Are these skills going to be used to produce a game?
This discussion was created from comments split from: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3749/simulator-project
Some things were deleted. This may impact the meanings of some early posts. The point of this thread is to enable discussion around jobs that focus on skills used in game development, but aren't jobs that produce games.
Some things were deleted. This may impact the meanings of some early posts. The point of this thread is to enable discussion around jobs that focus on skills used in game development, but aren't jobs that produce games.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
As for opportunities for non-game work to carry people. Yes, often people need other jobs. There are plenty of places to look for those jobs, if we stop pushing back against non-game jobs when they're posted here because people see a community full of "tech people" that's not being exploited, where does it stop? Which jobs should we allow and which ones shouldn't we? I have nothing against simulator work, as I have nothing against people working for Derivco. They're just not game development positions, so why should this forum help fill them?
There's a whole different argument to be had about "good" or "bad" jobs to do while you're trying to build your game development career/parachute/nest-egg. That's usually based on a whole slew of value judgements and expectations instead of hard data, and a discussion that should happen in another thread please.
It was a decision I thought long and hard about. But in the end I deciding not to take those jobs and instead keep honing my craft as a game designer and artist, even though the situation seemed bleak. My reasoning was that even though these tangential jobs offered me short term relief, they didn't offer long term opportunities as a game designer. Working as a Web / Graphics Designer or in the Film industry would only offer me more opportunities and experience in those industries. Small indie studios hire artists and designers that have experience working on games, not websites and films. I don't blame them, it minimises their risks of which they have many.
But after sticking it out for 2 years, creating my own prototypes, doing the few scraps of client work (in gaming) that I could find, publishing a game and getting as involved as I can in the local community, I have finally started gaining momentum. Slowly opportunities are starting to emerge. My prototypes are getting better, client work seems to show up just when I need it most. I'm not through the worst, but I am moving through it, and I have a very positive feeling about 2016. Working in the videogame industry has given me opportunities in the videogame industry.
Now for the massive disclaimer, I do not stand alone. I have a loving family that is helping out where they can, and a devoted spouse who is lending me their full support, without which I would not have been able to sustain for as long as I have. So if you are not as privileged as I am (for which I am eternally grateful), and you are in dire straights, of course you will need to look down other avenues to sustain yourself and your loved ones. But what I'm trying to say is please don't think that doing work that seems tangential to the videogames industry, will give you opportunities in the videogames industry.
It is extremely hard to get a job in videogames from within the industry, and it's even harder if you try and approach it from outside of it.
So that's why I to value the fact that all job postings within these forums are moderated, ensuring that any one undertaken would further my career in the industry. There are plenty of places to go to get pay-offs now, I come here for the more substantial pay-offs I get later.
@dislekcia, you are becoming known for your over the top reprimanding posts. I don't think they are helping the community or making the community friendlier.
You made a game that made millions, but that certainly isn't the case for 90% of this forum's users. Some of the guys here have only a part time interest in making games and some of the guys who are full time have premade assets and other skills that can be used for this project. The overlap here is a no brainer.
I understand that you don't want every recruiter posting a million things here, but this isn't a slippery slope. You can still shoo away the ones that actually don't make sense.
Or perhaps we should define what a game really is? This simulation sounds a lot more fun than some of the games I've played. Certainly a lot more fun than some of the games I've made.
Warnings for inappropriate behavior are also being issued.
Splitting this thread into one for this potential job posting (survival dependent on being a game development job or not) and another for continued discussion around what constitutes game development jobs and the perennial "which jobs are acceptable" debate is much needed.
@Zaphire: Please make this point in another thread. I believe there's a very interesting discussion to be had around it :)
@mikethetike: I think you've misunderstood why I'm the forum admin here. It has nothing to do with Desktop Dungeons: I started a game development community in 2005 that focused on very specific things and methods of interacting online, that proved a successful model and picked up more and more committed people until they all helped turn it into the current MGSA. I have over 10 years experience of running forums and managing communities, this is one of the things I do, along with advocating to government, building SA relationships with distributors and evangelising SA development locally and internationally... Growing a local game development community is exactly how I reached whatever levels of success you want to ascribe to me, not the other way around ;)
@ESS: I must apologise for your job posting being closed right now. Hopefully we can fix this soon.
-Edit- Split happens here.
I might be wrong, but there seem to be 3, for want of a better word, groups of people in this forum: the top tier guys who have made successful games, the mid level guys who do jams and have one or two projects on the go, and finally the very casual guys who read and attend and dabble with stuff from time to time.
As the community grows, you will have new people joining the forum and most of them will be in the third category. I think it can be easy to forget just how intimidating it can be for new members who have no idea where to start (let alone read all the forum rules) to post something here. Especially when they read posts of other new member who are shut down immediately by the admins.
