What's The Point Of A Game If Nobody Wants To Participate?
What's The Point Of A Game If Nobody Wants To Participate?
Please answer the question in the title. I'd really like to know. I was recently in the hospital for a few days and was sad to see that although the subscriber numbers here kept increasing, nobody was posting any challenges. So Please tell me what is the point of a game if nobody wants to participate?
Assuming you want an honest answer, philo, I think there are three major obstacles to this community flourishing:
- Vague/misleading images - Many of the starting images are vague enough that they could apply, for instance, to over half of the thrash songs from the past two decades, whether obscure or well known. Others are almost adversarial with how far they stray from the source. A recent example is the prompt for "The Lady in Red," which prominently featured a beautiful young woman... in a silver dress. People who are interested in guessing can easily become discouraged when it seems like the game is tilted strongly against them. Many won't hang around to figure out how to create their own posts if the game seems unfair.
Suggestion: Make an effort to weight prompts in a way that adds some degree of emphasis to bits of the lyrics thar make a song unique. In the event a particular song is more obscure or niche, provide some level of assistance either at the outset or after a set amount of time. This could take the form of the decade of release, an additional image that highlights other specificity in the lyrics, or even a witty hint about the artist/band.
- Unfamiliarity with prompting - I get the sense that there are many who are intrigued by the pictures and the concept but do not know how to create images that they feel accurately convey the song lyrics in a way that is guessable. It can be frustrating to feel like you're stumbling in the dark without much guidance. Some thrive on discovering things for themselves, but I'd say the majority probably abandon their attempts once they feel like the price of engagement is sufficiently high.
Suggestion: Increased availability of information about how to prompt successfully. Providing assistance and advice when asked for it.
- Your attitude - Without regard to any justification there might be, you often come across as prickly and unwelcoming. There have been times that the community has seemed to be less of a cooperative space and more of a power trip. People who pass the first two obstacles may be turned away by the overall atmosphere here. Very few will want to play against the actual challenge, the added difficulty of vague or outright misleading images, and the nagging sense that the community leader is an active antagonist.
Suggestion: Less iron fist, more silk glove. In TTRPG terms, the DM shouldn't be playing against the players if they want to create engagement.
None of this is meant as an attack. This is my honest opinion of why this community is relatively inert, and some thoughts on how it could be invigorated.
This right here. In fact, the main reason for me stopping actively participating was point 3. Alas, sadly, this entire thread seems to prove the point over and over, as you keep flippantly replying to anything you don’t agree to, up to actually, apparently, blocking a user. You can’t nurture a community by making it your personal fiefdom. A community is made of all its members, diverse as they may be. I would like to come back, I love the game, but participating started feeling a bit toxic. So I lurk, and I suspect many do the same and that’s why subscription numbers increase, but not active participation. I do think people are capable of change, though, and look forward to becoming more active again.
That's pretty funny, AmanDuh you would see wasn't banned for a disagreement as you seem to think, they were banned because they thought they were entitled to membership in this community without any participation. And they made it clear that no future participation would be coming. While banned they can still freely read this forum and that is all they wanted to do anyway so what is your problem with that? I find it sad that you {and some others) find a need to blame your own "stoppage" on me. Accept responsibility for your own actions.
I get it, the participation trophy rather than the participation. Let me remind you it was the community that suggested the answers be revealed in spoilers which I at first didn't want to do but eventually did. Also, it was the community that requested a thread like the Welcome sticky from Last which when I asked for not a single subscriber had the decency to help create for over two months until Last offered in a DM. I give subscribers plenty yet they can;t be bothered to participate? And you have the sheer nerve to blame my attitude?
My attitude yet the subscriber numbers still went up yesterday...
Not everyone has, or wants to have the skills to use or learn AI tools. And as often is the case with niche communities, the people who post are often only a small percentile of the people reading/subscribing.
This is not a bad thing. It's just how it often is.
396 subscribers only 3 people post challenges? That's not bad? Less than 1%?? Sadly that isn't gonna keep a community running especially if my absence were longer than it was.
I have a few communities. One with 700+ subscribers and I'm pretty much the only poster. It's just how it is. Either accept that most people will not post, or abandon the project.
You've discovered the power of a niche social platform. I single-handedly provided content for a classic car community for over one year before realizing that it was less of a community and more of a blog. If it's not political or technical, a lemmy community will most likely die when the single provider gets tired of the wall of silence.
This isn't a niche community. you can call it whatever you want but it is simply a game community with a bunch of subscribers (396 at the moment) that only 3 post challenges. That simply isn't enough to keep this community going. To be honest, I suggest that all the subscribers who claim they enjoy guessing step up and post a challenge once a week or so or don't complain when this community fades into oblivion.
Welcome to the DM's quandary.
The Dungeon Master puts in all the extra time to build and run a campaign, but never gets to play.
Running a campaign is playing!
Wish I had fewwer scheduling issues getting in the way of my playing as a DM.
I've always been the designated "You seem to enjoy it more than everyone else" DM in my friend group.
I'm not saying being DM isn't fun, (I'm itching to get a campaign going) but it's not the same game that everyone else is playing, and every now and then you can't help but think "Sure would be nice if someone made a dungeon for ME."
I like this game, but even with the genre hints it's often very hard. It takes a bit to get into the habit of just taking a stab at it.
I think getting more hints, in words or images, in response to guesses would increase the interest.
