The future of VGChartz

[phisheep]

Well, wow, Brett. I hope this all turns out to the good, but glad you have taken the step!

I don’t really feel any pull towards blogs.

But I think there’s two things that might be worth experimenting with:

First – co-authoring of content

What I’m thinking of is some way of attaching a topic thread to a work-in-progress for generating articles/analysis/surveys etc. So that we can get more than one persons input into high-quality content.

This is something that – so far as I can see – is non-existent or at least rare elsewhere, and would give a real opportunity for generating content that is more thorough, more rounded, more representative and just all-round better than anything you find anywhere else.

It needs some thought. For example, of course you’d need some editorial filter, and probably you’d want to restrict the number of contributors to a topic so the primary author doesn’t have too much to deal with.

But there’s enough topics here already that if you distilled what is in them you’d have some jolly good content that it seems worth the effort to give it a try.

Certainly it is something I’d join in with even though I’m not really opinionated enough to want to author stuff solo.

Second – reaching out to and catering for the ‘newcore’

‘newcore’ = my term for the bulk of the expanded audience. Probably not those carelessly labelled as ‘casuals’ but the majority who are new into gaming and are seriously put off game sites by the rude reaction they get elsewhere.

These are the people who will form by far the biggest proportion of the gaming community going forward, and there’s nowhere catering for them. Not in any welcoming way anyhow.

(I’m sure not everyone here will like this idea, but seriously it is a good opportunity).

Not sure how we would do it, and it does need some thrashing around, but I would envisage at least:

1) on front page a prominent pair of new-here?/new-to-gaming? Links, leading to
2) a sort of ‘nursery slope’ area with relevant content and sort of Butlins-Redcoat-type mods, where people can play around, exercise their opinions without fear of flaming

There’s a lot of people lurking on various sites just scared to take the plunge, and surely we can encourage many of them to dive in.


Just my thoughts.