Look, I'm not talking about the Swedish designers or game makers from other countries who clearly should not be here. I agree 100% with the admins and their actions there. The tone can be a little harsh for those shut downs as well, but let's not go there for this discussion.
When I got my guitar ages ago, I would hate going into music stores. Not only are you embarrassed because of your junior level of skill, but the sales people were always d*ckheads. You were so afraid to say anything because you might use the wrong term. Honestly I once got told that "this store is really for professional musicians only"
Sometimes this forum feels like that. I see guys posting something for the first time and there is this immediate backlash. Guys who feeling their way around, and have no idea that there even are rules.
As for this post in particular, if you don't want to do the job, don't reply. If you want to only do game jobs that's your decision, just read past it.
If even 20% of the community may be interested in the job, surely it can be here. There are people here who want to do this work and would expect to find this kind of work here. Let's not get bogged down with classifications and think more about what the people in the community would want to see. Do people want to see portfolios from Sweden - no. Do people want to see specials on Sunglasses - no.
Either way though, my complaint is more around the way that new people are intimidated by some of the shut downs. I read this tone as hostile. When you do shut down posts, can i suggest doing it on a PM level? This will get read by many more people than those involved in the conversation and for the 3rd category guys, it may be enough for them to leave.
If you want to argue that this rule should not be in effect (it seems like you do), then that's a separate issue... Actually, let's maybe think what this community is for first. It is for game development. It is for people that know how to make games and already do so, and it is also for people that are trying to get started. Like you said, it is especially important to make the forums a safe space for beginners. One of the ways we can make it a safe space for people trying to make games is by making sure the content is about making games. If you want a place to have off-topic discussions, make another forum. Another way is by being civil in new posters' threads and not attacking admins trying to ascertain missing information.
Well it's unfortunate that you think that post was hostile. Remember that it's very easy to misread tone on the internet. That said, when someone says that only game dev related job posts are allowed here (and asks a question), and the reply doesn't address that comment at all, the sensible thing seems to be to ask more directly. Whether that should be public or private is not really your decision to make, and there are many arguments for both. What if we don't want to inundate a new person with PMs from everyone that has questions? I mean, isn't discussing something on a thread kinda the idea behind a forum?
I don't see how someone coming in to drop job postings that are not game development related as belonging to a category belonging to "very casual guys who read and attend and dabble with stuff from time to time. "
I didn't see what @dislekcia asked as being "hostile". That is a tone determination that you made that is not empirical. "Okay. Are those skills going to be used to produce a game?" is not empirically hostile. Trust me, I've had my own share of head-butting with him, and I still don't see this line as being necessarily hostile. I guess what you would have liked was something more like "Sorry, but I have to ask if these skills are going to be used to produce a game." or something "softer"?
Which I don't think is necessary... So let's see, how would you have asked the same question that you deemed as "hostile"?
Now I'm really not being hostile, I'm really trying to see if there's something that would satisfy your criteria for non-hostility and this forum's need to adhere to being a place about game development.
Otherwise we really need to be okay with every job posting that has to do with art creation, design, sound design, project management, programming, public speaking, art direction, cinematography...
Basically, everything but a chef position :)
The Organisation’s main objectives are to;
- Promote and develop the game development industry in South Africa;
- Act as a voice piece for the game development community in South Africa;
- Act as a community hub for game developers in South Africa;
- Assist game developers in establishing sustainable businesses; and
- Promote proper game development education
Following these points I believe the question of whether a job posted is actually making a game is valid.
We're not TechSkillsSA, or GameAndOtherProgrammerSA, or SkillsThatGameDevsHaveAndYouCanPoachSA.
We Are Make GamesSA
Yes there is an question of maybe those skills can be used to make games, but that is why the mod team asks those questions.
If we want to talk about the issue of whether non-game job posts should be allowed on the forums: I'll look back at the objectives.
Does it promote proper game development education? This objective has to do with institutions that teach game dev courses, so it is not valid to this discussion.
Does it assist game developers in establishing sustainable businesses? One could present the argument that there is the financial gain of being able to make games on the side. But as @pieter pointed out earlier this only seemed to be a short term solution of getting by, and not really allowing him to increase his abilities for making games in those jobs.
There is also the problem that often companies state in their contracts that the creative work you do in your own time belongs to them, and it's a lot more common than one would think. You can look at a thread we had a while back that was dealing with this issues even through their current job wan't related to making games. So outside jobs could potentially hinder people from making games.
There is also the assumption that people who take these jobs go back to making games. How many people who have ended up in tangential industries who were interested in making games stayed there because they believe that it would be fiscally better for them? That certainly isn't aiding game dev businesses.
