This is a call for software suggestions. I'm willing and excited to put some time and work into this, as the Forge's tech admin.

The wrote:
I wish there was some feature a bit like Board Game Geek that helped you pick and choose RPGs. 

...For example, what if I wanted a sci-fi RPG that I could play in an evening?  A Fantasy RPG for extended campaigns and character development (I know that one: Burning Wheel).  A game that's suited to 2 players?  With or without a GM?

Paul wrote:
<a href="http://wagn.org/wagn/structured_rails_wiki">Wagn might be worth exploring.

Perhaps it could be integrated with the Unstore? It might make sense to have descriptions and buying together.

Story Games has something similar to this. The other option would be to update their version.

Graham

Graham wrote:
Perhaps it could be integrated with the Unstore? It might make sense to have descriptions and buying together.

My Finnish-language webstore has buying and descriptions and whatnot together. Somewhat logical, but it'd be difficult to get any degree of uniformity in the information in the Unstore, considering how hands-off Vincent is about its contents. Also, information overload would need to be addressed - basically, you can only have two of a) good reference, b) commercial function and c) usable interface. This is why I'd go with a separate database with links to Unstore or wherever; you wouldn't need to clutter the Unstore with the reference material.

I don't know how useful mere short reviews of games would be - I've thought about creating some web resource to introduce people to the design tradition of the Forge, but I've pretty much concluded that a well-written article is the way to go, perhaps supplemented by some categorized lists of important games. Publishers are quite capable of running their own websites, so it might not be that useful to duplicate those marketing materials in yet another database. Besides, what use would an undifferentiated, unanalyzed list of games be? What would the criteria for inclusion be such that listing the games would have value?

Considering a database, though - where BoardGameGeek is used and useful is as a roughly standardized and well-updated reference. It's the place where we link in boardgaming discussions whenever some game is mentioned. The clean site structure with unique numbering for the games assists in making the site a default reference whenever a hardcore boardgamer wants to check out basic statistics about a game. In Internet discussions it's easy to link to BGG instead of searching for the publisher's site, especially as you're usually guaranteed some basic information about any game in BGG whether the publisher has that info in their own site or not. BGG also collects rules updates, translations, links and other basic supplemental material for the games, making it an easy one-stop starting point for researching a game you're interested in.

Running that level of operation is a huge task, though. BGG has a large and active user base with exceptional dedication to cataloguing their own game libraries and a vested interest in caring for the database. I can't imagine duplicating that sort of database activity with anything less than the supposedly forthcoming RPGGeek site. So considering a Forge game database, it'd have to be something different... I could see a primarily designer-updated wiki that focused on games associated with the Forge - basically let anybody add indie games in there who'd care to and see what came in. I'd imagine that we'd get something like 50 games in it... perhaps it'd be worthwhile - I could clean up my own site and provide links to the new database, for example.

I would be willing to contribute information / writing to the project. (basically, if someone else gets this thing off the ground, I'd be willing to flesh out an existing structure.)

Wagn looks excellent for this and for a literary project I've been wanting to do for a while. I'm going to spend some time this weekend exploring it.

yrs--
--Ben

Phew - I thought I was going to have to do this after my last post.  I would like to help, possibly as the voice of the new player.  I appreciate all the input you designer types are putting in but I would like a real end-user player perspective also.  I looked at the Story games website and while it is good to have all those names in one place it's not helpful in terms of games selection.  It looks like the sort of stuff you could read on the designer's website, albeit gathered in one place.

I always found this Geeklist on BoardGameGeek a good one.

I'd like to know things like:

• Optimum number of players
• Best with X players
• Necessity of dice rolls - Burning Wheel = loads, Everway = none
• Systems of resolution
• Is a GM necessary?
• Is the setting GM, player or game generated (e.g the latter being something like the Forgotten Realms supplements)
• Sci Fi/Fantasy/Horror/Greeks in Outer Space
• Complexity of the system
• RPG skill level - to play Baron Munchausen I would think you'd have to be a great improvisor

In terms of helping I'm a computer expert in my office but that's because I know how to load the printer tray and change its cartridges.  That's the sort of standard I'm used to.

