The power of you

I just put this up on my blog, but it's directly relevant here, so I'm reposting
it in full. You are free to distribute this article in full or in part, as long
as you include attribution and a link to
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com.

The active size of the Angband community, excluding the top 3 variants, is
approximately 100 members. I base this number on the number of active members of
the angband.oook.cz forums, which is a conservative figure but not unrealistic.
Looking at the Angband variants with the most active forums: it appears Furyband
is maybe four times larger, Portralis probably a third smaller, and Tales of
Middle Earth possibly twice the size. I'm having to guess here based on the
number of simultaneous users online for those forum stats - it would be good to
know a break down of active users vs. people who haven't logged onto the forums
in the last three months.

So perhaps a total community size of 500 users all up, which is undoubtedly an
over-estimate. I'd like to know how many people who download Angband who don't
'contribute' further by joining one of these online web forums. Given my
experience with Unangband, it's probably a 10:1 to 50:1 ratio. Berlios, who host
Unangband, make the download stats available for each Unangband release, which
you can have a look at.

You may well have objections to the way I'm restricting 'community' to those
people I can count. Well, I could well have been harsher, and just restricted it
to the number of people who post to the forums, or Angband ladder, or
newsgroups. This would be a more laborious process, but it would give me numbers
that would be a lot smaller. And a closer sense of what I'm trying to define
community as.

Why am I discussing this? Well, for one, there has been a mini-furor on the
Angband Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.angband about the utility of web forums
vs. Usenet. I have little time for this sort of discussion. Firstly, Usenet is a
great resource, but one that is increasingly become restricted from general
access, mostly by ISPs who are not offering nntp as a service anymore. It's also
not the first port of call of Internet users anymore, like it was in the days
that I attended university (And my dad was running the Commodore 64 BBS for the
Auckland C=64 club and excited about getting Fidonet feeds in).

I don't buy most of the arguments for just using the newsgroup because the
Internet has always been heterogeneous. I've cut back on a lot of the links I
listed on this blog, but if you look to the right and scroll down a little,
you'll see the number of Angband related links that I feel confident will allow
me to capture any discussion about Unangband. Then I still have to subscribe to
Technorati. Then I still have to check which traffic is coming to this blog and
the Unangband home page on Google Analytics, and notice that one of my main
traffic sources du jour happens to have the blog link in a very light grey
against a white background and still manages to redirect more traffic to me than
sites that have featured this blog relatively prominently. And then I still
search Google for Unangband every month, just to see if anything else has come
up.

Secondly, it's because I get frustrated by seeing amateur software developers
like myself making despondent posts about whether or not it is worth spending
the time trying to develop code, or whether they should continue working on an
idea that they had. I'm no stranger to this feeling, and I'm fortunate enough to
have been rolled a really good hand in life and have a loving wife who actually
understands my need to sit down and write code for six hours at a time.

I'll put this in black and white. If you enjoy playing roguelikes, or any other
games that are put together by people who are not employed full time by the game
industry, you have the power to transform their lives.

1. Give the author feedback on their blog or on web forums or email or
whatever means of communicating with them that you have.
2. Contribute what you can back in the form of being an active community
member. Help out others, write reviews of the game, set up your own blog and
link to the game.
3. Become an advocate for the game. Pester game reviewers that you know or
like, link to the game on related forums, submit articles about the game to
Slashdot, Digg it, Reddit.
4. Be a hedgehog about it. Don't just promote the game once, but keep doing
it.

This site was recently Slashdotted, on the basis of a story that I submitted to
Slashdot that as far as I can tell was made red hot by 11 people and paid off
with 16,000 unique visitors to this blog and a three-fold increase in traffic.
It's possible to get onto the gaming front page of Digg with as little as 40
diggs. If you thought the size of the Angband community was small, these numbers
are tiny.

So why do this? It's simple really. The more feedback an amateur software
developer gets, the better they feel about the game, and the more they'll code.
Positive feedback helps, but even constructive criticism is good.

