The right forum place for AAR / Let's play threads?

[sisko]

Congratulation on AC2's first AAR.

The latest version of the scient-ifficPatch is hosted in our downloads section.

Would  the Theory of Everything forum be a better place for this?  Shall I move it?  Do you mind comments interspersed with your reports, of shall I split this post to a separate comments  thread?

i was thinking "AAR" and "Let's play" threads should go in the Planet Tales forum, that's because they are planet tales, just narrated in a multimedia form instead of just text.
i'm aware that's not the most popular forum on our site, but maybe this will change things a bit...

your views on this issue?

[Buster's Uncle]

Your point has merit.

...I still don't understand what the Miriam article is doing there, though...

[sisko]

off topic:

...I still don't understand what the Miriam article is doing there, though...

where to move it? The Theory of Everything?

back on topic:

Your point has merit.

thanks.
we can move Planet Tales above The Command Nexus for more visibility..

[NewAgeOfPower]

You may move my DAR. I believe Green is willing too, although you should probably ask him.

[Buster's Uncle]

Hmm.   So many things to do and only one day happening at a time to do them in.

Green actually started his first in Planet Tales, and I moved it.  I was surprized when sisko raised this point, as I rather expected him to take the opposite position.  Now we need to hear from t_ras, too, and I wish I'd left Green in Planet Tales and saved us a lot of confusion.  See, that's why I've never liked activist moderating and thread surgery - and doing it the right way and asking gets slow and complicated.

Where would you actually prefer your AAR be?

[Green1]

It does not matter. Google has already indexed it if someone searches for such things. Our AARs are right up there with some ancient AARs on other sites if someone wants to read it during thier spare time.

[NewAgeOfPower]

I do not care much where my thing ends up.

Decide where a consistent location is, and I will prefer to have everything there.

[Buster's Uncle]

tras?  sisko?


Good news about the Google, though.  Good as in fantastic.  SEO is a major, major priority with us for obvious reasons.

[Green1]

Well, you can look at it this way by looking at what other forum boards do.

CGN only had maybe one or two, so it just went ito one general area.
Civ Fanatics puts all thier AARs into a story section under each version of Civ, but Civ Fanatics is a huge board with hundreds of AARs.
Apolyton, I never saw much for.
Octopus Overlords has lots and puts thiers in one general gaming section section.

The question is how many you get. I probably will not put hundreds up. If I do, send folks in white coats to make sure my head is still in reality. But, you quite a few of them, you need a section.  If just a few, where it is now is fine.

I do not really feel AARs are fan fiction, per say, but I have seen some that border on fan fiction.

[Buster's Uncle]

-But as sisko said, they DO tell a story.

Of course, I hope we get enough stories posted that putting the two together isn't practical, either.  I suspect that, absent action that wasn't taken the day this thread went up, we're best letting things stand as they are.  ToE is a good place for them.

[sisko]

is this the right moment to make a change?

[JarlWolf]

In my humble opinion I feel that AAR's are stories, I agree with Sisko on that, but I feel that they will eventually need to be cataloged and put into their own subsection. They aren't always directly stories of fan fiction, some of them are just the equivalents of lets plays in a forum post format, while others like my current Varshavianka one is more bordering on the edge of story. For now I think it should be categorized by two merits, whether its more gameplay focused like Green1's "Something different" or my one previously mentioned. While there is an element of story in Green1's the content and perspective is mostly of a gameplay one rather then character/ story one. Ones more focused on gameplay belong in the Theory of Everything as it is a form of general SMAC/SMAX discussion: its discussing gameplay through an entertainment format.  While on the other end, my Varshavianka one focuses less on gameplay and more so on elements of story making, the gameplay being there to serve as a means of story progression go in Planet Tales as its story centered.

[Buster's Uncle]

How many AARs do we have onsite?  Without going and counting, I think we're already bumping ten - giving them their own folder might not be a bad idea...

[JarlWolf]

Indeed: Even if it's just an archival folder people browse or something of completed AAR's.

[ete]

Rather than subfolders, perhaps finding an addon which allows threads to be tagged would be better (allows searching for just AARs, but means people don't have to go to a separate subforum to find them).