Thanks for reading
Piers

I think that, beyond the system that will be used to organise the games, we still need information to start-off this project. Even rough definitions based on genre are a good start. For instance, going-down the list of sub-forums here at The Forge...

FANTASY
Sorcerer http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com/
Elfs http://www.adept-press.com/elfs/
Legends of Alyria http://www.darkomengames.com/alyria.html

ADVENTURE (NON-FANTASY)
The Committee For The Exploration of Mysteries http://ericjboyddesigns.com/The_Committee.aspx
Rustbelt http://www.angelfire.com/indie/btw/games/rustbelt.html
Fae Noir http://www.greenfairygames.com/faenoir.html

OFF THE WALL
Obliterati http://www.angelfire.com/indie/btw/games/obliterati.html
A Flower For Mara (drama) http://www.darkomengames.com/mara.html
House of Cards (crime) http://ericjboyddesigns.com/HouseofCards.aspx
Candycreeps http://www.greenfairygames.com/candycreeps.html

WARFARE
Gray Ranks http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/index.php?game=grey_ranks

SOCIAL (SERIOUS)
Break The Ice http://www.blackgreengames.com/bti.html
Shooting The Moon http://www.blackgreengames.com/stm.html
Under My Skin http://www.blackgreengames.com/ums.html
Fiasco http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/index.php?game=fiasco
Drowning and Falling
http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/index.php?game=drowning_and_falling
Dirty Secrets http://www.darkomengames.com/secrets.html

SOCIAL (HUMOUR)
Super Action Now! http://www.angelfire.com/indie/btw/games/san.html
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/index.php?game=roach
Primetime Adventures http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/games.html

SPORTS
Kayfabe (wrestling) http://www.errantknightgames.com/kayfabe/

I know this is just a start, but even if that were it, I think it would satisfy a lot of people's curiosity. Now, especially with indy RPGs, is grouping things into single genre always perfect? No, of course not. But it's a start, as if I, as a gamer, want to find some science fiction game books, at least I know where to start. Hypothetically, each game could have one or two "sub-genre" listed to help further define it. But for quick reference, generalisations kinda need to be made.

I don't think that "genre" is a useful indication for forge games like it is for more "traditional" rpgs that share the same basic experience of play.  With forge games it's the basilar play experience that often changes between games, and it's often very easy to hack a different genre on a game (for example, you can play Breaking The Ice in a superhero genre, playing the first three dates between Superman and Wonder Woman, but it would still play like Breaking the Ice, not like Capes).

It would be more useful to show relationship between games (influences, direct derivation, shared premises, etc.) to get the "if you liked this you probably will like that" effect.

Moreno wrote: It would be more useful to show relationship between games (influences, direct derivation, shared premises, etc.)

Not ot get meta with the discussion, but there's a whole wiki about how to do "Wiki as Database":
http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiAsDatabase

In my own experience as a frequent user of icehousegames.org (a "wiki database" of pyramid games), I would suggest the following:
* Establish a style guide from Day One:
-- How are articles named (Initial Caps, or sentence case)?
-- (How) Do you use sub-articles and sandboxes (of at all)?
-- What are Talk pages used for: game questions or commentary?
-- Do you need InfoBoxes; and if so what kinds, how many templates?
* Develop a STRONG, COMPREHENSIVE categorization scheme, or use Semantic MediaWiki (which seems a tad tricky, but I haven't really researched it). Enforce its use, rather than allow a proliferation of one-article Categories.
* Encourage designers to post articles for their own games, and maintain a Watch on them. If left to the average Joe off the street, you're going to have some pain, as designers check out their games' articles and see all kinds of unprofessional crap. Page locking might be a common admin action.
* Build a strong navigation system, to provide another way to browse games other than with the Categories, and provide it (with Help links) on the Main Page and in the sidebar. We use four major navigation pages:
-- Main page, to point folks to the L2 navigation.
-- Games Under Development, as a L2 page for incomplete games and those in playtest.
-- Comprehensive Game List, as another L2 with just alphabetized games, divided by Published (in print) and Community/online.
-- What Can I Play?, which is an L2 page that sorts games out by the components required, as many folks buy into the Icehouse system a tube or two at a time.
* Anti-spambot measures are mandatory. Your site will VERY quickly be overrun with links to porn and ring tones, if you don't (they even like to destroy pages to make the links--wonder how that works for them?!?).

