1620: Community Matters

The Squadron of Shame, the “gaming book club” that was born on the 1up Radio message boards and has subsequently lived in several places across the Internet, has moved house again. We now have our own forum here — though if Squad co-founder “Beige” gets things sorted, we’ll have either that forum or a variation thereof on our own domain before long, which will be nice.

Forums aren’t all that fashionable these days, though they are still used somewhat, particularly for communities relating to specific software companies or even individual games. I can’t say I’ve used one for a very long time indeed now, but having gotten back into the swing of posting on one thanks to the new Squadron of Shame boards, I can honestly say I’ve missed them.

The reason? They’re completely different to the way modern social media works. While you may think that social media would be the ideal place to begin discussions and have in-depth conversations, in actuality modern social media is not at all well-suited for this task. Whereas many forums have long-life conversational threads that stick around for months or even years, the very nature of social media means that posts are transient — they’re there one moment, gone the next, replaced by a cat picture, some vapid meme or One Of Those Clickbait Headlines That Makes Poor Use Of Headline Case And You Just Won’t Believe. And while certain social media posts can attract a long string of comments and stick around for a while due to consistent interest — the reason why Facebook steadfastly refuses to organise posts in chronological order is because of this, if you were wondering — they’ll still fall away far quicker than an equivalent topic on a forum.

This is fine for the sort of vapid nonsense that people post on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, but less ideal for more long-form discussion on more specific topics — such as the sort of thing we like to stroke our collective chins over at the Squadron of Shame. Now I know that many existing, well-established forums in 2014 — long-standing gaming forum NeoGAF is a good example — have proportions of the community that do not like seeing “walls of text” (even when they use paragraphs and punctuation and everything), but the fact is that forums are ideally suited to long-form discussion and thoughtful discourse. They’re not instant messages, they’re not time-sensitive, they’re not places to post “fire and forget” comments that you never look at the responses to — they’re places for asynchronous communication between people of similar interests, and an excellent means of having far more detailed discussions than is possible on social media in its current form.

Social media is crowded. Social media is noisy. Social media is like stumbling into the middle of a party, slightly drunk, and shouting whatever you feel like and hoping someone hears it. And, sometimes, that’s fine, and can lead to beautiful interactions, friendships and even relationships. (I’m sitting in this house with the person I own it with because of Twitter.)

But a forum is like getting together a group of people with common interests — depending on the number of participants, it can be like a book club, a seminar or a large-scale gathering — and having a civilised, peaceful, thoughtful discussion on a particular topic. (Usually, anyway. This isn’t to say forums are drama-free, but there’s a lot less of the attention-seeking passive-aggression that’s often seen on social media for the most part in my experience.)

As I said above, I’m not sure whether the Squadron of Shame will be staying on that free forum software for now or whether we’ll be moving to our own site. But either way, the shift — or should I say shift back, since that’s where the group was born — to a forum-based means of discussion has so far proven popular, and I think it will be good for the group in the long term.

If you’re interested in joining us to talk about underappreciated and overlooked games, both new and old, drop by our new home and say hello.