A voice from the distant past on Wraith-l resurfaces to reply to my comments on RPG reviewing made some time ago.
Lea responds to my ideas thus:
Adam argues for "a single source of good, edited, commissioned reviews run by skilled people and provided by a team of experienced gamers and writers." I'm not sure this is practical. It takes time and effort to deliver the kind of analysis that Adam wants, something that few experienced gamers and writers, with many other calls on their time, would be able to commit to.This is, of course, the main argument for a professional RPG mag, with a team of writers who are paid for their work. However, since the RPG market seems determined to make such an enterprise completely unprofitable, that isn't going to happen. Luckily, Lea has a technology-based solution to the social problem at work here.That's not to say that few people could or would deliver good reviews or criticism. The problem with Adam's proposal, I think, is that it puts the onus on a small circle of people. If the community wants "Basements and Bugbears" reviewed, the editors have to commission someone to review "Basements and Bugbears." This is hard work for both the editors and the reviewer
How do we provide a common location where trusted writers can find an audience, and readers can find a source of trustworthy writers? Aggregation.And you know what? This might actually work. Lea suggests using the RSS format and moderated aggregation, so basically an editor can build a web page out of reviews submitted to him.Specifically, moderated aggregation. There clearly needs to be editorial control, otherwise the screeching howler monkeys just hurl their faeces down the aggregated feed instead of in their nasty little forums. But aggregation steps the role down from commissioning to moderation, and with a suitable definition of the feed the traffic should remain fairly low. Sure, from a critical point of view it's not as good as a rigorous editorial process, but it has the benefit that it might actually maintain a flow of content.
There are alternatives. People who pay careful attention to the look of this blog might have noticed that I'm testing the Movable Type 3.0 beta right now. If seen some interesting uses of Trackback at work during the testing, where blogs have been built out of the Trackback pings from other blogs. Here's how it works: blogger a writes a post, and then sends a Trackback ping to a set Trackback address. Blogger b gets e-mail notification of the ping, reads the post and then goes onto the MT interface to approve or deny the ping. If it's approved, it becomes part of the visible reviews blog.
This might even be worth a try.
Ooh, I've always wanted to be a voice from the past. Looks like those seven years of gafia weren't wasted after all *grin*.
The trackback approach is interesting. Its advantage is that it works at the individual post level; its disadvantage is that it works at the individual post level. That is, the editor doesn't have to filter out the relevant articles from a set of RSS feeds many of which will contain non-gaming stuff; but it also means writers have to remember to ping the trackback URL every time they write a review. The trackback approach scales better, but may have more difficulty gaining traction with casual reviewers. (Hmm. Perhaps this is an advantage in disguise?)
Tool support for trackback is potentially an issue depending on what tools potential writers are using. When I was using Radio, it didn't have trackback, and those few Radio weblogs I still see don't seem to have it yet. Not trying to knock your suggestion, Adam; but the writers come first, and if key writers used non-trackback-enabled tools then this approach would be closed off.
Practicalities:
If such a site is to survive to reach critical mass, it needs to be supported from the start by a decent number of competent-or-better reviewers, with enough of a backlog to dribble out as starter content. It's okay if early momentum is an illusion created by recycling reviews that are actually four years old, provided that the site creates a *perception* of regular new content.
The editor (or editorial board) must be trusted by the non-screeching community. Not to prejudge the issue, but does anyone know Bruce Baugh's secret identity?
Scope. Is the site defined as a reviews site or a criticism site? The latter includes the former, but makes room for articles that assess tropes, examine practices, survey genres or genealogies, etc. Personally I'd love to see these (no surprises there), and a wider scope allows for a larger flow of content; but there's an obvious risk of losing focus and thereby losing audience. A possible approach is to acquire two sites, one for reviews only and one for reviews plus criticism: the latter could automatically aggregate the former.
At the time of writing, rpgcritics.{net|org|com} are available and rpgreviews.org is available (rpgreviews.{net|com} are not, though neither seems in active use).
By the way, this is probably a Movable Type beta issue, but there may be something wrong with comments posting -- if I preview a comment, then post from the preview page, I get an error (this has happened twice). Posting from the "article" page is okay.
Testing that bug
Also testing, using Typekey.
Testing again
OK, after rooting around the bug reporting database, they are aware of this one and are working to address it. Incidentally, as a Typepad user you already have a Typekey account (it's the same user name and password as Typepad) and you should be able to comment using that.
I'll reply to the thoughts about the review site later on.
Hm. I'd be interested in this idea...
Actually, it could easily run as part of 20 by 20 Room. Hm.
Or independently. But it seems like it'd be worth trying.
Note that there is incentive for RPG.net and ENWorld and Gaming Report to play; given how Trackback works, users would have to jump to those sites to get the full reviews, thus providing traffic.