In the end, it could be simpler to make a purpose-built MS Access database and publish it to the web, with proper forms, and user security, and all that. (Or an open-source solution, like MySQL.) If you're just wanting a basic relational database with an "Enter Game" and "Query Games" form, it's not really a lot of work. I mean, look at online MLS systems and imagine all the shit THEY have to balance and relate (my pop worked on them for years--he's lost all his hair and the rest is nearly white). A games database, even with some extra table fields, is hardly more complex that the "book inventory" sample DB that comes with Access....

HTH;
David

David wrote: Develop a STRONG, COMPREHENSIVE categorization scheme, or use Semantic MediaWiki (which seems a tad tricky, but I haven't really researched it).

Wagn looks nice. If that's the default setup... it's pretty sweet. Here's a link, that lists it's features, and lists other wiki's features, sort of like distrowatch but for wikis.

Whatever the forms ends up being, the main functionality that I would want out of this tool as someone who is not well-versed in Forge history, terms, or culture is a content-sortable database.  Frankly, I don't care about reviews.  I can get reviews just about anywhere.  I can read actual play threads.  I can even email the author.  The problem, though, is that I don't know which threads to read or which games to research.

I want to be able to sort games by things like number of players, system type, GM presence, game length, session length, preparation needed, and, yes, intended genre.  Frequently, I find myself saying, "I'd like to play a superhero game," or something similar.  Even though all of the superhero games may be wildly different, I'm not asking about play experience in this question; I'm asking about genre.  I don't have a play experience in mind; I just want to play a superhero and I'd like to know what kinds of experiences are out there in that genre.

No more opinions about what it should be like, please. Thank you all for caring, and for wanting it to be good.

If you want to participate in its development, the thing to do now is suggest web database apps and suchlike for me to look at and weigh against one another. Everything else is premature.

Thanks!

-Vincent

Hello,

I created the framework for something roughly similar awhile ago. You might be interested in looking at it for inspiration.

http://csmsp.awardspace.com/rpgs/rpg_database.php

- Sean Musgrave

While extolling the virtues of semantic wikis, I forgot to link to any. I use MedaiWiki (i.e. the code that runs Wikipedia) for the main wiki bits, with the Semantic Wiki plugin. There are others.

I haven't seen a very good introduction to what these actually do for you. All docs seem to make it sound way more complicated than it actually is. So, here is a nickel tour:

As you probably know, in a standard wiki, you link from one page to another using some kind of markup around the name of the target page, within the text of the source. So, say you had a page about a game called Fizzbin. It might contain a line like:

[code]The earlier game [[Udis]] heavily influenced the design of Fizzbin.[/code]

When the Fizzbin page renders, that line contains a link to the wiki's page titled "Uids". A human reader can know from the context that the reason this link from Fizzbin to Udis exists is that Udis influenced Fizzbin.

Unfortunately, computers don't analyze context that well. To the machine this is just a link. There is no information about why the link is there.

The point of semantic wikis is to change this. They supply the computer with a why, and this turns out to allow some powerful things to happen. The why is encoded by changing the link syntax, so that the line above would look something like this:

[code]The earlier game [[influenced-by::Udis]] heavily influenced the design of Fizzbin.[/code]

The page renders the same way as before, with a link from one to the other. Things get more fun when you reach the other end of the link.

