Thanks everybody for participating. This seems like one of these "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations, and no matter what I say, there are people who are going to be unhappy about it. But I sincerely hope that we can find a workable solution.
What are we discussing?
There are two matters on the table here:
1) The use of genres. To me it's obviously the less important of the two, and short of implementing the layered genre structure which Garry suggests (I've already covered this
here), I think we can find a functional workaround which most users can live with. They might not be thrilled about it, but it'll be manageable.
2) What games we should cover. We've covered this topic before,
first in the early days of the revamped site, where it was a matter of allowing RPG-style games and such. Later on, the debate
turned towards Speed IF.
What do people want?
It seems that we have two camps:
a) The ones who would like the site to focus on the 8-bit (and possibly 16-bit) era, and who feel that going outside that era is diluting the quality of the database.
b) The ones who would like us to include more modern games, including every type of competition game and even the much-maligned Speed IF.
Part of the reason for this lies in the site's roots. It grew out of my own background and interests, which were the 8-bit games. I'll be the first to admit that they, along with Amiga and Atari ST titles, had my sole attention for the first many year's of CASA's existance. As long as a game used the classic format with a text input, I was a happy camper, and of course this formed our user base. At some point we started to include a few Inform games, and being the pragmatic guy that I am, I thought, "Why the hey not? It's still reminiscent of the games I created the site for, and as long as we maintain our focus, sure". So the inclusion of "modern" games just led its own, quiet life without adhering to some elaborate expansion scheme.
I also knew that I wanted to create more than just a list of solutions, so while they have indeed been our "bread and butter" for a long time,the goal was to create an information site about the games and their creators. However, when we were discussing CASA 2.0, one of the key points that arose during our discussions was that we didn't want to compete with the existing IF databases (IFDb, IF Wiki). As Garry so succinctly puts it, "the CASA community is tiny and other sites do it [reviews, ratings etc.] so much better." But we're still trying to cover "the entire range of games from the earliest titles to modern Interactive Fiction, with emphasis on older titles.", as I have so naively written.
"
I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."
The way I see it, the classic formats are already fairly well covered, and a lot of them have
detailed information unique to our site. That's no mean feat and certainly something to be proud of. But in the long run they're also a bit of a dead end. There are only so many C64, Spectrum and BBC games to cover, and although there's always more to do, it's tempting to dive into the huge Inform and TADS ocean.
However, I think that, with more than 7,500 games already in the database and not enough active users, we might be overextending ourselves. We don't have the user base that IFDb or IF Wiki do, and I must admit that when Garry presented his list of competition types, I felt a bit disheartened. Again, my background lies squarely in the old era, and like Alastair said, if I had known the amount of these games, I would probably have questioned the inclusion of some types from the very start.
If we leave out the matter of the quality of these games for a moment, we just don't have the user base to cover an area which is already covered fairly well by other sites. I would much rather see us expand on what we already have, track down authors, add descriptions etc.
I find it hard to exclude any games purely based on how they are created, because - as stated above - the cut-off point to how long it should take to write a "worthy" game becomes rather arbitrary. But it seems to me that there's a huge difference in quality between, say, IF Comp titles and the various Speed IF comp games. I don't care much for these one-joke games. As site owner, I have the final say in decisions pertaining to the site's direction, but as CASA has grown, an increasing part of its content is generated by others than me, and I can't really control what our users decide to submit to us. I can nix some of it and encourage other types of material, but I can't dictate what people send us.
Why are Speed-IF games an issue?
Can't people just ignore them if they don't care about them?
Well, for several reasons - in no particular order
1) They lessen the perceived value of the random game on the front page
2) They dilute the usefulness of the genre tags - if you click on "Archaeology" and a third of the games you find are in-jokey, one-room affairs, the genres aren't very helpful.
3) My personal take: There's quite a bit of behind the scenes work to adding and updating these games. CASA is and will remain a hobby for me which I have a limited amount of time for. So I'd prefer to spend that time on something which I feel heightens the quality of our database.
Where do we go from here?
1. Creating a separate site for competition games is not an option, for any number of reasons (technical, time, money, personal interest etc.)
2. Our user base is small. I want to make as many users as possible satisfied.
Do proponents of the two camps have any suggestions where the issues stated above become less of an issue? Would it make sense and be technically possible to, say, filter off unwanted material from search results? Any other equally dim-witted suggestions?
3. I don't want the site to overextend itself. I can only
strongly encourage that we focus on improving what we have rather than adding Russian mini-comp games and "Pirate kart", whatever that is. If we're going to add games, make it some of those that aren't found on the other major IF sites.
4. Let me re-iterate: our user base is small. I'd be sorry to see anyone leave because they don't like the direction the site is taking. The competition from Facebook groups and such is tough enough as it is.
5. I'll have to update the about section.
6. Personal note, as per issue #3 - I want this site, and working on it, to be enjoyable. The day someone decides to sponsor CASA and I can make it my full-time job, things will obviously be different. But as long as it's something I try to find the time for in between work & family obligations and other interests, I only have so many resources to pour into it.