I challenge you to pick a game, any game that you like that you feel is
unappreciated, go out and become an advocate for it for a week. If you can't do
that, at least post five times to the forums of five separate games within a
week. Be more than a passive reader. Get a Digg account, search for roguelikes
and digg every article you find. File some bug reports, using whatever bug
reporting tool the game has. I love to get bug reports, even though I reserve
the right to ignore fixing them (I'll write more on this another time).

If you do that, I guarantee that you'll get more game written in return for a
fraction of your total time invested. Not only that, but you create a small
chance that something magical will happen. If enough people start to love the
game that you love, there is the distinct possibility that the software
developer will be able to make the biggest transition of all, to working on
their game full-time. I think most dream of being able to do so.

Think about it. Through spending a little of your time, you could end up with a
professionally written version of the game that you love. But you've got to make
it worth the investment. And becoming part of the community, or better yet, an
advocate for the community, is the best way to start making this happen.

--
The Roflwtfzomgbbq Quylthulg summons L33t Paladins -more-
"Apple: Celebrating the poisoning of Alan Turing since 1977."
ASCII Dreams: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com
Unangband: http://unangband.blogspot.com

On 2007-12-08 09:49:48, andrewdoull <andrewdoull.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> The active size of the Angband community, excluding the top 3 variants, is
> approximately 100 members. I base this number on the number of active members of
> the angband.oook.cz forums, which is a conservative figure but not unrealistic.
> Looking at the Angband variants with the most active forums: it appears Furyband
> is maybe four times larger, Portralis probably a third smaller, and Tales of
> Middle Earth possibly twice the size. I'm having to guess here based on the
> number of simultaneous users online for those forum stats - it would be good to
> know a break down of active users vs. people who haven't logged onto the forums
> in the last three months.

This number, I think is quite a bit bigger than you estimate. I use my own
download data for evidence. Also, as a rule of thumb, you'll have 1-5% of
replies and community members out of your entire user-base.

As proof of the above statements, after a release, I get about 500 total
downloads of new steam, and I have about 100 people on the mailing list (at any
given time), and about 10 of those people discuss things on the mailing list.

People fall into and out of the community at any given time. So that's
currently, but many more have played Steamband alone.

> Why am I discussing this? Well, for one, there has been a mini-furor on the
> Angband Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.angband about the utility of web forums
> vs. Usenet. I have little time for this sort of discussion.

No, but you have time to post, and re-post your article in three separate
places, and then *follow* all those discussions that occur.

> Secondly, it's because I get frustrated by seeing amateur software developers
> like myself making despondent posts about whether or not it is worth spending
> the time trying to develop code, or whether they should continue working on an
> idea that they had. I'm no stranger to this feeling, and I'm fortunate enough to
> have been rolled a really good hand in life and have a loving wife who actually
> understands my need to sit down and write code for six hours at a time.

Well. I'm trying to remain calm here.

Those people? posting those despondent messages? I'm being polite by calling
them stupid f%^&$ng idiots.

I have some news for them -- if they are posting about whether or not it is
worth spending the time to develop code, then without question *it* *is* *not*.

Look at successful shareware authors, people who code there own freeware. You
don't see the creators of dwarf fortress bitching about whether or not it's
worth their time, Nor T. Biskup, nor the author of Fastcrawl. Mostly they are
too busy fsking coding and, oh, I don't know, say, giving interviews about their
successful software to post online whining about their userbase.

If you are writing software (much less a roguelike) for *public* *acclaim* you
might as well do something more likely to garner public acclaim like go fishing.
To whine about the fact online is. . . well, I'm sure you can draw your own
conclusions on how I feel.

> I'll put this in black and white. If you enjoy playing roguelikes, or any other
> games that are put together by people who are not employed full time by the game
> industry, you have the power to transform their lives.

uh? what? I'm all for positive communication, and I'm very responsive to my
player base. But *asking* people to do these things is silly. Make a game that's
good enough and you won't have to ask anyone to do illustrations of your classes
(http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/GFX/fanart/) or build a community around your
game - they will do so because of it's inherent value.

