Gods it’s been a long time. Sorry.
I know, I’m horrendous at keeping anything like a consistent schedule, and apparently can’t be enthused to write about anything I don’t really care about – there goes the “Write something every week even if it’s complete shit!” mentality I posted before. It might have actually helped my writing too, if it wasn’t for that dratted time thing. That's the catch after all; even if you want to write it doesn’t matter if you can’t find the time to sit down and do it, or rather if everything else seems so much direr and demands doing in the small bits of time you get.
Anyways, I’m still vainly going to try and keep to that regular posting mentality in the future. I have no hopes that it’ll stick but hey, what the hell? Isn’t there a quasi-annoying phrase like “You miss every shot you don’t take” out there? I’ll pretend to adopt that, even if it turns out I just miss every shot I do take. Right. Well now that I’ve bored off anyone who might actually benefit from reading this, I’ll get back to the original idea.
Oh yes, I have one. I even thought it marginally clever when it originally strolled into my head two weeks back (See? If I had bothered to post then I would actually have kept my schedule. Blame life, not my mind), and it revolves around the gaming community. It was directly inspired, as it were, from my last post. No, it’s not a solution to the problem of the internet but it might be an interesting little project to try out on it. It starts, as all great ideas do, but blatantly ripping off some one else;
Newgrounds. Once again for the uninformed; it’s a site that primarily revolves around using the Flash Program to make movies or games, though I must admit despite the ‘G’ word showing up in that sentence Flash has absolutely nothing to do with what I want to make. Besides, the site is, if anything, a glorious declaration to the kind of community the internet habitually dishes up. Thankfully what’s run by the mob if policed by the mob so it’s not as bad as it could be – but let’s kill this digression right here. There’s important rambling to get down to. The aspect of Newgrounds I want to take is its system of supporting itself. See, Newgrounds is entirely run off user generated content and its bills are paid for by the advertising supported by the multitude of people who frequent the site. In essence, it’s self contained. As long as Flash exists, the community for it will exist, and Newgrounds will exist.
The manner of the system is easy to describe. Every single person who goes to the site can sign up for free and then upload a video or a game for free. The product will be thrown out in the masses that can, also for free, view or play whatever’s made and then judge it mercilessly with a voting system. Well made things get voted up become popular and win awards, crap is thrown down the crapshoot. Free free free, all supported by a couple of strips of advertisements that can be blissfully ignored. As far as systems go it’s an admirable one. It’ll function like that with minor interface changes until the community implodes one day in the far future.
What I want to do is take that system and implement it for games. Well, gaming culture to be more specific. Instead of Flash movies there could be video blogs, instead of games there could be…well, actually, there could still be games. But in addition to games there could be reviews, previews, user generated content about anything relevant to the gaming community. It could all be uploaded and run in a similar system and it would be every bit as self sustaining. We look at Rotten Tomatoes and see that sites can thrive entirely off people writing little paragraphs of criticism, why can’t we have the same for games instead of movies? We look at the Escapist, and see countless little video’s made out of nothing more than a slide show with a man talking into a microphone and they’re not only successful but occasionally run away hits!
I feel that if the Flash community, tiny compared to gaming as a whole, can create a site dedicated to the random creation and evaluation of it’s own hobby and thrive, the gaming community should be able to build one ten times as large. Gods knows we have the people for it and the creativity too. Why the hell hasn’t some one made this yet?
Eh, maybe for the same reasons I’m not ending this post with a valiant declaration of liquidating everything I own to put it into making a website.
A) I don’t for the life of me know how to make a website. What little HTML I know probably couldn’t get me past the first page, and
B) Money. I don’t know how expensive starting this off would be, but since it involves a lot of uploading I’m guessing it won’t just be pocket change.
So will this idea ever take off? Who knows. If I win the lottery, probably. If not, probably no. The idea is still out there though, I’m not liable to forget about it any time soon, and there are many more ideas about how the site could expand if it did take off. So we’ll just have to see what the future brings. Maybe I'll run into some one who does win the lottery.