So does this time of people being outside the industry and not running or working with a game dev businesses aid this objective. It seems like a no.
Does it aid us in being a community hub for game developers no.
Does it aid us in being the voice piece for the game development community in SA well if we have less people making games then less able to say we have the weight of x many devs working in the industry, so it's a hinderance.
Slightly tangentially (and related to education) one of the problems is that education is expensive. So when we have hopeful diverse applicants that want to go into the field, but they can get a full bursary for another degree we have trouble getting people into the industry who aren't from privileged backgrounds and then leaving a window for them to leave in their community just feels wrong.
Does it promote and develop the game development industry in South Africa lets deal with promote first. So as pointed out above there is the potential that people working these non-dev jobs may not be able to make games. We generally promote the industry by showing the games that we have made. So no.
Does it develop the industry? As pointed out above the skills acquired won't necessarily advance devs in making games. It seems that it's a general detriment to the industry to such position to be here.
So I believe that these jobs don't advance any of the objectives of MGSA.
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Lastly I'd like talk about the notion of opportunity. It's a buzzword really. It's meant to drum up enthusiasm and make you feel good: it's kinda like exposure.
Now I now in the case of a job people are getting payed (well probably, I know quite a few horror stories about that too) but much like when you eventually want to cash that opportunity in it's needs to have actually been worth something in terms of making games to consider it has having the value that should be required to have a job posting in this community.
Edit: Change the intro since other people said better what I wanted to say in the time it took me to write this post.
There are a LOT of professional game developers who don't post here, and this includes people at Free Lives, Americana, Fuzzy Logic, even ex-QCF. Are we just not getting anything out of it? Are those of us who're professionals who still lurk here only doing so out of nostalgia (this is where most of us started our careers), or out of charity? Is it because we've been too aggressive about what's considered game development, to the point where everyone who doesn't strictly consider themselves a game designer-programmer doesn't want to be here?
I know it's a bit off-topic, but I think it's still relevant in terms of where one draws the line, both in terms of topics in general, and in terms of job postings. I can understand there needing to be this common ground type thing as a reason for any community to exist, and I can understand the need to prune things that don't fit.
And yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about perception, online communication and welcoming users. I check with many people whenever something like this happens and a clarification question goes badly. The best theory I have been able to construct with the help of others is that the most likely source of offense is that the answer to the question is assumed to be negative, or damaging to the person being asked, so the goal of asking was to humiliate or belittle them.
I don't know if that's what made you get offended on someone else's behalf, but I can assure you no humiliation was intended: We honestly don't know how what @ESS calls a "simulation" relates to a game in the slightest. We know that there are significant term misunderstandings in that conversation already, with 3D graphics and animation skills being labeled simply as "game development". The first part of communicating is establishing shared understanding, to do that, we need to be talking about the same things with the same words. I try to ask questions to make that happen. I'm also trying to prevent inappropriate jobspam on the forums at the same time ;) There's honestly little difference. Yes, people are sharing different kinds of information on specific projects, but anyone that's "established" is just as needing of feedback as someone that's brand new. We're basically all reset back to 0 when starting on a new project. Experience just helps people progress faster from the reset.
The advice to people that are new to game development remains the same: Make stuff. Join in. Ask questions and look for feedback. Try... Problems seem to happen when people want validation without trying, but that's really a larger discussion for a different thread about expectations ;)
So, while we're on the topic of being as welcoming to people as possible: Have you thought about the impact of saying "guys" every time you spoke about people in that quote?
It's a good point. I think having as much experience here from as diverse group of people as possible is highly desirable. That said, I'd argue that the discussion should remain about making games. I'd say that it would be terrific if a bunch of biologists (to give an example) joined the forums and started discussing about how they want to make games about biology (someone make that happen!). It's especially sad that people that are making game IRL don't feel the need to visit here much. I think fixing this should actually be a top priority of the forums. Unfortunately I don't have a very good solution to this myself (fortunately I am just a tiny part of this community :) ).
However... for this topic, it seems like a lot of the contention seems to be around job postings. Perhaps we can do something that focusses specifically on that? A static page that listed available positions could be cool (not on the forums itself, which currently makes this difficult), or maybe only job posts that have been pre-approved are allowed? What do others think?
Some of it might have been the tone someone took when discussing gambling games. Or the perceived tone. In any case, I don't think these experienced people would come around here if gambling game job posts were happily allowed. The perceived sentiment against gambling games was probably the cause, more so than disallowing gambling game job postings.
That's for those people who don't come here because of that. And that certainly doesn't cover EVERY experienced game dev who doesn't frequent here.
