I’ve read the report on the 3rd Party Community Sites panel at the AGC. Hm, quite boring.

The quotable part is something that Grimwell said:

Craig: Back to the flow of information thing, it’s okay to talk to us even if you can’t talk about your game. There’s a lot of room for us to talk about the people involved with the game rather than the game itself, and that shouldn’t cause you any legal problems since it’s not going to leak any game features.

Here’s an example: I talked to one of the guys working on the Stargate game, and he couldn’t say anything about the game itself, but I was able to talk to him about his past experience, what he’d learned from tabletop gaming, etc. And that was useful stuff.

My opinion about the discussion is still the same: it is taken too seriously.

At the end the goal isn’t good or bad press. At the end the goal is make a better game. Good or bad PR comes after, as you can fool the players only as long you can hide things behind an NDA and pretty screenshots.

What I mean is that sooner or later you have to come out of the hole, and that’s when things start to matter.

Now the point is: how to make a better game? And how “making a better game” can imply better communication?

The answer is “the circulation of ideas”. Communication isn’t one-way because it isn’t *needed* one-way. It’s not just the players that need communication. It’s in the interest of both sides, and both sides including different companies and different games. So not a network that is limited to the specific game or game company.

You need to keep yourself informed about what is going on, you need to know all the games out there, you need to examine problems and solutions. See above the very specific problem to draw better conclusions and find out where things don’t quite work. This is why the circulation of ideas brings to better games. Facing problems, openly discussing them. Having a broader view. This is useful for all kinds of developers, not just designers.

Concretely? Concretely it means that the control over what the developers say should be more lax. It doesn’t mean to FORCE devs to write blogs and read and post on multiple forums.

It means letting them free and contribute in the measure they feel useful.

Blogs, official or not forums, rant sites, more or less known news sites… All these matter only in the measure they communicate with each other, not in the measure they get exclusive content or are self contained. The developers should only work to reduce the distance between themselves and the players (scary, eh?).

In their own interest. In the interest of the game. And in the interest of the players at the end.