The more challenges the better IMO because we all have different music taste and knowledge so many challenges I have little hope of guessing. But would still be interesting if there was more back and forth. I wouldn't mind challenges lasting longer if the op would give clues because then even in a genre I don't know well I could learn something new.
I don't expect things to move very quickly as I only check things twice a day or so myself. I like the idea of browsing through a bunch of unsolved games to find one that I have a guess for, I don't care how long they've been up, and as poster I don't mind responding to old games, or if I get tired of it can always post the answer.
I have three suggestions: Longer time, maybe a week, before posting answer.
List of songs already played (not that you should never reuse one, but in some ways this is helpful and inspiring to those who might post a challenge). Not all of the Lemmy apps have ability to search within a community.
Don't just reply "Nope" if you've got time to be a little more helpful--the game is hard.
This is the reason the answer is given inside spoiler tags. That way users can always practice on old posts.
I never know the right answer but i like seeing the pictures and the guesses. As I'm terrible at the game, i haven't been inclined to post a challenge for others. Lack of input does not equal lack of enjoyment, but i get that it's not fair to expect to be entertained. Thank you for the work you put into it. Hope you're doing well.
For what it's worth, my typical Lemmy habit is to pull up the "subscribed" feed in the morning, sort by "Top Day", and then scroll until I hit all of the posted content from my communities. After that point, I might transition over to "All" and sort by "active" to see if there is anything out there getting traction that I've missed. This is the first post I've seen from this community. It's an interesting concept, so I've subscribed today. As others have said, this community is still establishing itself. Keep generating content, and if what you publish is enticing (as it was for me today), and you'll attract others. Some subset of that population might also have the the drive to create content as well, but it wouldn't shock me if the proportions of lurkers to posters was 99:1.
When there were less than 300 subscribers, there were plenty of challenges being posted by plenty of different users. I even had some users complain there were too many posts. Then the posting stopped as if the community got a disease.
Is that really all that surprising though? Novelty is a powerful incentive. The folks that were bolstering your early numbers are probably those who are specifically hunting for brand new or small communities. I'd wager that these users typically post more frequently than the average. However, much like you are experiencing right now, once the novelty of a new community concept fades, if those posters don't get the engagement they wanted on their test balloon posts, they will write the community off as dead and move on.
As the person with the most skin in the game for this community, your steadfastness is what will provide the base upon which others will build, but you should be prepared to either suffer the grind until the community has built a self-sustaining ecosystem of posters, commenters, and lurkers who upvote. Alternatively, if you're getting burnt out from feeling like you're screaming into the void, you can walk away (intentionally this time, not because of a hospital visit). Return later if you feel reenergized, but you don't have to. It's just an internet forum.
Also, I do think you are underselling the difficulty of posting in this community a little bit. I've been toying around with Craiyon, based on the recommendation of your sticky post, trying to generate an image for Iron Maiden's "The Trooper". It's a fairly cinematic song, should be easy to generate an image that fits, right? Plug in a couple of the most evocative lines and you're off to the races. Not so much, I'm finding. Dumping the lyrics in raw gets me various depictions of horses and not much else. Okay, back to the drawing board. In my own words, I describe a 19th century cavalry charge. Closer, but it lacks any of the touchstones from the lyrics themselves. Also, the resulting images themselves are various degrees of janky in the way that the free image generators typically are. Sure, I could just throw it out there in the spirit of providing content for people to chew through, but I might argue that a tidal wave of low effort posts is more damaging to the health of most new community than few posts of relative high quality. And, again, this is all for a song that is very specific in the imagery it evokes. I'd imagine trying something more esoteric would need even more revisions and iterations to get dialed in to a point where someone has a shot at guessing.
Other than a very brief period of time when these sort of generators were first making waves in TTRPG DM communities, this is the only time I've messed around with these types of programs, so I don't really know how to best revise or write these prompts. It ends up being a lot of trial and error. Which, yeah, if I'm just throwing out a test post to gauge the response, no big deal. But I don't think it should shock you that someone may not be interested in doing that on a regular basis. It seems like you possibly have some degree of experience with these programs (at least looking at the quality of the outputs you've been posting), and I think you may be letting that cloud your perception of the time investment.
As a final point regarding engagement in this community, I'm not sure this is the sort of game that breeds huge amounts of comments and whatnot. Using your Journey post as an example, I posted a guess, you responded with an emoji, and now that post is now effectively dead unless things go wildly off topic in the comments. Not that that's a bad thing if you're okay with it as the community manager, but I'd guess it is probably the exception to the rule. In the reverse situation, if I come across a post which has stumped me, I'm more likely to just keep scrolling on to the next thing because I wouldn't want to ruin the chance someone else might have at guessing it "honestly" (so to speak) by asking for clues. That's admittedly silly, but I don't think the sentiment is unique to me.
I don't mean to bust your chops, I do really like this concept and hope it finds its footing. I just think you may have been overly optimistic with your expectations.
I've posted some challenges myself and will occasionally take a stab at guessing one of the entries, but I don't get around to engaging every day or even week. For me personally, I think the game is very fun, but the number of challenges per day/week is too high. If you scaled back a bit, I think you'd get more participation on each individual challenge.
Not enough Taylor Swift songs.
On a more serious note, I made one a while ago but I didn't think it was good enough quality. Sorry bud, next time I'll post regardless.
Sorry, what game are we talking about?
Better question would have been what good is a community where nobody wants to participate?