City of IF

[Bookwizard]

*As the sun rises on the city, grumbling can be heard coming in from the north gate, an old dusty wizard ambles in with a knapsack and a handful of books under his right arm. As he makes his way to the center of the curious metropolis his eyes light on different areas in the city that lay in slight disrepair. His grumbling continues unabated, slightly louder: waking IFians from the depths of their peaceful sleep*


That's right, the wizard is back, and ready to ramble in all of your general directions!


*By the time the wizard reaches the central square and sees the now abandon Market Bazaar, he can contain his boring agitations no more*


Fellow IFians! I come from the terrible land of RL, a land of which I have been forced to labor in, just as many of you have, for many months. I come back to this great city to rejoice in a world much richer in the flow of iderium then that of RL, a city of great legend and verse! Through all these many moths I have been missing, however, it seems the city has moved away from its former glory, many of it's hallowed citizens seem now to be elsewhere. The once great and thriving Market Bazaar, and Games District missing! The SGOTM gone! It simply will not do!

Now I as one who has had no say in these decisions, nor one who has partook in their logic have no full ground on questioning them, but you as citizens, you are the lifeblood of the city. I thereby implore you to help revive the city to its former glory by joining me in my campaign to revive not only the Games and Market districts, but also by reviving the way the city is approached. This is more then a place to write, this is a place to live, it is truly a city! It is a place to think, write, play, and laugh! To read, rejoice, RP, and elect leaders. This is a place of such immense uniqueness, that it cannot fall to become just another typical writing site, I will not allow it, and I hope you won't either!


*The wizards voice dies down, and he looks around at the small crowd now assembled, and then past them to some election poster fluttering in the wind. His eyebrows furrow with thought.*


I see the city has come once again to that time of year when it elects its leader, a leader to embody not only competence, but the will of IF, the will of IFians. So it is now that I ask you to do three things, with these things we might bring about a better city.


Number 1, let these things now mentioned be a factor when thinking of who to elect as your next mayor.

Number 2, look at this site as a place not only for writing, but for unique interaction between writers.

Number 3, sign a virtual petition below by leaving your name and thoughts for the sake of the re-creation of the Games Section/ Market as well as a revival of the city.

[Smee]

SGoTM is not gone, it's now called Spotlight Competition.

Games and Market bizarre activity, if there were any, could thrive quite happily in the Open forum. Indeed some games do.

[Thunderbird]

If we're to have a thriving games sector, we need to have a massive brainstorm thread that thrusts it forward, where we can explore not only ideas we've encountered online for games we can play, but new concepts we might be able to develop through the observation of those previous experiences.

Something of the same would need to be done with the Marketplace, a thread to explore what we feel we might be able to accomplish with our fables, what we would like to be able to obtain with them.

These things must be brought up immediately in any attempt to revamp these locations. An exploration of what has been done, and what new can be introduced will be absolutely necessary. Especially with so much new blood here that may not recall that which has preceded them.


While the SGOTM may have morphed into a new form, this form is unfortunately too rarely seen manifested in the city for it to be effective. I feel our experiment in removing the SGOTM to replace it with an arbitrarily assigned competition has removed the predictability, and thus reliability, of what was always a powerful, uniting event and while we may still yet not have enough strong new stories to support a monthly competition, we do need a return to a stable, predictable, reccuring Spotlight.

[Smee]

Quote: While the SGOTM may have morphed into a new form, this form is unfortunately too rarely seen manifested in the city for it to be effective.

It can be as often as you like - we had them monthly when it was busy, and when it was not... we had none.

Since the arrival of some new talent there has been the election which meant I didn't run one now. There is nothing wrong with Spotlight except we lack a new mayor yet to run one ;-)

The same would have happened to SGoTM over the summer as would have happened to Spotlight if we'd run one, maybe two nominations if we're lucky and maybe 2 votes.

[Bookwizard]

I completly agree. It never even occurred to me to attempt a true "re-vamp" based on the thoughts and contributions of the site-goers, but now that you have mentioned it I can certainly see no better options!

[Crunchyfrog]

I don't do politics but I do do stats.

Check out the SGOTM/Spotlight results thread in the City Auditorium, which will help to draw your conclusions about the success/ failure of the competition over the years.

Note that during Summer 2010 we were averaging about 10 posts a week, and there were no SG candidates for a competition.

Currently we are averaging about 200 posts a week, which from the Recent Posts section appears to be mainly in Storygames. In the past two months 5 SGs have qualified for the Spotlight Comp which has only been delayed while the election takes place.

Look at the Recent Posts link and you will see that there are four 'two word at a time' games going on in the main SG forums, and there are two RP-style SGs going on in General Fiction and Experimental.

