation, with audience discussion expected afterwards. This is
more work for people to do, but as a conscientious group member, I do endeavor to make 1 such presentation in coming months. Unfortunately the book I picked to do it about, turns out to be a dull read for me, so I might have to go back to the drawing board.
Strategically the problem for a
Civ focused site is that
Civ sucks. I don't think it's accidental that you've had some luck with a SMAC focused site, even if it saw better days 5 years ago. SMAC doesn't suck like Civ. Sure it has points of tedium, but Civ III had
more tedium. Civ IV wasn't as bad, but they didn't really spend time fixing any major problem of the genre. They added religions and corporations, so in short
more gewgaws, indicating they clearly don't understand what's broken. Oh and their combat system sucks rocks, you have to build every kind of unit to have any hope attacking an enemy. Then Civ V the baby joke came along, and it had enough in common with the Civ IV I'd played extensively, to say thanks but no thanks. Beyond Earth is a watered down travesty. I don't even care what Civ VI is anymore, even if it's any good. It won't run on my ancient decrepit 10 year old laptops anyways, and by the time I get that straightened out, they'll probably be on Civ VII and I'll care even less.
I cut teeth in the cesspools of Usenet back in the day. I was Newsgroup Proponent for changing the venerable rec.games.programmer to the comp.games.development.* hierarchy. That means I shouldered 50% of the work of getting that to happen. The place became nasty enough that I went off and made my own gamedesign-l, which was successful for a number of years. Eventually though, Web 2.0 happened, Usenet died, the reasons for anyone to go to gamedesign-l waned, and finally Yahoo! groups became invisible to search engines.
For the past several years I've scratched my head from time to time about rebooting gamedesign-l somehow. However what's really needed for something like that, is a group of motivated talkative game designers,
that I actually want to listen to. I go on Reddit from time to time because it superficially resembles the old Usenet, and I try to participate in their discussions for a bit. But I rapidly find myself losing interest for various reasons. It could be that I'm
talked out, that I've heard every
basic subject under the sun many times already. Or there could be something wrong with the
pace of Reddit; too ephemeral. Anyways it hasn't provided the solution. I've generally thought, if a game design community already exists somewhere and provides what I want, then I don't
need to make one with my personal name tag on it. On the other hand if it doesn't exist, then I have to think about all the social engineering dimensions of Making It So.
I wrote Constitutions for the IGDA game design and indie developer SIGs, back in the day. I got everyone to vote on them. If memory serves I think we even PASSED those Constitutions. However it all turned out to be an academic exercise. There was a nasty core culture in most of the game industry that was
not grassroots. When I finally got booted off the IGDA site as non-paying member (there are horrific political reasons for taking such a stance, long story, basically a vote of NO CONFIDENCE on how they were running things), I realized that game industry people were in a Command & Control mindset. They enjoyed the idea of having power over others and making people go away that disagreed with them. Whereas I had first participated in face-to-face community organizations like the Fremont Arts Council. It had "hippie DNA" and was a Consensus governed organization, however that may have actually worked in practice. I mistook that model of organization for the general trend of "what self-selected people would actually want". I was wrong. People wanted to feel like they were running
their game studios. Most of them are deathly toxic and that's why I've never worked for one.
I won't even get into all the Open Source projects I've been through. Let's just say I have many community war stories. I don't do Open Source currently, and if I don't ever again, that will be ok. I worry about solving
my own problems nowadays, before concerning myself with any kind of Community Good.
Nowadays the only online community I do besides this one, is WetCanvas. It's for visual artists. I was at odds with it and didn't do it for 2 years, but I eventually came back. Their moderation policies are effective at avoiding many unpleasantries, but often onerous for freedom of expression. I feel that probably most "edgy" artists have been roundly hounded out of the place. I haven't really found an alternative with the kind of intellectual content I have in mind, nor a sticky membership. Your comments, BUncle, about Facebook sucking the air out of everyone's lungs may be apropos here.
