Qualms of a Philosophical Game Dev; or, Fostering an Actual Community

Feature Requests Community Site Feature Requests
1

Cooperation, community, self-sufficiency. Not only a must in life, but within the online sphere. Had the "law of the jungle" rang true, the existence of man would be none; frankly, those who assume supreme authority is required for life must reconsider the basis of what man is. "But what happens if...?" Must we quibble about how a society based upon defending your fellow man would handle what one presumes is chaos? A valid critique, but such is often a tactic of bullying; oh, where has the debate gone? Have we truly put all our soul into a sole man with increasing power?

Of course, I am not here to lecture the statists on the validity of statelessness - as much my alignments aspire. I come here to express qualms of the lack of community. For the unenlightened, my journey as a presently dormant game developer takes roots in a familiar name: Scratch. Whether you [the reader] dabbled in joyous block-coding or legitimate "big time" creations, the experienced cannot but observe the state of this website; cold, dry, a monotonous cave of atomized peoples.

In the opposing corner is Scratch, actively fostering a website where tykes may befriend and descend into the decentralized communities of games. Yes, many mature individuals such as I would criticize the neglected potential of such models, but simultaneously provides a comparison to what Snap! could be.

There be no method of connection, no sharing of creations, nothing of significance. At most, this is considered an educational tool; otherwise, a do-nothing place. I hence plea to this community, its developers, the collective, to adopt a simplistic trajectory towards a communitarian Snap!.

My recommendations for such a movement are the following:

  • Implement a commenting system on projects: Taken from Scratch but would guarantee greater interaction between users.

  • Fancier profiles: An actual bio, user page, and the whole shebang would look nice.

  • Love and favorite system: Allow users to bookmark and like projects onsite; a "star system" similar to Newgrounds has also been advocated.

  • Renovation of the program: handling larger projects, less visual bugginess, and overall performance improvements are welcome under any circumstance; TurboWarp provides inspiration aplenty in methods of speed upgrades.

  • Deliberative democracy: A system not of votes, but of synergy is to be utilized in decision making; websites such as Wikipedia have adopted this.

To whom it concerns, a revolution of sorts is required. Authority has failed repeatedly in terms of connectedness to its people, and a bottom-up structure is by no means utopian. In the end, the seeds of change must be planted.

Considered even in concept would be grandly appreciated. Sincere thanks.

2

Your requests have been asked for before. Please read this FAQ post.

Also,

Try clicking on my profile picture. :-)­

I personally take offence in this statement. What do you think happens on these forums?

3

I mean, the projects are stale. Forums aren't the mainstream thing, people like commenting on profiles and projects.

4

Harsh. Being as I am part of the authority in question, I'm nevertheless as anarcho-syndicalist as the next person. If I had my druthers, we'd publish everyone's address and phone number, and we'd all routinely hang out at each other's houses and/or at the local Chinese restaurants. Alas, here we are marooned in the 21st century, some of us even in 21st century Amerikkka, and we're stuck with austere substitutes such as comments on projects.

We are on record as promising to implement comments as soon as we can. We've been promising that for years; we really do need to put more development into software support for the community. Our excuse is that we're a zero-budget project with a staff of six, most of whom have day jobs. (Even Jens, who is theoretically paid just to work on Snap!, actually has to spend a ton of time giving talks at meetings of various kinds in order to keep SAP, his employer, happy.)

If you happen to be rich, you could give us ≈$1M to endow a permanent job slot for a programmer. Or, if you're a lawyer, you could surround us with legal armor to protect against getting sued (or just shut down) when y'all molest each other.

Otherwise, we'll try our best. We, too, desperately want an engaged, active community of learners.

5

Hello, comrade. Nice to meet you, and yes, 21st century Amerikkka is indeed relegating (serious or not).

Yikes. I see what ya mean; large-scale cooperation is a means to an end, yet the struggle for your group is understandable. Perhaps a volunteer campaign would be advisable.

Money makes one into a beast of greed, so you will not witness such a donation anytime soon (alas, I lack a bank account, greatest apologies). As for the latter, a decentralized moderation team (or just a program for users to self-manage and correct one another, though I could see the low prospects of consideration) would be my first recommendation.

6

Yeah, we're gonna move in that direction; stay tuned.

7

Excuse me, what are you two implying here? (Asking as a American.)

8

You mean, you're an Amerikkkan.

9

America in Racistese.

10

... Are you implying what I think you're implying?

11

That you guys down south are racist? I believe so.

12

South? I'm from Missouri!

13

For me, everything in america is south!

14

Bruh from Cah-nah-dah.

15

I say everything in america is west (I don't know if it's true, because I never payed attention in geology)

16

We're a small community with a system dedicated specifically for this purpose, that is the Forums. It works well, because...well quite frankly we're a small community.

17

Yeah...nah...we'll just leave that to the 8 year olds in this community who will eventually learn from petty behaviour such as that. I remember going on Reddit at like 12 years old and crying over one single downvote: it's just one downvote for Gods' sake, I didn't need to create a whole dang Shakespearean Performance over just that.

18

So you're British, and @bluebaritone21 is Canadian(from Cah-nah-dah).

19

What good would a system in which people can add or subtract from a Like Counter will benefit anyone? Yeah, it's cool that you have like 10 more likes than me on a Snap! Project, but does that mean you're better than me in Snap!? No, right?

But yes, I do agree with your comment system ON Projects, although we DO have a Forums System for posting our projects and collecting feedback.

20

That's funny, because I live in america, and I feel like I have the most american accent (except after I finish watching a bunch of bluey).