Gamocracy

[icycalm]

http://www.gamocracy.com/

Via email:

Hello Alex,

I read some of your writings at www.insomnia.ac and it prompted me to get in touch because I agree with many of the topics you’re covering. I especially understand your take on the relationship between gaming publishers and the media. While I’ve never been a journalist, I did write a couple piece for magazines at some point and I’ve been around editors long enough to understand the tricks of their trade.

I believe the problems you’re pointing at can be solved though. At least I am, along with 3 friends, giving a shot at a new model we’ve been working at for the past few months. It’s called www.gamocracy.com. It relies on the new possibilities offered by the internet. As you put it, in the 80’s, we needed magazines and a handful of writers to broadcast the information because there was no internet. Today, we can rely on everyday gamers. The bigger the number of contributors, the harder it is to manipulate them.

Another key aspect of our site is that we will not rely on advertising to make a living. Instead, we will sell games ourselves.

I won’t bother you any longer for now but I would be really interested in hearing what you think about all this,

Cheers,

Nicolas

My reply:

The name is terrible. Extremely tacky. Good luck anyway.

What I really think about it is that I couldn't care less. I am not interested in websites any more -- I am interested in people. More specifically, in experts in specific genres and sub-genres. If you are an expert then I want to read what you have to say regardless of where you post it: in a forum, in a blog, on a major or minor news site, on a piece of toilet paper -- anywhere. If you are not an expert then you can makes a billion fancy sites if you want, but I sure as hell will not be reading them.

[Bradford]

The bigger the number of contributors, the harder it is to manipulate them.

Yeah, that's really probably not true. The fewer prerequisites to participation that you impose, the more stupid people will be participating. Stupid people are generally far easier to manipulate than smart people, no matter how many there are.

You also have the Library of Babel problem - the more information being generated, the more difficult it is to sort the useful from the useless. That's why the ruthless culling of participants from this site is exponentially more likely to produce material worth reading.

Things everyone should know but few realize: half of all people on the planet have IQs lower than 100, human intelligence graphs as a bell curve, and there is a very good reason that the U.S. Constitution contains no guarantee for the people to vote for their chief executives (hint: it's the same reason the factory workers at GE don't get to vote for the CEO).

At least pick a name for your site that doesn't allude to a form of government that doesn't work. Maybe try aristocracy instead: garistocracy, gamistrocracy, aristogamacy, I don't know, you're the one with all the big ideas to "solve" the problem of games journalism...