How to get more engagement on MGSA?

edited in Questions and Answers
Engagement on MGSA in my opinion is not where it should/can be. Since I have joined the forums I have seen the same people post on MGSA with a few new people posting one or two posts before disappearing and never coming back. There is a ton of people that say something on the Welcome post but never really come and post on the rest of the discussions.

How can we go about encouraging more people to get involved in each other's discussions?

Things that I have thought of that could help. (Some might require website functionality that does not exist)
  • Be able to write tutorials, tips and guides on game development similar to http://www.gamedev.net/
  • Point system similar to reddit where you get "karma" for engaging on other peoples discussions
  • Finding active developers from outside to join us on the forums. Sebastian Lague is someone that I have always wondered why he is not active on the forums as I am sure someone like him would attract a lot of interest. https://www.patreon.com/SebastianLague
  • Meetups should get more exposure and look more attractive. I haven't been to these yet but everytime I see pictures or videos about it I get slightly more motivated to go and attend. Having more pictures and better videos of it could attract interest in people attending it.
  • Have a survey to find out the game engines, modelling software etc that is being used by the average person in South Africa and try to create more content that could attract new active members. Successful developers and Unity content is what attracted me to this website in the first place.
If you read this discussion and won't be replying please like it just for interest of how many people actually read discussions and don't necessarily reply to them.

Would love to hear everyone else's thoughts on this.

Comments

  • Okay I'll jump in and share my 2c as a newbie.

    I suspect that many people are hesitant to receive feedback or advertise their projects for fear of harsh criticism or humiliating themselves (or whatever. You know what i mean)

    I don't see the regular members being hostile or harsh per se, but i believe that there has been a problem like that in the past (havent seen it myself)

    Nevertheless i think the mere presence of professionals is a factor that makes many newbies uneasy (maybe to not have their pride dented or be compared to professional standards when theyre still learning or whatever the case)

    I think sharing criticisms suffers much the same issue. There are a lot of knowledgable and experienced members to give feedback etc, whereas newer members are likely to feel that their input is not backed by experience and therefore not valuable.

    I think this happens on most forums with established communuties with established 'cliques'. Newbies lurk. It's not always a bad thing.

    Some extra things you may consider to encourage people to get involved:
    Have an off-topic section where people can talk about anything. It can act as a place for people to 'mingle' a bit - just casual discussions about hobbies, game released or played (not ZA games) etc etc
    I think off topic forums give newbies a place to post without concerning themselves too much with denting their pride or feeling like theyre giving advice that will quickly just be superceded by a more experienced person.

    this could be a way for people to 'ease in'and become more familiar and acquainted with MGSA and its regular members rather than jumping straight into the deep end of sharing their works and knowledge.

    Just an idea :) hope this helps
    Thanked by 2Zaphire Sigh_Leeeee
  • @Zaphire

    I personally think that engagement itself isn't the same as quality engagement - and we should aim for the right engagement rather than engagement, period. So on that note I don't think "karma systems" would encourage the right things.

    Then everything else about getting good people here and doing more exposure and writing more content is great. But of course someone needs to do them and that comes down to the fact that MGSA is a community-run community. There's no full-timer here nor resource to hire. So if we want anything, we have to do it ourselves. And by ourselves I mean "me" or "you", not someone else. Unfortunately.

    I apologise ahead if this is going to sound targeted and antagonistic, it's really not my intention, but I have noone else to point at here and you're the only example live right now, so...

    Why haven't you come to our meetups? Come! Take pictures! Share them! I'm at every meetup. I do some tweeting with pics. But it's not my job to. If you think it's important, come do it! Not saying I don't or won't, I'm asking you to join in :)

    Be the change you want to see! Or don't, which isn't my blaming you or anyone for not doing so, because we all got our own shit to do. And so that's where this community is. We rely on people doing stuff. Not other people, us, ourselves. The mes and Is of the world, not the yous and hims and hers.

    -------

    @nekowaiidesu

    The facts of criticism is dual-edged. We would like people to be able to receive criticism at all. But we would also like people who provide said criticism to be sensitive and give critique that's easier to digest. I think overall MGSA has made great strides to the latter, though I wonder what that means for the former in the longer term.

