bellemorda

I'm not going to go on about our history or our love affair, how wonderful it used to be or reminisce about finer points. I think to do you justice I need to say what remains unsaid by anybody who belongs to this site. If it causes us to part ways then so be it; I'll know that I'll have weighed the right decision on my conscience to try and make you a better place and let you know why I feel I just don't love you any more. If I didn't care about you at all I'd del this post and bid you a silent adieu and move on like so many other regulars already have.

You went to all that work to revamp the site, update your image, comb your hair a different way. You look luscious and smart, well-put together. But the more I hang around, the more I realize your substance has not changed. I feel you aren't offering me anything that I can't get somewhere else, somewhere like 1up, Kotaku, gamasutra, gametrailers, magicbox or heaven forbid, IGN.  I mean, here's a harsh wake-up call but honestly, you don't even rank with the content I get from LiveJournal's gamer_girls community for godsake.

I don't understand why you want me around, I mean, in the forums or on the portal site side. The site is divided neatly into two halves, the informative side and the forum side and rarely do the two interact or support each other. And I hate to say it but both halves are failing me.

On the one side, we have the portal. I think that's what you mean it to be in the 1990's sense of website design. A place where you can look at jobs, get news blurbs, see the latest reviews, and shop if you like.  Only this concept fails me when I can get that information better and faster and with more concise delivery from the news sites you are linking me to follow. Honestly, I can set up an RSS feed on my own blog to siphon that information directly from the incepting sites to my blog or inbox without having to visit the news forum. In eight years I have never purchased anything from the store because there is never anything new there that I would say, "oh I gotta have that!" The job section, well that is a very handy thing if you live on the east or west coast and are looking for gaming industry jobs but for the rest of us in between the coasts, in Canada and Europe, how many of us can say we frequent that section?  In the Games section, I can get any number of the games you link or promote through any other site specifically dedicated to offering dowloadable content, with effective downloaders and demos. And while I am a diehard Geek Woman fan, I have to say your editorial/review section is severely, morbidly lacking in *amount* (not in quality, please note). One review every month or so, and not of necessarily contemporaneous games/hardware/tech but of standard industry games we could find reviews of on any other site like Yahoo! Games  for instance.  With all the excessive information, none of it shines, all of it mumbles together. All that information clammoring at me at the same time, what is it you're trying to say to me? That you are a gaming review site? A jobs portal? A news hub? A cache for great indie or small dev games (i.e., "Play Games at WomenGamers")?

How is this meant to inspire us to keep coming back to the site to see what you have to say? What is it you feel is deserving of the market share attention you are working for? Why do you think you are the same caliber of other sites that have more editorials, more user features, more user contributed content, more active forums, more up-to-date and comprehensive news (comprehensive meaning, "reported on, not just linked to"), more defined intent to provide a specific service to the gaming community and MORE GAME STUFF, PERIOD....? Why are you resting on your laurels, is it because by your mission you "represent?" Because its expensive to keep up with other sites like that? Because its too hard or you're too busy?

Your content is....great when I see it but I don't see it nearly enough to make me feel you are filling the objectives you had in mind when you wrote your mission statement, or that you're fulfilling what it is you want to do most for women gamers by offering a community that ranks with any of the hundreds of other gaming sites and still distinguishes itself from them. Because honestly, there is no community, just a bunch of information that is lumped together without any contemporary edge or deep relevancy to gaming in general.

Which brings me to the other side, where we have the forums. The Women(and Men)Gamers-driven voice of the special interest gaming sector that has for years supported the WG site, encouraged others to come, perpetuated the interest in what's going on here.  All I can say is, why are we pouring so much love and admiration into staying here, and perhaps lingering where we're not getting our gaming information needs and desires met? We want to believe what you stand for, we believe it too.  We want to be proud not just of what you've accomplished in the past, but what you are doing and continuing to provide the gaming community. Only, in my eyes and my heart I don't feel that I'm getting one ounce of what I really need from you other than the cameraderie of like-minded people who, like me, are starved for content to whet their wit, opinion and participatory membership on. Not only are we starved for content, but we are famished for *user* content as well. Why is it not possible for the users to help build the content of this site that other than posting in a predominantly text based, img-dropping, personalization-lacking bbs style forum? 

I know I am not the only one feeling like the love has died, or is at least  struggling on life-support. This does not mean I do not appreciate everything you've done, all the work gone into the site revamp. Its very nice how its all reorganized. But like a guy who tells me he's gonna change, I'm finding that really not much has substantively changed: your content is thin, the search engine for the forums is essentially the same as before the revamp (only this time, a huge chunk of archives is inaccessible, as I've mentioned in a previous post in the forums), and there is even less for us to feel a symbiotic relationship with between the membership and the site itself.  I miss my friends, Brumm and Beli and Dac and every other single player here, all of whom have an opinion of substance I want to hear and discuss and discourse and laugh with, not just lol over the latest pic in the Kitty Thread. Our conversations in general are reduced to substandard emotes in impotent response to bored posts on topics that come further and further apart.

Please don't make this about how I don't understand how hard you've worked, or your dedication, or the fact that you are people with real lives because I get all that. Don't misunderstand my voiced concern as a LACK of consideration when it is exactly the opposite. And its not all about complaining, because without some suggestions for solutions this post would be worthless.

For months now, I spend my mornings scouring the internet for interesting news, articles, gaming stories, release information, trailers, special interest editorials, *anything* that I could post on your forum to incite your membership to engage and populate any kind of discussion. Only now I see what I've been doing -- trying to pull any interestingly relevant content and plunk it down on your site because its not there to begin with. I can honestly say every thing I've tried in the past nine months has been in an effort to buoy what was once a place I envied being a contributing part of. Even in criticism I've attempted to be plaintive yet productive. I've tried my very damndest to keep the love alive, even pouring my  heart out in this post and many others. It would be so easy to bitch about what's wrong and then tail-end it out of here but I just can't. Neither can the rest of us suspended in inactivity who are waiting for something, anything to make us want to stay and keep you alive.

~Belle