Internet Map

[peewee_RotA]

I'm a fairly new member and I'm very happy with the way that Pen and Paper games is going. On that note I'm very happy with the way that most RP websites are going. RPTools, The TangledWeb, Obsidion Portal, (to name a few) have great communities and leaders in those communities.

I personally see the value in each community. The Tangled Web has a very strong PBP pressence and is very supportive of MapTool. Obsidion Portal also suggests for players to use the Pen and Paper registration to find players and games in their area. And the chat here should not go without mention. It's a great place to talk to fellow gamers.

All that having been said, there's one thing that is a huge draw back. The existence of several forums is a symptom of a fragmented community. Attempting to unify all of the communities to a single forum would probably cause more fragmentation, and I think that their uniqueness would be lost. Besides, not all communication has to be unified. Really only advertising of games between the sites is important.

So my suggestion is quite simple, and I welcome feedback as it's an infant of an idea for the moment. What if there was an alternative player/game finder map that used a cusomized map of "the internet" instead of physical location. This theoretical map would show "countries" representing each community and then games would be placed as events in each "country."

This would require an outward facing page with a map that any community site can embed or link to. It would also need a registration page to add games. There would need to be some sort of administration to it as well because new communities would need to be added as time goes on.

I didn't take the idea from this old XKCD comic, but I think it shows a graphical representation of how it could look.
http://xkcd.com/802/

Hopefully it could be categorized by theme, setting, and system so that someone could just browse what interests them before getting into the details of each individual post.

I think it'd be a fairly simple extension of the existing technology. The hard part would be pitching it over to the other communities.

[cplmac]

We actually sort of have something like this already with Obsidian Portal and P&PG. If a game is posted over on Obsidian Portal that is in my area, I recieve a notice about it. Granted, I only get notifications about games that match what I have listed on here at P&PG as being interested in. This has been in place for quite some time now. Our Owner/Administrator, Farcaster, was very far seeing in getting this partnership set up between the two sites. You may want to inquire with him about this very thing expanding to include more sites.

[peewee_RotA]

Yes that feature is pretty awesome, it's what inspired me to expand on it, but my idea is slightly different. I'm looking at mine as more of a central repository with a really cool graphical way to browse things. Plus it wouldn't rely on physical location, just community. I guess to that end IRL games wouldn't have much use for the tool. Only games using skype, virtual tabletop, or pbp would use it.

I think that it also provides a different kind of a service than game notification to existing players. For example if a GM is storing all of his quest or scheduling information over at the tangled web, then this theoretical map would communicate that information. Also new users over at the rpgobjects forum tend to install maptools and then check out the rpgobjects forum. Pretty soon after posting their LFG entry they get pointed to several different forums in order to actually find their games.

I think it would be really cool for people who have just installed Maptools, OpenRPG, or d20 pro. They could look at the map to see what communities there are, see what kind of games are running, and then get into a game of their liking much faster. This would be good for someone who just decided to try PbP or who have just finished a quest.

I was under the impression that the admin would prefer to float the idea here first before presenting it directly. Is there a better place to discuss it with Farcaster?


Thanks for your resposne

[cplmac]

You can always send Farcaster a PM (Private Message) about this. Just keep in mind that he does get tons of them, so it may take some time to get a reply. It sounds like it would be something that would take the colaboration of the Adminstrators of any and all sites involved in this endeavor.

[peewee_RotA]

Cool. I will do.

I'm going to try to prototype it first though. Replacing the images of earth with a custom image is not as simple as I thought. Although I know it's possible.