… and just a little soul draining. My last few entries on my blog have all been about the Game Crafters Guild website and mostly technical in nature. Here, here and here.
I thought the idea behind the GCG site was/is a good one. It would be something I would contribute to and participate in. So I made a new feature-rich version of it and it went live a little while ago. I didn’t just plug together some pieces of software, I wrote code to join them, tested it, created new themes and templates for and brought it all together. It works. It is alive.
However, it is barely shambling forward.
I only know a little about getting communities started. I believe I succeeded with the Redbrick Wiki, failed with Project Freebrick and Occult Wiki. The IrishGamingWiki.com is ticking over, at least more so than GCG. I’m only involved in running Redbrick Planet but that seems to be trickling along.
The Formula: People must want it, then you fulfil that need and off you go. Once you have three or four people who believe the idea other than you and start using it earnestly, things start to happen.
With GCG, I was under the impression that there were quite a few people who would be interested in it. But I guess I did the site upgrade in a sort of vacuum. No-one was calling for it. No-one was arguing about it. Just me, thinking it was a good idea. Still do. Still working on the site. But there was no “buzz” anywhere about it. It just happened. Perhaps I should start some flame war on igaming or irishgaming.com/forums… that would generate interest, polarise people for and against the idea…
It’s just frustrating that barely anyone has logged on. I can imagine more than few had a look at the site and went “hmm, that looks good, when people start using it” and then buggered off… not realising that we need to turn you lurkers into users. I feel like a cafe manager sitting in a brand new cafe, that’s totally empty with the staff constantly cleaning tables to look busy. People look in and see it’s not busy, so they’ll come back later!
Maybe I’m just coming down off my “creative” run with it. I did do a lot in a short space of time. Maybe I’m not patient enough, that it’ll happen in good time. Perhaps with the impending Gaelcon, people are too busy but after Gaelcon will start using it. Maybe. The worst thing is when your friends say, they like it and would use it and they’ll log on… and then don’t. They have good excuses and all that, I can’t fault them per say, but they all have excuses and reasons.
What do people who read my blog think about it? Is GCG a good idea? Would use it and if so, why aren’t you, what’s the thing its missing?
One of the more frustrating elements about it is that I put some other personal projects on hold to try and finish the site. In a sense, I got buried in code so I can’t contribute to the site as a user would, as I would if someone else had created the site. I have a project (mentioned here and here as “COG”) that I had planned to use the site to do something with for example but that’s paused right now. I had a few blog entries I wanted to write about too, which are now just empty drafts waiting patiently to be filled in.
[…] others to collaborate in, requires that others want to collaborate with you (anyone remember the GCG website?). The second is, I haven’t met or found anyone online or otherwise I would want to […]