    I think the former can be addressed by a more formalised way of delivering a FAQ or manifesto. If our FAQ reached 5% of people who visit it's 5% more people who might understand critical views and not attempt to defend their honour to the bitter end because they used placeholder graphics and that got pointed out :)

    And also an off-topic section is an interesting idea, it's not like we haven't played around with such an idea. I think our current airtight stance on off-topic stuff goes with our structure of single forum, which is both great for engagement (seeing one big pool of posts rather than tiny, sad pools is good) and bad (one big pool means off-topic is a big no-no, and it gets harder to manage as numbers grow)

    But again, it comes down to power of execution... Everyone has to agree on something and someone has to have the time to do it out of their own time. Both of which are really big asks given this volunteer structure.
  • Thanks, these are some good points, worth discussing :)

    Point system similar to reddit where you get "karma" for engaging on other peoples discussions
    Something like this would probably be possible on the new forum tech, and could add value. Though I'd be (just a little) concerned about it encouraging posts of little substance (the same thing you see on sites like stackoverflow). Perhaps I'm just being paranoid :)
    Finding active developers from outside to join us on the forums.
    This is something at least some of us do, constantly advocating for developers we run into, to join the community. We encourage anyone else to do the same ;) Some people do just choose not to, for whatever reason.
    Having more pictures and better videos of it could attract interest in people attending it.
    Yup, that would be great, volunteers welcome :D
    Have an off-topic section where people can talk about anything. It can act as a place for people to 'mingle' a bit - just casual discussions about hobbies, game released or played (not ZA games) etc etc
    This one has been discussed on numerous occasions, and the general consensus has ended up being it wouldn't be ideal. The pros you mention are definitely valid, but the main concern has been that having an "anything" area tends to add massively to moderation burden, unless we wanted an "anything goes" policy, which we definitely don't (from past experience with the community).

    Thanked by 1Mexicanopiumdog
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    Yeah, something I like about Discourse is how it seems to reward people for spending time reading posts, and for creating quality posts rather than volume. (Though whether we'd go with Discourse seems to be undecided at the moment...?)

    Something I've tried to do personally, is that every time I post in something that is negative or troll-like, I try to make up for it by posting feedback on a game that hasn't gotten much feedback yet. (e.g. How many people are posting in the SA GTAV thread that clearly isn't trying to get feedback, is being purely promotional, obnoxious and non-contributive, vs the other game threads? That's our fault too...)
  • edited
    Perhaps something like reddits karma could work as a means of user moderation and way to guage the overall relevance of off topic threads.

    I can see how an offtopic section becomes a modetators nightmare (especially if it's "anything goes") but what if users could just downvote posts beyond a threshold and the post is automatically removes or hidden (much like reddit)

    In a similar way, you may (if possible) have offtopic posts only displayed on frontpage if theyve reached a number of upvotes (and maybe a good up/down ratio too) That way offtopic spam would not clutter the frontpage and take away space from the real objective here (game dev)

    Even karma has massive flaws though. It's easy to abuse. You would think it encourages discussion, it probably will, but sometimes people are so karma-driven that they will not call each other out on bullshit lest they get downvotes. Everyone becomes stagnant with complacency and while it "looks" like a friendly community it's really a facade for karma-hoarders. With all due respect, i do think that being a small community concentrated mostly around one area makes MGSA kinda susceptible to go down that road; not to say it can't be avoided :)
    You can also obviously just downvote because your opinion differs with someone else, or heck, for teh lulz.

    P.s.
    how many active admin / moderators are there on MGSA?

    Edit: my bad. Shoulda read the guidelines and FAQ :^) seems it's only 3
    Thanked by 1Zaphire
  • edited
    Tuism said:

    Why haven't you come to our meetups? Come! Take pictures! Share them! I'm at every meetup. I do some tweeting with pics. But it's not my job to. If you think it's important, come do it! Not saying I don't or won't, I'm asking you to join in :)
    Why are you taking me on so personally.... I'm kidding, I would actually enjoy doing it, when I get a chance to come visit one of the meetups I will definitely bring the camera with! The big issue with the meetups for me is basically distance as I stay in the East Rand so going to fourways on a weekday is something I have to plan for but I will definitely start making a plan and also bring our game along that we are busy with so that I can abuse the testers at the meetup!

