what makes a good AAR?

[bvanevery]

I'm currently writing the longest AAR I've ever written, at least by webpage count.  I may have written more text in the past, but screenshots take up a lot of vertical space per page.

I have no idea whether it's a good AAR, in anybody's estimate.  From my point of view it's a fairly thorough AAR.  Basically any time something happened in the game that I thought was remotely interesting, I made a post about it.  Usually the trigger was something "screenshot worthy".

But who's the audience?  Do certain kinds of screenshots continue to be worthy?  Like "I got some tech" screenshots.  AARs would become awfully damn similar after awhile, if every tech got a screenshot every game.  Maybe sometimes I'm taking screenshots because I'm bored with the overall game and it's something that's "sorta" happening.

What do people want to know from an AAR?  I know what I want to know.  I'm meditating on "narrative worthiness" in extremely long games.  Why a person would bother to tell another person about something that happened in the game.  Why that would be interesting or not.  How short or long it would end up being, and how attractive or repulsive to other people.  But just because I wrote it, doesn't mean I know what others want out of it.  Some part that I think sucks, people might think is great, and vice versa.

[Buster's Uncle]

I guess mostly I'm interested in what sort of thing you did, and why, and how it turned out.  You do pretty good at that.

-Mind, I wish your language was a tad cleaner -we're trying to run a classy place, here- and that you ragequit a heckuva lot less.  But you know, I've read every word of every AAR, and you've done considerable to entertain me.  Also, this is very much a kind of content AC2 wants and needs - and your efforts are very much appreciated.

[bvanevery]

Is it actually ragequit if one is bored out of one's skull?  Perhaps there needs to be a word with new connotations, like "borequit".  Which doesn't preclude rage.  Sorta like ragequit is a trigger, with the addition of "AND I'M BORED OUT OF MY MIND!!!"

I'm feeling serious fatigue in my Miriam AAR now.  I think it is the vastness of the project that keeps me going.  Like, I should try to get closer to completing at least one vast AAR.

[Buster's Uncle]

Me, I treat the game a lot like doing a puzzle - and one hates to quit a puzzle unfinished.  The only time I do that is when I've been away from a particular game forever (at least several months), and I can't wait to start a new one.  -But I expect I'd be too embarrassed to do that with a game I'd been posting an AAR about.

[bvanevery]

I think absence of an apparent audience puts a lot less pressure on me to finish anything.  Frankly, a lot of my AARs have felt like listening to the sound of my own voice.  Since I know what I'm saying and what's been happening, it's easy to conclude that the only one to be pleased as to how it goes is me.  So if I reach borequit, it's not like anyone suddenly piped up and said, no no! no no!  Please finish that particular game, we were so interested in what was going to happen next!

A related problem, is producing so much content, that one starts to worry about its visibility, and its archival longevity.  I did most of those for my own primary benefit, hoping secondarily that it helps someone someday.  But there comes a point at which, for the hours expended, it's like "hey how about some eyeballs??"  Which is a lot to expect from an ancient game like SMAC.  I'm not sure how one would go about increasing the page hit count of a website about SMAC.

Archival longevity is like, if I've spent all this time authoring in an external BB format, and the server data someday gets destroyed, then what becomes of all the writing I did?  Do I value it enough to protect it for the future, if only for my own personal perusal?

Quite awhile ago I dealt with some of these issues when co-authoring a Battle for Wesnoth campaign.  It started out as this other guy's masterpiece, but I did so much polishing on top of that, that I had a pretty substantial contribution of my own.  I wanted that work to be more visible in the Wesnoth community and was irritated that third party campaigns could never get the top billing / eyeball spots in the application installation spaces.  Those were reserved for "Mainline" campaigns which were frankly pretty lackluster in story and art production values, we pretty much killed them by comparison.  But we weren't about Wesnoth, we were about a sort of Arabic magical carpet ride kind of place.