I don't rightly know what would get all of them to come back to frequent here - perhaps there's just not enough crossover between their needs and the needs of the current crowd. Perhaps we'd need much more information and research to know what they need. Perhaps we could provide for those needs, perhaps we could never.
We simply don't know.
On job postings:
Could the existence of non-strictly gamedev job postings be "solved" by putting them out of the primary forum, and given their own place to live? So that people who *are* interested would have a place to go to browse these things, and admins wouldn't have to cull anything because that's essentially a "anything goes" zone?
Mmmmmmm, I think it would work, because we're basically handing off the responsibility of keeping things on-topic off to users. That's like creating a "unmoderated zone" where people can go and vent and off-topic on whatever they want.
Is that a good idea?
... I don't know. Maybe? But I have big reservations about that. It'll just become spamville, naturally. And when it is spamville, who would be bothered to go and browse through madness?
I've already said that if anyone wants a forum for any and all jobs they're more than welcome to create one. So far nobody has, because those things already exist.
I'd like to help clarify that you're not trying to attack those people, you're evaluating if something should be posted on this forum in line with the forum's stated goals. Those are two different things! People can have their own goals, MGSA can have its own goals! This is okay :)
Another angle on this that might help is the following idea: This forum isn't a jobs board, but people post jobs here anyway. When keeping those jobs posts fulfills MGSA's mandate from both sides, ie: when helping a company fill a position is directly growing the local games industry (because they're a games company in some way) AND when helping someone find a job also directly grows the local games industry (because they're entering a game job to their benefit), only then are those posts clearly serving the goals of the MGSA and thus welcome.
2) To the "do these people ever work in games again" argument, again I offer myself (I've moved back and forth between simulation, gambling and gamedev), @AngryMoose (gamedev, gambling), @GarethNN (gamedev, gambling) and Natalie Ausmeier (simulation, gamedev-worked on The Harvest, Bladeslinger and others) as a few examples.
Does it really make sense for the community to lose people of that level of experience to absurd purism? Especially when the supposed "rule" that only "pure" game development jobs are allowed was never established by any kind of decision by the MGSA committee or a significant majority of the community?
The argument of "if we allow this we need to allow everything" is just daft. There are some fairly rare skills (realtime graphics programming, low poly modelling, etc) that are limited to a fairly small number of industries. These industries are naturally closely related in their technologies and growing skills in one will benefit the other due to a larger talent pool. This isn't rocket science.
I'm not sure I know how to address this, but I would love to see this being a goal for the forums for 2016: Make it a place people want to come to, find value in sharing their knowledge and experience on etc.
Secondly, thank you @pieter for your story, but at the end of the day, you made those choices. You would have made the same choices whether or not MGSA had shown related or non related posts. It is not MGSA's duty to shield community members from distractions. I do not open every thread on MGSA. I open the ones that are relevant to me.
I do not agree with @Karuji. The economy is pretty tough at the moment. Here is a company that has a job that, as we have all established, at least part of the community would be interested in. This is how I see the conversation going.
"Hey ESS, did you eventually find someone to do your mining simulation."
"Well I tried MGSA, but they came up with this barrage of questions of whether I was doing this or that. Man, how hard is it find someone to give money?"
"So you're saying you wouldn't go back there or recommend it to my friend who has a lucrative game related project"
"No, those persons were such d*cks. Reminded me of when I used to go into guitar shops."
How can scaring off companies be beneficial to this community? I have seen plenty of business games and advert games, been presented at the evenings at Microsoft. How are these any different?
So what should we do?
There are clearly 3 types of posts:
1. Obviously relevant posts
2. Obviously irrelevant posts (e.g. "I'm a looking for a chef", "I'm a recruiter looking for c# programmers")
3. The grey area.
Please don't lump 2 into type 3 in your arguments, otherwise we will get nowhere.
Type 2, completely irrelevant posts are easy. They should be removed.
I see a lot of talk about "if we allow x, we will have to allow everything." and "the rule defines that it must be x". No. There is no Artificial Intelligence filtering going on.
Part of the South African culture I enjoy most is how we treat rules. Rules are stated so that if someone breaks them, and it is hurting others, we have grounds to stop them. For example, at Spur the rules are that no one over 12 years old can be in the play area. Why? So that if there is a teenager running around hurting kids we have grounds to kick him out.
Posts in the grey area that are not relevant to anyone in the forum will be self moderating. No one will respond to them and they will die. In fact, by sending out the interrogation squad, you are actually drawing attention to the post.
To @dislekcia and the other users who have made it, thanks for taking the time to add to this community. I'm just saying don't be the d*ckhead in the guitar shop.
Lastly, thanks to everyone who helpfully pointed out that "make games" is in the title.