    I agree 100% with what you are saying is that in order to make MGSA better it needs more volunteers doing the work!


    @nekowaiidesu I think the off-topic idea is something that can definitely work especially on a social level. When we give each other feedback on games etc it is very non-personal and not a lot of room for getting to know each other where off-topics can promote the social aspect of the forums and allow people to get to know each other and chat about other hobbies that are both game dev and non-game dev related.
    Thanked by 2nekowaiidesu Tuism
  • I myself the reason I don't start a discussion in here is because I am not a unity developer and the majority of members in here are unity users so at the moment I am teaching myself unity just so I can interact with others in here and make more games with a different engine.

    I Love MGSA.
  • Jay said:
    I myself the reason I don't start a discussion in here is because I am not a unity developer and the majority of members in here are unity users so at the moment I am teaching myself unity just so I can interact with others in here and make more games with a different engine.

    I Love MGSA.
    Please please don't let the platform you use or don't use dictate whether you post or not! Most of the threads here are non-technical, and discusses stuff outside of how to code this or make that. There are also people who use all kinds of different engines talking to each other :)
  • Jay said:
    I myself the reason I don't start a discussion in here is because I am not a unity developer and the majority of members in here are unity users so at the moment I am teaching myself unity just so I can interact with others in here and make more games with a different engine.

    I Love MGSA.
    Jay you will be surprised how much people that don't use the same engine as you can still help you! What engine are you currently using?
  • Something I've tried to do personally, is that every time I post in something that is negative or troll-like, I try to make up for it by posting feedback on a game that hasn't gotten much feedback yet.
    This is truly fantastic, and easily actionable. Thanks @Elyaradine, I'm going to give this a try.

    heads off to find a game thread to post in to make up for posting here
  • @Zaphire I am currently using the libgdx framework.
  • This isn't really directly related but has anyone thought of maybe making a discord channel for the south african gaming scene?
  • edited
    IceCliff said:
    This isn't really directly related but has anyone thought of maybe making a discord channel for the south african gaming scene?
    That would be nice, there are a few Slack channels, but Discord is a bit more convenient. Would carry a bit more weight if one of the established community members made the channel.
  • So more of a lurker here, but have hung around for a long time. Seeing the saddening message posted on the ZAGD forum this morning about some biggoted comments posted, I think this (at least to me) highlights why there isn't that much interaction.

    Like Jay above, I don't use Unity as much as I use other engines (so I am more on phaser and quintus HTML5 game engines at the moment and before that gamemaker) so I don't really post things around engine specific things, but then outside of Unity based discussions, the rest of the discussions (at least that I have seen) revolve around issues of Race, sexism, and game dev politics. There are other posts where people show examples of their work which is really awesome, but for all the other discussions it feels a little too emotional and inflammatory to me, and personally I am not sure if it benifits me or anyone else in the community to add more to those discussions.

    I like what Tuism said, and for me personally, I get a lot out of the community nights and I find people really welcoming there, but in terms of the forums themselves, I don't think it is the kind of place (at the moment) where new people would feel welcome if they read the last couple of discussions outside of the welcome thread.

    Changing it at the moment I think will require a couple of positive threads to bubble up to the top of the forum, so that the first community news you read when you join isn't all negative in one form or another.

    I am pretty tired this side on this crazy weekend, so apologies if this comes across as rambling!

    On the flip side, thank you to everyone who does try hard to make this a positive and welcoming place - we will get there eventually I am sure, it may just take some time.
  • edited
    japiegreef said:
    Seeing the saddening message posted on the ZAGD forum this morning about some biggoted comments posted, I think this (at least to me) highlights why there isn't that much interaction.
    It's worth saying, but I don't think any of the posters from MGSA were aware of any race/privilege dynamic when they posted. For most of the posters there was a race/privilege dynamic, and I'd hope these posters would have written different posts had they been aware of it.