Anyways, the Wesnoth forum managers were a bunch of unruly teenagers and ended up banning me, because they had that level of profesisonalism and emotional maturity.  The original author elected to go with their own "archiving and preservation" arrangement; lord knows how well that's worked over the years now.  Like, does anyone even know that it was the greatest campaign ever written, at least at the time and possibly subsequently?  That author after saying "thank u" for all the hard work I'd done to improve the work, kicked me off the project.  Then he burned out and I don't think he ever made anything more for Wesnoth.  Can't blame him for that, it was quite a lot what he produced.  He had to "take exams", then probably had to get a real job, take on real responsibilities for money, etc.

Now under US law I have full rights in the work as a co-author, but there just wasn't any value in going it alone.  I'd be better off writing my own stuff entirely from scratch, rather than try to re-use co-authored campaign materials, and an underlying GPL saddled codebase.  Somehow I found I didn't love the genre enough to pursue it on my own, even though it's doable.  Not like I love the 4X TBS genre / SMAC.  I just chalked it up as a life lesson about Copyright and multiple authorship.  And now I get why bands break up.

So... I think about these things in an ecology that surrounds a game.  A lot of stuff can just rot away.  I saw an awful lot of perfectly good Wesnoth campaigns rot away over the years, for instance.

If somebody looks at an AAR about SMAC 5 years from now, what are they going to care about, I wonder?

[Buster's Uncle]

Hard to say.

-Tell you want, though; commit to actually finishing games/AARs in the future, and I'll resume promoting them to the Front Page of this site, and start stickying a link to whatever you're currently working on atop our Facebook page (provided it's been at least three months since someone posted a major mod or something here, which is most of the time.  Mods and well-packaged scenarios are the ultimate gold for promotion/eye-drawing for this community, but I never have enough to keep me busy promoting for long enough.  Fresh anything interesting is good for Facebook promotions, and if it's worth stickying on our page, it's worth sharing with some FB SMACX groups, too.  That gets its existence out in front of a mighty portion of the SMACers online, and is good for you, and good for the forum).

[Mart]

I think absence of an apparent audience puts a lot less pressure on me to finish anything.  Frankly, a lot of my AARs have felt like listening to the sound of my own voice. ...

One of the reasons, that there are not many discussions, may be, that similarly to fanfiction, some people do not want to "dilute" the story in AAR with comments. In fanfiction some practice is to open a parallel thread for discussions/comments. But maybe you already tried that?

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't believe he has.

Mart's got a point, b - there's some tradition on older forums of having a separate comment thread, and I may not be the only one who might have commented a little more without that in the back of my head.  (You never know any particular bloke's position on that, and would rather not guess wrong to possible nerdrage.)  I grok that you'd rather keep it simple, but a boilerplate statement atop the OP of each AAR that 'comments right here in the thread as it progresses and after would be welcome and very appreciated' might be in order.

[bvanevery]

-Tell you want, though; commit to actually finishing games/AARs in the future, and I'll resume promoting them to the Front Page of this site,

Do you realize that if it weren't for Civ VI, I already hold the lion's share of user posts on the HOME page anyways?  Depending on how you want to count... my metric has been "lines of text consumed".  To be honest I've been quite shocked, the few times I've clicked on the HOME page for some reason, to see ancient posts of mine about Roze still up there.  It was very weird to feel like I had front page authorship for something I hadn't actually done in a long time, and that I expected to be fleeting.  It made me think the page had some kind of RSS feed that broke about a year ago.

So yeah they're old posts, but they're still my posts.  Which makes me think they don't do any good whatsoever about attracting traffic or getting people to read more AARs.  I would be willing to take seriously the question of "what can drive traffic?" but that doesn't seem to be it.

And I don't think finishing AARs can change that status quo in any way, because nobody's going to know from looking at those relayed posts on the Home page, how I end the game or not.  Far more important whether the post looks interesting in the 1st place.  I would say of those old posts, not interesting enough, except that oh looky! someone is in fact posting about SMAC in modern times.  Is that really enough...

For me personally Civ VI is not interesting at all BTW.  It should not have any kind of top billing.

I would think the value of having Civ VI on the homepage "at all", would be to have some kind of "Civ Corner" be known about.  Civ VI is a gateway drug for SMAC and one would definitely want Civ junkies to feel at home, not like they're an alien species.  But a "Civ Corner" doesn't have to / shouldn't consume 1/2 of the precious home page real estate.