I think what everyone is worried about is that if we allow this Mining Simulator, it will be a gateway drug into heavier, more hardcore simulators, like that evil Moshpit Simulator by @creative630 we saw here a while ago.
(Still love that simulator BTW)
I personally don't want to talk about engines, but I wouldn't stop you from talking about engines. If there are other people who want to talk about engines here, surely they would have talked to you about your engines.
If there are only very few people here who wants to talk about engines, it's not really their fault or yours, it's just what it is, I think. You can't blame other people for not wanting to talk about what you want to talk about :/
The primary objective of a mining simulation is to... I don't know, make sure someone can operate the machinery without crushing everyone, or something. I'm out of that depth. So are most of us. I know it probably isn't to entertain. And thus doesn't care one jot about being entertaining or attracting people to use it for reasons other than... Those reasons I know nothing about.
I don't know the details, but mining simulations can be used for exposure to new investors or education in training and safety matters.
I still don't see a difference
And noone said anything about the mining simulator being a "game" at all. It's a mining simulator. Let's stick with that without adding our own interpretation to it. If it were a "mining simulation game" then that'd be a different story, but it isn't.
I don't think that "fun" is the criteria - "entertainment" is. Games are primarily entertaining. Even edugames and serious games must be entertaining (or try to be, at least).
None of this is really relevant to the discussion anyway, is it?
Are some of the same rare skills used between simulation development, gambling game development, serious game development and entertainment game development? I would say definitely yes.
Is growing a common skills base that's useful to all those industries good for the entertainment game industry and the people in it? I would argue definitely yes.
Does allowing job adverts for those industries advance that goal of growing that common skills base? Hell yes.
A business game, being built by a game company for a client, is being done to earn the game company money to be able to continue being a game company and making games. If that game isn't fun or engaging or compelling (or any one of a hundred words that describe that grey area of quality in games), then the game company is going to get less business and less return clients. A game company is covered by MGSA's mandate.
A simulation, being built by a simulation company for a client (or more likely in-house) has at it's core focus reproducing a segment of reality that's either too expensive or too risky to expose people to in person. Sims earn money by being exhaustive and by requiring constant updates - if your certifications change over time, that's the best for a sim company. Simulations earn money to make more of the same simulation.
But here's the real difference: A simulation is mandatory, a game is voluntary. That difference in how and why users approach the product is huge. As someone that's built sims, business games, educational games and "regular" games, it's the whole process of trying to get a person to want to play that's a core skill of game development.
But what if a game company builds a simulation for a client? Or what if, shock horror, someone builds a simulation game? Who knows, I assume that's not the end of the world, or requiring of immediate excommunication? (Excommunication from what?) If I was looking for staff to make graphics for a simulation I was doing for a client, I wouldn't post here - I'd go to CG forums and trawl polycount. If I did post about that job here, I'd be very clear that it wasn't to produce a game, nor would I pretend it was to pivot to game development eventually either.
I read through most of the threads and wish I had more time to give constructive feedback(that will be my 2016 new year's resolution as @dammit suggested).
In the past I've also argued that this is "make games" SA. Which is cool and all but making games spans so many different skills and make up of people that I've started to feel we need to open it up more. There are roles that are being filled in our industry that barely even gets mentioned on these forums. Business managers, Producers, QA Testers. If we keep our narrow focus on making games, then this community will make more games sure, but we probably won't grow as an industry.
In terms of handling the issue at hand, I kinda view it in the same 3 categories that @mikethetike does.
1) Obviously relevant
2) Obviously irrelevant
3) Not sure
Categories 1 and 2 are easily handled without any input from the community at large. I don't see that we need to handle Category 3 in any pro-active way though. If the forum members wish to engage with the content, they will. If they don't, they won't. If the concern is that engaging with the "wrong" type of content will drive more of that content ultimately skewing the community in that direct, then I have some bad news. A community that engages with "wrong" type of content is already skewed.
If we want to make this community to be more about games, then it should be more about games. Not less about other things. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but in the past I've seen that threads like these gain the most traction. Obviously I'm also guilty of this since I'm writing this wall of text in this thread.
I don't think that this requires any pro-active moderation though. Let the forum users decide what is relevant and have moderators step in as neutral 3rd parties when conversations end up being unproductive.
I'm not trying to point fingers, since I don't really think anyone has done anything "wrong" in this scenario...but I really don't like that we are losing people. I also don't like that we will keep losing people if politics and power struggles are what we are about.
Sometimes it pays to just shut up and let the thread take it's course. (<- what a hypocrite right? :P)
Also, are you sure this forum is all bad? This thread seems to have been very helpful to you.