This is basically an attitude of entitlement. "Coding is hard, so whether the
code/software warrants it or not people should praise me for it."

> 1. Give the author feedback on their blog or on web forums or email or
> whatever means of communicating with them that you have.
> 2. Contribute what you can back in the form of being an active community
> member. Help out others, write reviews of the game, set up your own blog and
> link to the game.
> 3. Become an advocate for the game. Pester game reviewers that you know or
> like, link to the game on related forums, submit articles about the game to
> Slashdot, Digg it, Reddit.
> 4. Be a hedgehog about it. Don't just promote the game once, but keep doing
> it.

All of the above will be done without having to ask for it.

You know what this reminds me of? Everyone once in a while (not often) I'll have
a player who will submit a list of ideas. Some good, most of them however are
poorly thought out. This list comes with a statement "You should make me a
member of your development team. I've got a lot of ideas and could make steam a
great variant."

I smile while thinking 'Steam is *already* a great variant', and reply. "Sure,
that sounds wonderful! Send me patches and I'll integrate the ones I like, and
you'll get a development credit!" But doing the work isn't what they want --
they have an attitude of entitlement. They want to tell someone what to do and
receive praise for it.

Out of the half dozen times this has happened, not *one* of those people have
sent me any code. Of course all of the people who have sent me code never
bothered with the first e-mail of ideas. They just wrote the code, and I patched
it in.

> So why do this? It's simple really. The more feedback an amateur software
> developer gets, the better they feel about the game, and the more they'll code.
> Positive feedback helps, but even constructive criticism is good.

How is it other people's responsibility to motivate you? I know you're
(probably) generation Y and everything, but this seriously isn't how things get
done IRL. Check with any local authors, or anyone in a low paying creative
field. They aren't doing it for the kudos. Code and books are being written
without their authors being praised.

> I challenge you to pick a game, any game that you like that you feel is
> unappreciated, go out and become an advocate for it for a week. If you can't do
> that, at least post five times to the forums of five separate games within a
> week. Be more than a passive reader. Get a Digg account, search for roguelikes
> and digg every article you find. File some bug reports, using whatever bug
> reporting tool the game has. I love to get bug reports, even though I reserve
> the right to ignore fixing them (I'll write more on this another time).

You see all these posts in these forums and others? Those are the people who are
doing that. It's not our job to cajole those people into communicating, it's the
software's job to be powerful and compelling enough to engender this type of
communication.

> If you do that, I guarantee that you'll get more game written in return for a
> fraction of your total time invested. Not only that, but you create a small
> chance that something magical will happen. If enough people start to love the
> game that you love, there is the distinct possibility that the software
> developer will be able to make the biggest transition of all, to working on
> their game full-time. I think most dream of being able to do so.

Yes, and nearly all lack the skill. If you need praise in order to code more, I
wouldn't count on being successful.

Again, for clarity's sake. Me posting something positive about a game will *not*
make someone else love it. Only the game can do that.

> Think about it. Through spending a little of your time, you could end up with a
> professionally written version of the game that you love. But you've got to make
> it worth the investment. And becoming part of the community, or better yet, an
> advocate for the community, is the best way to start making this happen.

You tell everyone to think about it, and then draw some un-realistic consequence
from actions. "Why, if I just wish *really* *hard* maybe I can slow the decline
of the dollar! Wishing makes it happen!" Them spending 'time' writing you will
not make code appear. You writing it will, and that should happen whether they
write you or not.

You say "You've got to make it worth the investment". Nope. They don't. People
will still write code (variants AND software) without anyone commenting at all.
Here's a protip: They know we like communication.

Asimov said it best. People write because they *can't* *not*.

I write to make the type of game I want to play. No one else was making it. It's
fun (the writing and the game), and I really like to play Steamband.

Guess what? Other people do too.
--
-Campbell

- Join the steamband group by sending an email to
steamband-subscribe.DeleteThis@Yahoogroups.com !
- Visit the Steamband web page, and follow the progress of Steam! (and view my
art!) http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/