[bvanevery]

I grok that you'd rather keep it simple, but a boilerplate statement atop the OP of each AAR that 'comments right here in the thread as it progresses and after would be welcome and very appreciated' might be in order.

Yeah I'm vaguely aware of the practice of separate discussion threads, but I figured it was only relevant to narrative delivery posts, like writing a story based AAR.  I did at least one of those, maybe 2, but they are buried now.  By my own pefunctory game relaying and analysis posts.

I can think of one very good reason to keep all comments in the posts themselves, nowadays.  My current AARs are vast.  How the heck are people going to refer back to what happened on this particular turn, with this particular screenshot, when I'm already up to 9 web pages and only 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the game?  Frankly I'd be impressed if anyone read that much material, let alone responded to it.  A big reason I started the current discussion, is the sinking feeling that my current approach does not result in an audience friendly medium.

So yeah I'll definitely try boilerplating the 1st posts.  I've arrived at the following statement for now:

Comments and questions about the strategies I'm using in this game, are expected and encouraged.  Please make them in this thread.  As my AARs become longer and longer, I think that's the only way to keep this readable.  Don't worry about "interrupting".  I guarantee I can reestablish the flow with a massive wall of text and 5 screenshots if need be.

I did a shorter version for the shorter AARs, basically all games that I quit.  Now every AAR with the PIC icon has boilerplate.  I won't bother to "support" the legacy text-only stuff.  I'm realizing it's much easier for me to answer questions about a game post-hoc, if I've got screenshots to jog my memory about what was going on.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Tell you want, though; commit to actually finishing games/AARs in the future, and I'll resume promoting them to the Front Page of this site,

Do you realize that if it weren't for Civ VI, I already hold the lion's share of user posts on the HOME page anyways?  Depending on how you want to count... my metric has been "lines of text consumed".  To be honest I've been quite shocked, the few times I've clicked on the HOME page for some reason, to see ancient posts of mine about Roze still up there.  It was very weird to feel like I had front page authorship for something I hadn't actually done in a long time, and that I expected to be fleeting.  It made me think the page had some kind of RSS feed that broke about a year ago.

So yeah they're old posts, but they're still my posts.  Which makes me think they don't do any good whatsoever about attracting traffic or getting people to read more AARs.  I would be willing to take seriously the question of "what can drive traffic?" but that doesn't seem to be it.

And I don't think finishing AARs can change that status quo in any way, because nobody's going to know from looking at those relayed posts on the Home page, how I end the game or not.  Far more important whether the post looks interesting in the 1st place.  I would say of those old posts, not interesting enough, except that oh looky! someone is in fact posting about SMAC in modern times.  Is that really enough...

For me personally Civ VI is not interesting at all BTW.  It should not have any kind of top billing.

I would think the value of having Civ VI on the homepage "at all", would be to have some kind of "Civ Corner" be known about.  Civ VI is a gateway drug for SMAC and one would definitely want Civ junkies to feel at home, not like they're an alien species.  But a "Civ Corner" doesn't have to / shouldn't consume 1/2 of the precious home page real estate.

I have to hit a button and then go to the admin panel to promote a post to front page - and I stopped after I realized you always quit before the game's finished.

[shrugs] I appreciate the effort you put in and the value it has to the community -especially since you started with the screenshots- but I don't think we'd be keeping any eyes we drew if new people feel let-down by the lack of an ending. Waiting to see if it concludes before I promote doesn't seem quite right, but two minutes devoted to promoting "Svensgaard is a douchebag" to the Front Page is two minutes spent making AC2 look bad.  Pushing something on Facebook and other places can eat hours. 

I mean, yo - it's wintertime, and I haven't crawled out of my winter mood.  I simply cannot get myself motived to go to a lot of trouble -and believe me, pimping whatever around the nets, you could almost train a chimp to do, but it's still a lot of work- without more confidence in what I'm selling.  I care how much trouble you go to, but NerdX don't.  NerdX leaves AC2 forever feeling cheated if I try to sell him AARs that always get abandoned. [/shrug]

(FWIW and FYI, I'm not a morning person, and it's a bad idea to leave posts for me to respond to first thing, if it needs a prompt response with any thought gone into it.  I'm a little bad to not get back to stuff I had to leave for later in the day, which is my usual practice for overnight posts that are problematic or just a lot of work to answer.  I like talking to you, but suppertime is better, just so you know.)