Personally, Gama is a different place. I don't get anywhere near the same feelings of challenge or useful feedback from there these days. I've been a Gama member for a very long time and the comment culture there has changed quite drastically. These days I find that comments tend to affirm whatever the writer's main point was, even if that point has obvious flaws or special case considerations. In the past it used to be a lot more rigorous of a community, as a result, the experienced developers have mostly stopped commenting... That said, I'm glad there are different places. Here shouldn't be like Gama, because then why should it exist?
Is there perhaps a grey area of job posts that stay up but aren't necessarily appropriate for the forum? Why yes. Here's an assertion I disagree with. Could you provide more information as to why you believe this is true? For my part, it doesn't seem like a causal relationship at all, given that: The rise of the local film and animation industries has not produced a glut of game artists. The local animation and game college boom has so far not produced many game developers or studios, nowhere near their graduation rates. The rise of gambling companies like Derivco has not produced a swath of local game development studios, it's produced a lot of developers for Derivco (yes, some devs have left Derivco and are now making games, can we compare magnitude of impact, please? Also, previously I was personally attacked for "not having lived in Durban" when talking about this - this is both irrelevant AND false, I've lived in Durban).
To me, the thing that has made the largest impact on growing a local game development industry has been having a local community with a strict focus on producing games. Game jobs are hard. Game careers are difficult and not well paid. As such, laser focus and desire to make games seems to be the only thing shared by nearly everyone that enters the game industry. Okay, this makes sense if growing that skills base were the goal. For it to be a goal, it needs to be shown that a common skills base increases the number of game developers in the local industry. It would also need to be shown that doing so and posting non-game jobs would have a greater positive effect on the local industry than the negative impact of people leaving the industry to fill those jobs. (And note, once again, that "those industries" is immediately problematic here - not only does it offer a false distinction with serious games, but it also encompasses an industry that MGSA cannot legally represent)
The thing people seem to have a problem with is when job posters in category 3 get asked questions to clarify if they're 1 or 2. We've also had serious questions asked about the relevance to the community of other industries. And there's further discussion about the impact of allowing recruiters... Because spam is a problem - a community is not a place that you can just let monitor itself, it's a garden. In a world where the very real danger of lax moderation is a News24-style cesspool and sites are turning off comment sections all the time, moderation is not as simple nor as glib as you indicate below.
I don't think that maintaining focus is suddenly a bad thing. I'm trying to say that focusing so hard has brought us this far. A good community that can support and help each other. I'm concerned that the narrow focus will harm our growth as an industry. I feel that if someone were to take a simulation or whatever kind of job related to gaming,I would rather they get it from here than some other general forum. When I say related to gaming, the person applying for the job gets to decide if it's related or not, not the rest of us.
I'm hesitant to speak on behalf of someone else, but I think the problem isn't when people in category 3 get asked questions to clarify. I think the problem is that after these questions have been asked, the perception is that one person gets to decide whether it's relevant or not. It might be the best decision in the end, but being part of a community means being part of the course it takes.
You raise a good point about the category 2 posts never being visible even. I'll have to think about that. I mean, I think that I've been falling into that trap myself so I'll be more aware of it from now on. Thanks. ;)
I didn't mean to describe forum moderation as being easy. I might have put it glibly, but that is a misfortune of being me it seems. The message I was trying to get across there is that I want to trust this community to moderate it self. I don't know if that's possible, but that's what I want. I think if we all take responsibility for what we say to each other(and shut up more often(<- The irony is not lost :P )) then that might work. This is however a completely different discussion.
For the discussion at hand I want to make a suggestion. Maybe, if it is this grey kind of post a members warning of some form should be added to the thread. Something that shows up alongside the title that the members can make informed decisions but still get to decide with which content they want to engage. Does that seem like good idea? (I don't know of the implementation implications, but it's what I can come up with now.)
The same applies for posting about tech, or game engines, etc. which are not pure game design. Why is there such disdain for having a variety of discussions. And why is it preferable to send people away to other sites instead of nurturing the needs of the community?
From what I have seen, the members of this community are not as one dimensional as you seem to want them to be. The fact that these discussions pop up so often should mean something to you, and shrugging it off with the excuse of some puritanical "identity" is not productive. Not indie. Not South African.
So do you say this simply because there is the money component attached?
I took a look at the company website and it seems they produce interactive learning simulators - which I assume would fall under the 'game' category as much as children's learning tools would.
Details here: http://equipmentsimulation.co.za/training.html
Problems with posting loads of non-game jobs just off the top of my head here:
-Yes, people develop games out of passion, but we can't deny that for some it IS a career.
-Parents researching game development decide that their kids should pick a "real" career because there are no jobs in games if everyone's saying go work in another industry.
-Kids get discouraged because they're not seeing game work.
-Reinforcing the image that the local industry doesn't exist and can't support employees.
