Message-ID: <3AC1EFA0.76500E8A@csi.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 09:05:20 -0500
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (Win98; U)
X-Accept-Language: en,fr,ru,es,it,ga,de,ja,gd,eu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Nelson and Forman (was Re: Inform - GamePreRoutine)
References: <zCs2IIA+pnt6Ewvl@ntlworld1.com> <99mfvq$17p$2@news.panix.com> <99mkdt$ote$1@cnn.Princeton.EDU> <Pine.GSO.4.33.0103260819340.14495-100000@ucsu.colorado.edu> <99nqcb$q15$1@news.lth.se> <3abff067.253285897@news.newsguy.com> <99q4b6$mbm$2@news8.svr.pol.co.uk> <99qfb9$1r5$1@joe.rice.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.34.37.104
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.34.37.104
X-Trace: excalibur.gbmtech.net 985788004 208.34.37.104 (28 Mar 2001 09:00:04 EST)
Lines: 40
X-Authenticated-User: jnc
Path: news.duke.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!nntp-out.monmouth.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!news.tele.dk!195.158.233.21!news1.ebone.net!news.ebone.net!newsfeed2.news.nl.uu.net!sun4nl!ams.uu.net!nyc.uu.net!excalibur.gbmtech.net
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:84674

"Lucian P. Smith" wrote:

> While I agree that there seems to be a fairly large crowd interested in
> reading threads like these, the pool of people interested in *writing*
> threads like these seems to be much smaller.  This last time I tried to
> jump-start discussion with some specific questions, but that didn't seem
> to help, either.  I must admit it's all rather discouraging.
> Maybe some of the problem is that with the increase of reviews, people
> are feeling unqualified to just *discuss* the games any more.  Or maybe
> people feel that they don't have anything new to contribute to what's
> already been said.  I really don't know.  Anyone have a personal response
> they want to put in here?

I haven't posted anything of the sort, personally, partly because I'm still getting
my footing around here, and would like to avoid retreading old topics, but also
because I'm closer to the programming side than the playing side, to be honest.  I
don't know how well that reflects anybody else in the universe, however...

> Maybe I should just plug away at it, and eventually I'll get responses.
> Er, and I don't want to imply that *nobody* responded.  A heartfelt
> thank-you to those that did.  But we're somewhat short of a critical mass
> here, yet.

Well, I hate to make comments like this, because no matter how it's phrased, it's
going to sound like I'm condemning somebody, but hopefully with this disclaimer,
people will know otherwise...

But...it's possible that it doesn't happen because people are just asking for it to
happen.  I'd suggest (again, not to sound arrogant) leading by example, and showing
the "userbase" what you're looking for by discussing someone else's game.  They'll
come around soon enough, I think.

And, yeah, rereading that, it does sound like I've marched in on my high horse to be

partly hypocritical (since I haven't posted any such discussion, myself) and mostly
arrogant, but I assure you I really mean nothing more than that giving "the masses"
an example of what you're looking for (though not stated as such, obviously) will
work far better than soliciting opinions ever can.


