Well, BioWare caused the Internet to explode and absolutely everyone seems to be talking about the whole issue that was brought up there – and if you haven’t heard about it, I’m fairly surprised. Still, effectively, what happened is the Community Manager closed a thread that was discussing/flaming about why the words “Gay” and “Lesbian” were censored on the forums. The CM closed the thread and responded with:
As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars.
Thread closed.
That, as you can imagine, caused more debate and complaints. Generally speaking, whenever you bring up a hot button issue like that, people are going to be downright irritated. There is absolutely no avoiding it, regardless of your stance. In this case, the complaining spilled out of the official forums and onto blogs and news sites around the Internet. In fact, so much as bringing it up – even without presenting any opinion one way or the other, has been enough to incite heated debate amongst forum goers and commentators on the broader issue of homosexuality- which isn’t surprising, many people have strong opinions one way or the other (heck, I’m opinionated too). As I said though, you probably already know about that – or at the very least, there’s plenty of places to read about what happened.
Instead, what I found interesting was something on Scott Jenning’s blog, even if it wasn’t the focus of his post. Should MMOs have forums long before they’re released? Before any game actually exists for players to, well, play?
I find myself pretty torn on this one, to be honest. I like online communities and I like hanging around early development forums (even if I mostly just lurk these days). It can be fun to watch games slowly develop as new information comes out, to meet other people who look forward to the game, and to start building the foundations of a community. This period can be nice for really bringing to gether your strong core audience – well, in theory. A large part of me wants to say that MMOs should have forums early in this development stage. Of course, I’m also bias.
When I really think about it, you can make some good arguments for not having a forum until release/beta (where you really should have one). It is quite true that until you reach that state, there is very little game to actually talk about. There’s speculation – but that can often lead to heated and often circular arguments. There’s discussion on possible game systems, but there’s often litle basis for them, and the discussions are often rehashed. A lot. In fact, not just rehashed from discussions on other forums, but rehashed over and over again on the official forums. Then you generally have a lot of the random off-topic threads, which basically exist on every forum.
Besides that, fansites are going to pop up as long as you have made the announcement and pump out news on a semi-regular basis. Those fansites will have forums. The type of people who get on your forum during early development are going to be the same people that would go to a fansite to chat if you didn’t have a forum. It is when the game releases/gets much further into development, that you’re going to start getting a significant number of people who won’t go to some fansite to chat, but will go to your forums. (No, no citations for this, but I’m betting it is largely true.)
As I said though, I have a hard time making a call on that one. I’m actually rather curious on what other people have to say on this topic. As a note though, if these words were censored, even post-release, this issue would have arisen anyway. However, that isn’t the point!