-There's evidence that having a day job that uses the same skills as your hobby/calling makes you less likely to pursue that hobby/calling in your off hours.
-Hiding the jobs available at local companies.
-Making it difficult to have "post your job ads on the MGSA forum" as a payment motivation for companies to become MGSA members.
-Recruiters.
-The site not being set up to allow for good filtering of job offers, no templated forms, etc.
-The danger of people leaving the industry never returning to it.
-Encouraging emigration and skills drain.
-Because Careers24 and Pnet don't grow the local industry the way MGSA does. MGSA's mandate is to support the local game development industry. Other industries have their own bodies (and yes, we'll gladly interact with them at length, like we do with AnimationSA). Job postings aren't the only way to grow an industry, they're actually a pretty slow way to grow anything - especially if the focus of those jobs is skills transfer followed by a job shift back to the games industry, we're talking multiple years there!
Knowledge transfer has always been a key focus point of this forum: Helping people solve the problems they experience around game development. If a 3D artist working on a mining simulation posts a question about specular lighting and Unity shaders, they're going to get a bunch of really great answers and help here! They wouldn't be turned away because "ugh not games"! Not only will they skill up and solve their problem, but a whole bunch of other people who never knew to ask that question will learn too, it helps people making games or not making games alike. And yet more people will find that information via searches, etc. And the forum is reinforced as a place where people can share knowledge with each other, where asking questions is useful and safe.
A huge part of an online culture like that (and online cultures are fragile as hell) is signal to noise ratio. To maintain a knowledge transfer focus (note that feedback is just a specialised type of knowledge transfer), it needs to be the primary interaction on a forum. Job postings are noise in this case - they potentially only help a couple of people (employer/employee), they don't provide space for experienced members to provide information and they have zero long term value to the forum as search results. They were never what the forum was started to handle.
I've always said that a separate site for job posts would be great, but I'm not going to be running that. At the moment something like 20 out of my last 25 moderation actions have been dealing with job posts. This is where the "fear" is coming from - there's been an actual influx of job spam! There is no disdain for having a variety of discussions. There's only a desire to test assumptions throughout the entire site so that people are making educated decisions. Game development is massively misunderstood as a career path (or series of branching paths that start in completely different places) and there's a ton of misinformation out there. It's important for the visitors to this site that just read and don't post (the majority by a long margin, BTW - and they return, so they're getting something out of this, not being "chased away") that they're not having misinformation reinforced that might make them believe that old bullshit about needing to learn C++ to make a game, having to write a massive game design document first, having to do all your art upfront, etc. ... This was in my post that you just quoted: ???
A big part of people engaging with content is how much of it there seems to be. That's why forums that look empty (those places with 50 categories with 2 posts each) die. It also needs to be managed the other way around, you can drown people in content and signal-to-noise ratios become important. How many recent posts are all tagged with the "jobs" tag? Is it time to move that to a completely different forum so that whoever's in charge of that can deal with those headaches? There's a huge thread full of my replies to this question, please read it if you're curious. But the TL;DR is: They may be game-like, but they're part of the gambling industry that has its own regulatory body and strict laws, MGSA can't play there; Their historical impact on the local game dev scene has been rather poor; They've colonised the "gaming" keywords in job searches everywhere; And their interactions in knowledge transfer are few and far between. Yup. I did that... I'm curious as to what the employers' answer is. Do they consider what they do game development or not? That doesn't mean that they get insta-banned if not, just that it helps refine who they might be looking for. Perhaps it could even help us point out places they might want to try looking instead. I don't see how more information about both the job or the employer is a bad thing for anyone, especially not prospective applicants.
That said, I'd really rather the MGSA community was the place that whoever they ended up hiring came to ask questions about Unity instead. That's so much more valuable to everyone.
I see prototype after prototype fade away. Sometimes they don't even get a single comment. Or updated threads on games in development not get any feedback. You may get some hearts though. That's nice. I'm also not the best a giving feedback but the fact that in the past few months some of the threads that get so heated are about what we should talk about on the forums? What should be allowed on the forums?
Fuck, maybe if we just commented on some of those prototypes we'd just organically see what we wanna see. Just maybe if we spent some time playing some of the games and giving feedback instead of writing essays on the forums on what a game is we may get the quality of developers we want in the industry. That's what I want to try and get better at this year.
What would have happened to the thread in question given the same attention we normally give to a "poor" prototype?
Maybe the previous discussion about the format of the forum should be resurrected in some way as well. Maybe the traditional more full blown format with sections instead of classifications are more suited to this community... in some way it does allow for a kind of structure where certain topics can be emphasised over others while at the same time ring-fencing the "less than focused" topics. I know.. who goes and build it when no one is offering... but there is definitely a disconnect here and it does require a solution one way or another.