    Regardless, it was pretty disappointing to see members of MGSA behave in destructive ways over at http://makegamessa.com/discussion/4603/dead-village-gta-5-based-in-south-africa ...

    I definitely don't think anyone from MGSA was being racist, but most of the posts are pretty tone deaf and the result of the original poster coming away thinking that MGSA is racist was predictable. (and could have been avoided)

    (To be clear, I don't believe there were any bigoted comments posted, but the result was still that MGSA came away appearing bigoted).
  • Didn't really want to bring this up, but that ZAGD comment intrigued me so I went over to their site. Looks like NSG and Julian have distanced themselves from ZAGD and Johan Heymans will be taking over. The article link has since been taken down from the main site, but the actual article still remains. There is some mention of MGSA and IESA there as well.

    http://www.naturalstudiogames.co.za/web/site/nsg-splits-from-zagd/
  • critic said:
    Didn't really want to bring this up, but that ZAGD comment intrigued me so I went over to their site. Looks like NSG and Julian have distanced themselves from ZAGD and Johan Heymans will be taking over. The article link has since been taken down from the main site, but the actual article still remains. There is some mention of MGSA and IESA there as well.

    http://www.naturalstudiogames.co.za/web/site/nsg-splits-from-zagd/
    I did take over but I was just randomly banned by Sbonelo for who knows what reason.

    Thanked by 1critic
  • edited
    Apologies if this sounds harsh, but can we not let that whole ZAGD/Julian/NSG/Dead Village thing pollute EVERY single thread on this forum? It's getting really out of hand, and feels unnecessary.

    I feel like those who instigate their politics here thrive on that kind of attention.
  • edited
    We might benefit more from being proactive in moving discussions to the Meta category.
  • We might benefit more from being proactive in moving discussions to the Meta category.
    Yup, perhaps if users could flag discussions they feel should be moved to meta (explicitly stating that) and admins could move them and send the OP a message that it's been done. Meta stuff still gets kept off the front page, right?
    Thanked by 1dammit
  • We might benefit more from being proactive in moving discussions to the Meta category.
    As the way the forum operates right now, I doubt any sort of majority uses the categories to browse as opposed to just looking at what's the latest updated posts... But sure, maybe some do.
  • As the way the forum operates right now, I doubt any sort of majority uses the categories to browse as opposed to just looking at what's the latest updated posts... But sure, maybe some do.
    Exactly, IIRC the change was made months ago to not show stuff in the meta category in the main listing.
    Thanked by 1critic
  • edited
    Something I've tried to do personally, is that every time I post in something that is negative or troll-like, I try to make up for it by posting feedback on a game that hasn't gotten much feedback yet.
    This sounds like a great practice!

    I think another thing that is worth doing, is every time someone leaves you a useful comment on a project or topic you want discussed, go and check out and see what feedback you can offer to that person. And if that person doesn't need any feedback on their projects/topics, find someone else that does. Kind of a passing-it-forward system.

    (I tend to mentally keep track of the people who only ever post their work and never give feedback to anyone else, but it's actually quite uncommon these days I think)
    Tuism said:
    ... can we not let that whole ZAGD/Julian/NSG/Dead Village thing pollute EVERY single thread on this forum?
    Also I agree with @Tuism from earlier. In that there's not a lot we can do if people want to lob accusations at MGSA. I think it's better to just not engage at all than be defensive about it (or worse still, aggressive). But if we respond in any way it's best to try figure out where they're coming from (even if you think it's a place of misinformation, it's only possible to communicate with someone else if both parties understand each other, otherwise it's just going to be more miscommunication, and that breeds more distrust).

    And I think a lot of people do avoid engaging when these accusations at MGSA come up, and I think we can be grateful that so many people who are a part of this community are so level headed.
    Thanked by 3critic Tuism mattbenic
  • Isn't dead village just an idea??? I mean I got 100s of ideas and never even built one
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