[bvanevery]

Mods and well-packaged scenarios are the ultimate gold for promotion/eye-drawing for this community,

Those statements, I feel a need to examine.

Scenarios?  I may have never played one, in almost 20 years with this game.  If I did, it was so long ago that I've only done it once.  I can't even remember if I've ever played a game on the official map of Planet.  If I did, it was a damn long time ago, at the very beginning.  I would submit to you that the lifeblood of all Civ-like games is random maps.  That is what gives them replayability.  Now maybe scenarios can encompass the settings for random map generation, and do not necessarily imply a fixed map.  But there aren't that many inputs for the map generator and it's not exactly difficult to do them by hand, from memory.  Particularly if one tends to play single player on the same style of map for many games in a row.

Mods?  Well I know what mod I'd like.  That's the one where the AI plays competently.  It doesn't exist; I think Yitzi proved it's not going to exist.  Need to make and sell a brand new game.

Short of that: faction mods?  I know people are into doing it, but I have not gotten inspired.  I have a suspicion, based on my Wesnoth experience, that factions are driven by multiplayer communities.  People seem to want different teams to play on, with different gewgaws to try out.  And if nothing else, different cool artwork, just to look cool.  To the extent that SMAC is not a multiplayer friendly game, I'm not entirely convinced that "the availability of faction mods" can or would be the lifeblood of a SMAC community.  I could be mistaken, and since I wasn't in and didn't know about SMAC communities "back in the day", maybe historical evidence has something else to say on the matter.  But given the amount of complexity the original 14 factions offer, play mechanically, I'm not sure what faction mods can do.  I've never used one.

Fan fictions, narratives, shipping, musings on the world building... I've read a lot of archives of that sort of thing.  It seemed to float someone's boat at some time, and some of it did amuse me, blowing the dust off those archives.  I think this is as much a lifeblood as anything else, in a game with as much narrative draw as SMAC has.  The narrative force of the game is the main reason it has survived with any kind of noteworthiness this long.  Not the play mechanics, although they're still better than the modern Civs, as they have some depth.  Certainly not the AI.

[bvanevery]

NerdX leaves AC2 forever feeling cheated if I try to sell him AARs that always get abandoned. [/shrug]

Well I'll be honest: I don't believe you.

Tactical analysis itself is valuable, and I have done piles of that.  Learning about games that lead to "dead ends" is valuable.  Would-be game designers like myself care about what makes a game interesting or boring.  I mean sheez I could put rainbows and ponies at the end of AAR for the sake of form, what difference would that make to the journey of the game?  All the steps it took to get there?  I could even lie to you, and completely make up an ending for any of these AARs.  If the goal was simply to have a product to sell, to your imagined NerdX audience.  Recon Rover Rick and Mythology For Profit, indeed!

Don't you think new people learning something about how to play the game, might be a little more valuable than an imagined NerdX pitching a fit because something he didn't pay to make happen, didn't get finished?  You really honestly believe that people quit reading sites over that?  Where's the evidence?

BTW how many Huge map AARs have you published?  Back-to-back, in a fairly short time window?  Do you even realize how lifeless I have to be, to even not finish games like that?  These aren't Tiny world sprints we're talking about.

NerdX may not understand the implications of playing on Huge maps, let alone reporting on them.  But he / she is probably going to figure out that SMAC is a long game at some point.  Or else he / she won't be around very long anyways because SMAC demands too much attention span / is too long / isn't a practical game for a lot of people to play.

I frankly would be far more worried about the degree to which my earlier posts were walls of text, firmly in TL;DR territory, than whether those games were finished.  Your objection is pretty much the opposite, that you wish they were longer still.

