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Project description now available for those who are interested Alife gaming. It is now three years in the making and is one of the largest games written to date- period! The game is built on a new cluster scheme that links six active games into a single world. A world which we built from the atom up.

The first game called the Astron is a galactic Sci-Fi adventure, the second is a strategy based life simulator, the third is a strategy RPG and the last two have never been touched on to date. The trick, and why this game is interesting, is how it links six unique dimensions of life (games) into a single clustered game that evolves. The engine runing the system is accessible with Pen&Paper, Dice or PC or linked!

We welcome serious comments and will watch this thread.

Get a small little taste of it through www.bionicbros.de. Its nearly all graphic and a few words about the concept - in february the site will turn into a network news station broadcasting from this new world.

I want to bring this to the forum - is this spam?

We all post when we've created a new game here, and I can't see how this is different - except it feels different. I think this is spam, and I think we need to set a policy on that, now that it has happened. Ron and I will discuss this and decide, but your input is valuable.

Please comment below.

-Clinton

It definitely does feel different.  It reads like advertising hype copy, not "Hey, I just posted my newest game to my webpage, take a look."

Looking at the webpages, it also doesn't look very 'indie' to me.  The game itself doesn't appear to be available yet, either, which makes asking for comments on it seem somewhat pointless.

The concept seems neat, and might even interest many of the Forge members, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate posting material.  I definitely don't think it belongs in the Indie RPGs forum.  Perhaps if there were a forum set aside specifically for this sort of general advertising, it would be appropriate there.[/u]

Looks spammish to me.  Absent a hard rule, I'd be disinclined to spank the poster very hard--better to make friends & all that--but multiple postings like this would make me less interested, not more.

Spam is definitely partly about quantity, much as I would like to be able to pluck out the rotten core of spam as some mystical, qualitative factor.  As long as these fora are moderated, we're more or less spam-proof.

In short, it's your sandbox, you get to rule on it as you please.  Since you asked, I'd say it's borderline.

--TQuid

Hi Clinton,

Speaking merely as a Forge-member*, I think the post belongs in Indie Game Design and the sender needs to get a nice, firm email regarding Forge policies - something like, "We appreciate you posting, and everyone gets one 'see my game' post if they want, but from now on, no more 'press release style' announcements." Phrased better, of course.

Best,
Ron

* For those of you who don't know, I wear the family-patriarch legwear when it comes to Forge content, whereas Clinton wears it when it comes to forum design/management. Hence, in this post, I am just another Forge dude.

I had the realization when I started proclaiming my rpgs here that "whoa! I'm getting close to ad copy."

Since then I try to include some design notes along with a game announcement. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that encouraged (if not outright required) when making a game announcement.

Even if it's something like, "Here's my game. ... (summary) ... I'd like comments/help on (aspects of game)"

Just posting a link to your game with tons of exclamation marks without being a viable contributor to the Forge seems kind of shabby. As if we'll drop what we're doing and take a look. (I did, and was non-plussed. Too many graphics and bad web design)

I think the key difference here is that you should only start a thread if you intend to actually read the feedback.  This is also the design forum, people should only be presenting ideas with the intent to get feedback.    

A forum is for discussion, an ad leaves no room for discussion.  An advertiser doesn't care what you have to say as long as you pay.  I have serious doubts that the poster is intending to read any of our responses here.

Chris

It is highly borderline for me...since the splat posted really tells me nothing important about the game.
Policy should be that the actual bits of the game are discussed here, not something that sounds like bad hype and is empty of discussable content.

Note to the writers of the post, if you are watching this forum for feedback, here's the thing: I see nothing to discuss in the post...there's no substance to the number of years something has been in development or that it is apparently set in six different worlds.

What are your plans, how does it work, etc?
Actually, I can't even quite figure out what the game is about from the webpages, other than a vague idea involving one-celled organisms.

Hey,

How does this sound for policy?

Everyone who has a game to sell or talk about gets a "benefit of the doubt" privilege on their first post to the forum about it. Even if they say, "Hi, come buy my game, 'bye," and that's it, well, they don't necessarily know about the prevailing aesthetic here and we shouldn't expect them to (want them to, yes, but not expect it).

So that post generates whatever interest it generates on its own merit (people visiting the indicated website, etc), and the poster gets a nice message from Clinton who welcomes them to the Forge and explains that their posts from now on need to have more oomph in terms of community-discussion value.

That's pretty much how it's been happening so far, or at least I hope that's how it's been perceived. If we formalize it a bit, with a standard mailing, how does that sound?

Best,
Ron

That's perfect, Ron. That way we don't scare away anyone legitimately interested in talking about design!

That sounds very reasonable, Ron. Better to fight spam with kindness as you cannot actually stop them from posting.

Mike

Oh yeah!

I forgot to mention the possible later steps of the policy flow-chart. Say the guy says, "Cool," and moves into neat Forge-style discussion, with admittedly frequent reference to his own work. Bam, exactly what we want.

But say he doesn't, and advert-style posts keep appearing, and even worse, no other posts or responses or involvement appear.

That warrants one warning, I think - a strong one, emphasizing that we can and will do something about it.

If the person keeps it up after that, Clinton does awful things that I don't even like to think about - suffice to say that the person will never post on the Forge again no matter what they try. (Nothing offensive or sent to the person - just defensive on our part.) And I am more than capable of providing a full record of the correspondence to fora and mailing lists at all tiers of the industry to alert everyone to this person's practices. Any policy-differences I might have with a given publisher or given distributor or whoever are minimal compared to our mutual hatred of spam.

Best,
Ron

Ron,

It works and it is fair.

-Raven

Thanks for all the input, guys. Ron nailed the right action, which has been taken.

-Clinton

Come on... You have spent more time discussing whether this post has crossed a spamming line than to nail down the project.

Is the project crap or is there actually something interesting there?  There is no humanly possible way one can type an entire site in a post so referencing (as done in the scientific forums is used).  

What we are programming is highly serioius, not another supid ad for some kids game and quite NEW. It is underground as it gets locked in the East side of Berlin. There is nothing for SALE yet and well after three years of building it this forum rather spends time on clearing ettique than providing a serious review. Come on serious comments.

Highlighting spamming issues often brings more attention to them.  The forums run by our colleagues here in DE typically just merge the 'spams' down using a linear ranking system until they are no longer visible. Talking about them just creates bad feelings...

JL