I look forward to seeing you join in and make the IF you want to see happen. :)

[Lebrenth]

You have an interesting idea there with brainstorming for games, Thunderbird. Not only do we need to do some brainstorming, we need a place to list the games we know. There are a lot of forum games out there that we could put in a sort of Games Library, and anytime anyone wants to start a game, they can look through the library for an idea.

I would also like to see Fables used for more things, they have always been good motivators for me. However, you can't really force people to trade them on their own, and the market really wasn't getting much activity so it makes sense it was shut down. Fables currency is still a valuable tool that occasionally finds a use, so as long as no one is considering getting rid of Fables, I don't think it's a pressing issue to "fix" them.

[DeadManWalking]

I have to say that, at first glance a lot of the changes BW noted seem like a huge problem.

But I was around for both the deletion of the Games section and the change of the SGOTM and there were perfectly legitimate reasons for doing so. The truth was that the city was empty. There was no reason to have the extraneous Games section when there were, at most, maybe three games actually running, all of which could be easily folded into the Open Forum. In fact, I'd say that putting them into Open Forum actually helped them a little, since people who might otherwise never go into the Games section might catch a glimpse and have their interest sparked. (Granted, its hard to measure that since the overall usership of the City was declining)

As for the SGOTM, I didn't really like the change to Spotlight, but it had to be done. Even though I would prefer regular competitions, there just wasn't enough traffic at the time to justify it. It got to the point where, if we HAD run an SGOTM, we would've had what amounted to automatic winners, since there were so few competitors. Waiting til there were enough participants for an actual competition makes sense.

And of course, with the resurgence of new blood in the City, I think the SGOTM should be restored shortly.

@Lebrenth, regarding Fables.

I've had similar issues with that part of the city, since we tend not to actually use Fables for much. But it doesn't seem to me like we can really do much right now. Since such a large amount of our user base is new blood, we can't create fable use when that group is basically excluded from participating, not having had time to accumulate fatbacks.

This problem could be solved by making everything a lot cheaper in the economy of IF, but that means people like your or I who have a shitload of fables can do basically anything, thus devaluing the fable in our eyes. I've seen this problem in contest entry fees especially. Make the entry fee too big and not everyone can participate, but make it too small and the reward at the end is too small to entice the bigger fish.

Of course, you can assume that a lot of us do things for the love of writing and not the fatback, and that the fable reward at the end of the contest doesn't matter (which is true, mostly), but if you assume that, then there doesn't seem to be a point in fables in the first place.

Btw, figured I'd mention this, this is NOT me signing the petition for the renewal of Games and/or the Marketplace. Neither of those have enough traffic to market separate sections, and I think we're fine the way we are currently. If a plethora of games come up, them maybe yes.

[Bookwizard]

When I started this it was mainly to provoke thought, express my grievances, and stir up the city a bit to bring back some older members. I did not really want to really argue my point, more just make a statement, but I now feel the need to establish my personal position beyond what was stated "in character" as this has now almost simply become a place to do just that. My position:

The transition to the Spotlight competitions was completely justified from what I can gather in terms of statistics and how many people were active at the time. Also in this case it really is not much of my place to complain as I naturally contributed to that decision by not being directly active at the time. However, I think that now I can see a revival of various old members, and a great deal of new ones flooding in for a great start to a new year: in lieu of this I think the SGOTM should be brought back.


I believe the removal of the Games Section was also more or less justified, but for the same reasons as the SGOTM, I think that if it were brought back now it would very soon once again have the audience it enjoyed in the good old days. Also I think Thunderbird put it very well in saying something akin to "we need to keep the kindling around to start bigger fires"


As for the Marketplace, I never fully understood the logic behind its removal, but I will not question it. The Market was one of the best places to do what I mentioned above, keep City of IF more then just a writing site, or maybe I should say: a whole new and different type of writing site. Not only did this give more use and value to the concept of fables, but it created a whole different aspect of the site that fueled creative flow. You saw the rise of powerful businesses, like the now only fabled "Chinren Inc." and many others that created a virtual economy and chances to assist writers with their SGs (for a price of course :)). So I have long since waited for it's return, and continue to do so.


These are the three more tangible things that I stand for in my advocations, I also quest for a certain feeling that was present in the City when I first joined that seems to be gone for now. This "feeling" I think will at least slightly come back with the revival of the three things above, otherwise it is up to the community!


This is my personal stance, and it is certain to flux over time and as new arguments are brought up, but for now it's what it is. I personally will try to help stand for these things by personal example (starting up my SG again, starting an RP, and finally getting around to developing "Book Inc."), but with NaNoWriMo coming up I may have to be content with a bit of hypocrisy until I can find time to do these things.