Did you figure out that those games always got played to the hilt, up until the moment they were quit?  That quitting is a bit abrupt for me?  Although there are plenty of warning signs that a quit is coming, if only I had my ear to the ground.  It's not like I sat around in an office and "played poorly" for 2 weeks while waiting to collect severance pay.  Rather, the diligent unit pushing and city improvement mouseclicking becomes untenable.  Too... boring... must... leave... now!

I've struggled with this very game design problem, in this genre, for almost 20 years.  I still don't have an answer for it.  In my worst moments, I contemplate that it may be an intractable problem and that I should throw in the towel.

I think an analysis of "who is the customer and what is the product" is better driven into other waters.  It's not about whether I finished AARs.  Really.  It isn't.  My unfinished AARs usually have vastly more content than most people's finished AARs.

I like talking to you, but suppertime is better, just so you know.)

I actually have no idea what your life schedule is, nor would I presume to impose upon it, or follow it.  Asynchronous email and web forums were designed with that in mind, and I don't have a problem with waiting for replies.

[bvanevery]

Don't you think new people learning something about how to play the game, might be a little more valuable than an imagined NerdX pitching a fit because something he didn't pay to make happen, didn't get finished?  You really honestly believe that people quit reading sites over that?  Where's the evidence?

I now have specific evidence to the contrary.  There has been someone in the past, on this site, who has exceeded my current epic AAR posting length.  That said, he had other people responding in the thread, and so far I do not.  And in my current AAR, I'm well on my way to catching his epic 15 webpage total, if I can remain interested in the game long enough to do so.  I'm already at 9 as I write this, and only 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the game.

He quit.  He had real life pressure that he actually talked about.  Could that be my mistake, not reminding people I might have things I need to do, other than post long winded or even epic AARs?  Doubt it.  More like, he had adoring fans and I don't.  He got 14,887 views, more than any total I've seen in the AAR archives.  Here's what the last beloved fan had to say in the last post:

I'm really missing Green1.
I hope he returns soon. And gives us the epic conclusion to this beloved AAR.
He makes really entertaining AARs. 

So AFAIAC failing to finish an AAR isn't some kind of "NerdX crime".  Far from it.  Unfinished work can generate the highest views of possibly anything on this site.  I'm now curious just how many other things on this site have 14,887 views.

The question to ask would be what's different between his AAR and mine?  I haven't analyzed his yet, and I will do so.  But there's one obvious difference already: the size of the community has shrunk drastically.  I'll be honest, I've been posting in a wasteland.  Yet it's still the best / only oasis for SMAC on the internet now.  I didn't expect more, I was ok with pounding sand for quite some time.  But now that my own work is getting larger and more refined, my desires are increasing.

Analysis of the work: it isn't "better" than what I'm currently doing, in any noticeable way.  It is different in several ways.  For one, it was partly a community effort.  I'm not sure how people's responsibilities were allocated, but it seems that Green1 was left holding the bag by the end.  It has a lot of chatty coordination with people about things.  That's informative as far as studying group organizational dynamics, but narratively, it's not a good read.  That chattiness surely increased the webpage total a lot.  As do the sequences of many many screenshots in a row by some posters.  That's pretty distracting.  I don't need 4 dialog boxes of negotiating with Zhakarov, just 1 if it really matters and a text summary of what happened, would be the thing to do.

There is Roleplay mixed in, in part.  Pretty substantial sections where someone was making an effort.  Unfortunately, some of those sections seemed to use Third Party Hosting and their images aren't available anymore.  They could have been really good, bangup images, but are lost to the archive now.

Ok, I tapped out halfway through the read.  There wasn't that much Roleplay after all, just 1 or 2 early sections written that way.  The rest of the presentation is pretty perfunctory.  I conclude that a much larger community was interested in the novelty of multiple people taking turns playing the game.  As a matter of narrative flow though, this is not very good work.  It doesn't hold up when looked at years later.  For narrative flow I'm already doing much better, even if there are ways I could improve.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well I'll be honest: I don't believe you.

This is where I lost interest in this conversation.  I'm neither a liar nor lacking experience in what promotion works and what's a waste of my time.  I've laid out the reality, and I think I'll go read a book now.