Our focus, help a greater good

After seeing some of the comments from my last post Forums suck - Take 2, I think we should discuss the focus of this website. But first a bit of history to those of you that are new.

This community started almost 2 years ago with a forum website called dretchstorm.com. That website served the users of the Tremulous game server that we host, called the same. Eventually it evolved into "Obliter8 Groups" (o8Groups), as an attempt to fix problems with structure and off-topic posting. o8Groups was focused on general gaming instead of a single game community. To an extent it worked, but for the most part it just remained the same. Finally, we moved to this website - just "Obliter8" - which focuses in gaming news, blogs, and game reviews and discussion. Entirely fueled by its members. Ok, so now back to the point...

The Prophet Recently I was chatting with a long-time veteran member - EvilZx - about the focus of this website. What I mean with focus is "What do we do here?". So knowing he's been around since the beginning and we both are heavy gamers, I asked him a simple question: "what do you think should be our focus?" His response was as simple as my question. Without any hesitation he replied: "I think we should focus on open and free games". This struck me a bit because I didn't intend to split gaming into camps; commercial and free. To me it's just gaming, they are just games and I play them. Sure, games are grouped in genres and such, but when you talk about games you rarely care if they are free or not. When you talk about Tremulous you think of FPS and aliens, not about GPL and Open Source.

EvilZx's reasoning as he explained why to focus on free/open games seemed obvious to me: "for every commercial game that goes out, there's already 20 reviews and 100 blogs about it. people get paid to write these things, but we are just regular players." Dude, you nailed it. We are regular players. Some of us are hardcore enough that we will code our own game. Why not just support that? We all like "free", but it's even better when you are "free" to alter and enhance the games you play. We all aren't coders, but we are all gamers. As mentioned in our About Us page; why let corporations tell us what we should play? If we support free and open gaming we tell them what we list and they must listen. So we all end up as winners.

Today, we target our focus to a greater good. Our guns now aim to promote, share and support free and open source gaming (FOSG). Not Linux gaming, not Windows gaming, not Mac gaming. All free and open gaming - all platforms. Not all games are good, just like commercial games aren't all good either. At least FOSG games can be improved. But they need our help and support. Remember that people that code FOSG games are real hardcore gamers too. Let's take FOSG games to the next level, with the same passion we give to commercial ones.

To accomplish our mission we need:

• More news on free and open games and technologies.
• Complete our directory of games and list every free/open game that exists.
• Write blogs to give feedback to coders and teams that develop these games. We must be objective, complete and real. Propose solutions and trigger ideas.
• Post more screenshots and videos of FOSG games so people find them and realize that "damn that actually looks cool".
• Extend our invitation to other pro-FOSG websites and organizations for collaboration.
• We need a core website staff that helps users and guides them, without acting like cops.
• Mark off-topic/idiotic posts with Alert (anonymously), even if your friend posted it.

Now you know our mission. Now you know why we are here.

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