In the end, it seems like you really want MGSA to be the united front of the SA indie scene, but at the same time it is so restrictive that you end up dividing the community further and alienating valuable contributors.
If you only want a certain segment posting here, then it would be appropriate to make that message front and centre - and also be very clear that this is not the place for people that want to find the SA indie community.
Also it's cool that people are not jumping down each others' throats (as far as I can tell). There's certainly some heated disagreement, but that in itself isn't an issue. Discussing something on the internet is really tough, so high five to everyone for being generally awesome about it :)
I'm gonna try only reply to more recent posts and ideas so that the discussion can actually progress and old news isn't constantly repeated. I assume if an author feels their point hasn't been covered, they'll bring it up again.
On the topic of making the forums a more welcoming place: I'm totally for this. It feels like resolving the topic about job posts might help further that discussion when it takes place properly, which is great - two [snake]birds with one stone.
Anyways, on topic: I had a thought that maybe we could look at banning all job posts. Unfortunately that's not a good idea, if we did that, people might miss awesome jobs like this. So then I thought, ok, why not relegate all job posts to some off-forum static page or other thing. Unfortunately that's also not good, it probably creates more work and it would effectively kill any "legitimate" job posts. So that's a bit of (useless?) text that basically just says: there isn't a catch-all solution.
In terms of should we allow things that aren't game development on the forums: there's definitely some part of this that feels like we haven't reached consensus on (to me). To simplify things (probably too much), the one side seems to say: "What's the harm? If it's irrelevant just ignore it." while the other says "Why should we have to ignore it? We come here for game dev, we don't want to sift through other stuff and we don't want it to negatively impact the community's size." I hope I haven't missed something here.
So starting from that point, let's look at the main point: will excess information detract from the important information? Fortunately, as @dislekcia has mentioned above, we can look to information theory and signal to noise ratio for the scientifically-tested answer to this: yes. I am very willing to go dig up some reputable source that confirm this (just say), but when I was studying this topic the answer is very clear: extra unwanted information detracts, a lot. You might argue that the numbers of unwanted things is important, and indeed it is, but when the number starts to approach about 50% then you are well into that region where the studies show the unwanted info detracts. So then the question becomes: how many unwanted job posts would we get? Well, just judging by the frequency of job posts that are allowed on this forum in relation to those that are actually about game dev, I'd say the answer is pretty high. If you frequent the forum on a regular basis, before @dislekcia has a chance to cleanup some of the recruiter spam, you'd see this for yourself. if you frequent any tech-related communities, there are basically just job posts. So I feel like the argument that these extra posts "wouldn't do any harm" is unfortunately wrong (unfortunately cause just ignoring things would be a much easier solution to all of this). Please say if I missed something here.
So then the only question really becomes: where do we draw the line? So the (bad) news: I've looked at this every other way and it seems like the "core" area of disagreement really comes down to what a game is. At this point I've written a bunch, so I leave the resolution of this issue as an exercise to the reader (i.e. let's continue discussing...)
Oh and I like the idea of giving more feedback on games/prototypes here so I have a meta-challenge to everyone: if you wanna make your 2nd or 3rd post or n-th post in this thread, maybe consider taking a few minutes to try find a prototype and give it one piece of feedback before making your next post here. I probably won't be posting here again until I've caught up on my backlog ;)
I honestly believe that those are the thoughts that are getting people upset. I might be wrong and please correct me if I am, but the perception that there is one moderator that get's to decide is a problem(for me at least). Regardless of who it is btw. Like a lot of people here I've met @dislekcia and actually get along with him well. ;) I would go as far as to say I actually like him. :P
I would like to see solutions that empower forum members to decide what content they can interact with. I agree that splitting everything into small tiny niche categories is a bad idea. The idea I have would be something like a flagging sytem. Anyone can flag a post for some misdemeanor or something(like bad job posting). Once the post receives enough flags it will gain that tag. User can then edit their profile to exclude certain tags from their feed.
I know that getting this implemented isn't easy, if at all possible. So I have cheap alternative patch job I'd like to propose. I have decided to impose the rule of 2 to 1 on myself. I'm only allowed to make posts in threads like these(that are not directly related to games) when I have made at least 2 posts that give feedback on a game or helps out another community member. ;)
How are you ignoring this: How does that gel with anything you've implied I want above? ... I'm speechless.
I'm not picking a side over your issues against @dislekcia at all, I'm picking a side on if you're going to make a point, you should have the courtesy of not asking someone else to back it up for you.
Thread's done now. What's the point of discussing anything if all someone's going to do is decide that they're ignoring your most recent stance, the one informed by other discussions?