Suppose you are now on the Udis page. You'd like it to have a section the lists all the games that have been influenced by Udis. Using standard wikis, you have to make this list by hand. If some new game comes up that lists Udis as an influence, unless you know that happened, this list will get out of sync with the rest of the data. With semantic wikis, however, you can do something like this:

[code]{{#ask: [[influenced-by::Udis]]
  | format=ul
}}[/code]

This automatically generates a list of all pages in the wiki that contain an "influenced-by" tag that points to Udis. There are a lot of other bells and whistles (with progressively funkier syntax), but that is the main idea. You can also use non-linking semantic tags for "properties". For example:

[code]First Published: [[created::2008]][/code]

You can then do a dance to make any created:: tag just render as plain text, rather than a link. This lets you add properties to various queries. For example, to list only those games created in 2008 that were influenced by Udis, you'd do this:

[code]{{#ask: [[influenced-by::Udis]] [[created::2008]]
  | format=ul
}}[/code]

And so on.

Hmm, I use wikis a lot and have set up a few.  I'm also a big user of Boardgame Geek (I put my PnP games up there), and would also recommend having a look a the piecepack wiki for ideas on taxonomy - http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/

More importantly I work in a library with metadata, and would be interested in helping you work out an XML schema based on authorities for your classifications.

Some interesting references include MARC (international standard for books) - http://www.loc.gov/marc/
Dublin Core (which we use in Picture Australia) - http://dublincore.org/
And RDA (and FRBR) which we will soon be replacing AACR2 with - http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/gateways/issues/94/story06.html
(soon in a very loose sense of the word).

Which is all a bunch of library jargon for "organising how you find stuff"
Authorities are the key to this - they determine the base term for all the variants.  I.e. "city fantasy see urban fantasy".

Hmm, found a useful link for authorities on Wikipedia (which isn't :) ) -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_control

sirogit wrote:
Hello,

I created the framework for something roughly similar awhile ago. You might be interested in looking at it for inspiration.

http://csmsp.awardspace.com/rpgs/rpg_database.php

- Sean Musgrave

Man, I totally forgot about Freebase. It is sort of like Wikipedia, but communally creating a relational database instead of a wiki. It already has a bit of RPG information in there already. As an example, here is its entry on Jared Sorenson.

Might not be what you are after, but I'm guessing you could mine its data, at the very least.

RPG Geek is now live. come take a look. http://rpg.geekdo.com

here's a copy of the press release:

--
The creators of BoardGameGeek.com are proud to announce the long-awaited launch of http://rpg.geekdo.com!!

Using ten years of community-driven software, http://rpg.geekdo.com has been specifically developed to organize Role-Playing Game information: High-level RPGs, Low-level RPG Items, Settings, Families, Mechanics, Categories, all the way down to Version specific information like PDF or Special Edition. Plus, we've added Artists and Producers to augment the Designers and Publishers to encourage everyone to participate in what will be a vibrant online community.

Additionally, http://rpg.geekdo.com has all the of the features you've come to expect from the boardgamegeek.com software: Images, Files, Forums, Ratings, Reviews, Collections, GeekLists, Trades, and many, many others.

As of July 31st 2009, http://rpg.geekdo.com contains 7000 items linked to 1300 role-playing games, with hundreds of new items being added daily. All information is user-submitted and user-corrected, so it will become what the community wishes it to be.

Learn the way of the RPG Geek!
--

another link that you may find of interest is the guide that was put together that explains the data model and how books should be entered to keep everything consistent:

http://rpg.geekdo.com/wiki/page/Guide_to_Data_Entry

indie game are already pretty well represented, but since the site is based on user generated content, if you see something is missing (and there is *lots* missing) please submit it, or submit corrections on data that is wrong

This is a fantastic development. Great news!

-Vincent