American Girl Scouts? Thoughts on AGS community sites
Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 1:09 am
I was recently looking for information on the latest award-winning AGS games, thinking maybe I'd find one or two new games to try out.
Unfortunately, unless someone is already familiar with particular AGS community blogs and websites, it can be a little tricky to find useful information about award winners from the last few years.
Some games are listed here:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/AGSAw ... ?year=2006
While others, along with duplicate award year listings, are posted here, in what appears to be a totally different page format with awkward navigation features:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswi ... wards_2009
And what's with the name "American Girl Scouts"? Maybe one or two people thought it'd be funny to use that for a domain name, but it's confusing for relative newcomers, like me, who might be interested in learning more about independent AGS games. Particularly when doing Google searches for terms like "AGS awards", for example, it is unclear whether search results in the domain name americangirlscouts.org are even relevant to what we're looking for. At least that was my experience, as someone not familiar with the ins and outs of the AGS online community blogs. Here's their explanation for this quirk: "This site exists because we like to tell stupid people that AGS stands for 'American Girl Scouts'" Hm, wonderful. Ha, ha.
Something else that has bothered me is that the award listings never say how many votes each of the nominees and winners received. This information is crucial for readers to be able to judge the worth of the awards process itself. I was left wondering: Was the competition close? Did only a handful of people actually vote? Was it only 35 people out of tens of thousands who actually download and play some of these games? How much stock should I put into these awards when trying to find a game to download and/or purchase? (note: I have posted about this in the past, and have nothing else to add now and don't wish to reopen previously covered arguments. Just wanted to mention it since it seemed related to the previously-mentioned concerns I had.) At least from what I have seen, the people posting the award winners have never shared any of this information with readers.
I don't like how many of those sites feel like insular, little clubs that seem to exist only for the same regulars. When I was looking around on the americangirlscouts.org site (and in pages that were NOT discussion boards, where it is expected to have people posting their opinions), I saw off-putting editorializing of a personal nature, particularly in their wiki pages. It seemed like a 4th grade gossip site, even if the posts are meant to be humorous rather than malicious.
A few examples:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Pimping
"The excessive advertising of a game way beyond that appropriate for its artisitic merit. The most notorious examples of this are MillsJROSS with Ace Quest, alkis with Other Worlds and Vel with Who Wants To Live Forever. "
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Yahtzee
"Yahtzee became focused on both his writing and a comic book based on Arthur Yahtzee known as Yahtzee Takes On The World. Yahtzee also became a well known member of the AGS community, and it got to his head. He became rather arrogant and egotistical. Some of the members of the AGS Community began to dislike him. He eventually declared that he was too busy with his writing to work on games, and left the AGS community."
Just a thought for those people creating general AGS community websites: Please keep the annoying, insider, cliquish stuff on information pages to a minimum, if you want to attract new people to the AGS gaming community.
Aside from all that, I think it's great that people are making these AGS community websites... and, assuming they even see this, I hope they take my comments as nothing but constructive criticism from an adventure game fan.
Unfortunately, unless someone is already familiar with particular AGS community blogs and websites, it can be a little tricky to find useful information about award winners from the last few years.
Some games are listed here:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/AGSAw ... ?year=2006
While others, along with duplicate award year listings, are posted here, in what appears to be a totally different page format with awkward navigation features:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswi ... wards_2009
And what's with the name "American Girl Scouts"? Maybe one or two people thought it'd be funny to use that for a domain name, but it's confusing for relative newcomers, like me, who might be interested in learning more about independent AGS games. Particularly when doing Google searches for terms like "AGS awards", for example, it is unclear whether search results in the domain name americangirlscouts.org are even relevant to what we're looking for. At least that was my experience, as someone not familiar with the ins and outs of the AGS online community blogs. Here's their explanation for this quirk: "This site exists because we like to tell stupid people that AGS stands for 'American Girl Scouts'" Hm, wonderful. Ha, ha.
Something else that has bothered me is that the award listings never say how many votes each of the nominees and winners received. This information is crucial for readers to be able to judge the worth of the awards process itself. I was left wondering: Was the competition close? Did only a handful of people actually vote? Was it only 35 people out of tens of thousands who actually download and play some of these games? How much stock should I put into these awards when trying to find a game to download and/or purchase? (note: I have posted about this in the past, and have nothing else to add now and don't wish to reopen previously covered arguments. Just wanted to mention it since it seemed related to the previously-mentioned concerns I had.) At least from what I have seen, the people posting the award winners have never shared any of this information with readers.
I don't like how many of those sites feel like insular, little clubs that seem to exist only for the same regulars. When I was looking around on the americangirlscouts.org site (and in pages that were NOT discussion boards, where it is expected to have people posting their opinions), I saw off-putting editorializing of a personal nature, particularly in their wiki pages. It seemed like a 4th grade gossip site, even if the posts are meant to be humorous rather than malicious.
A few examples:
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Pimping
"The excessive advertising of a game way beyond that appropriate for its artisitic merit. The most notorious examples of this are MillsJROSS with Ace Quest, alkis with Other Worlds and Vel with Who Wants To Live Forever. "
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Yahtzee
"Yahtzee became focused on both his writing and a comic book based on Arthur Yahtzee known as Yahtzee Takes On The World. Yahtzee also became a well known member of the AGS community, and it got to his head. He became rather arrogant and egotistical. Some of the members of the AGS Community began to dislike him. He eventually declared that he was too busy with his writing to work on games, and left the AGS community."
Just a thought for those people creating general AGS community websites: Please keep the annoying, insider, cliquish stuff on information pages to a minimum, if you want to attract new people to the AGS gaming community.
Aside from all that, I think it's great that people are making these AGS community websites... and, assuming they even see this, I hope they take my comments as nothing but constructive criticism from an adventure game fan.