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Rui, very good post!

Quality control goes into highly subjective debates indeed. And it goes against all that shaped RON in the glory years.
But we do have this current problem that RON is in a coma and several people in here have stated they feel RON has become too inaccessible. How I see it: it is the whole liberal nature that made it so. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy thing. You either have all the freedom in the world leading to all the chaos in the world, or you can have 'law and order', which would probably be the more accessible option now.

But yeah, some degree of the original freedom should still be given, I agree.

Thank you for using Defender as an example - it's my game after all! I can agree with you and confirm that I was indeed trying to uplift some of the lesser appreciated/some of the looser games by getting loads of references in, and installing some plot points that could be used to tie more together (the Surrealist). And I've been very vague about Davy's dead or alive status throughout the game on purpose, trying to make it both into a joke and into a mystery... by looking at his house, using the door of his house... and did any of you ever try using the x-ray eye on his grave?

I'm digressing. All what you're saying is true. But I'm just not sure at all if the past ways can be maintained while dealing with the accessibility problem, and if we want to ensure that RON won't be overflooded again with an overdose of bad stuff covering the good stuff - yes, very subjective, again, but there are quite some people who think there are too many bad games on the list, aren't there?

I actually wouldn't like to have a graphics standard installed. What I would like to have as a quality control feature is an obliged beta-testing rule (at least two testers). Something that would prevent games from being hardly playable the way Intergalactic Life was.

Although I said earlier that I'd be in favour of an 'AGS-only' rule, this is actually not what I would really want myself. It's what I think would be most beneficial in sense of resurrection.

I would like to keep all the games available. Okay, so I said a couple of times that I preferred the quizzes, the action games and the Tobias games removed... but I keep seeing these as special issues. I still can't see the point of the quizzes, I still think the action games/non AGS-games need to be taken to a separate folder, and I still think the Tobias games work better grouped together than as loose fodder throughout the pages.

Rui, your point of 'creators getting their own quality control in' actually is more pointing out the fact that creators are getting a canon control in. Games can become more canon when other games make use of them (the Jhon Steel example works very clear here). In this light it seems stupid to get three categories in but still it is probably the best idea to do so. Games could always be moved from one category to another. Perhaps if rules and regulations are installed like we are suggesting it now, Paranormal Investigation would end up in the 'other/collectors' folder indeed. But then Purity Of The Surf would have come out, possibly pulling the game with it to the canon folder. Or leaving it where it is... but then making use of a 'referenced games' tag...

In any case, I love the way you're thinking, the things you're saying... but I'm wondering if it isn't more idealism than the road to salvation...

Oh, I'm sorry Dan, apology accepted and here's one back from me! For a moment I was a bit unsure what you were trying to achieve; the two quoted comments went down a bit wrong with me.
It's good to hear from your perspective as well.

A lot of good points made by both of you, Ozzie & Anym.
Dan, although I though your first post contained some interesting comments I'm afraid you're starting to troll me out a bit here. Making stricter rules for attracting newbies is not a paradox at all (having a well maintained, solid system is more appealing than a chaotic mess). With comments such as "No for any RON Worshipping" and "you are failing while MMMania win" and "You're being overly negative while people here are simply having a good think tank discussion on how to keep something alive that more people may care about. So you don't care about RON's future... well we do, please leave us be.

Anyway. The 'games referenced' info could indeed be taken as Anym suggested. I was also thinking that instead of listing every single reference (such as my earlier post suggested), you could say that for some games you really need the basis given in another game (like the status of the mayor or the coming of Death), so instead of listing every single reference you could narrow it down to a need-to-know basis... although this may indeed prove to be a difficult task.

- better quality control before inclusion in the RON catalogue (fixing inconsistencies, checking playability; production quality might also play a role (MI5 Bob or The Spoons were unacceptable in my opinion))

This for sure! To me, the DasTobias games and the Underworld were unacceptable. One thing that led to the current state is the way how in the past, lots of poor quality games simply had to be accepted because they still adhered to the minor rules.
I agree with your '2.0' suggestions. This is how RON is to be kept alive after we hopefully get some life back in it. It's probably a good idea to have such a template ready on a revamped site, so people know what to expect from the future, see that it's going to be maintained, and can get a good frameset right away in order to make their own games! But not too jump ahead too fast, let's try to get the life back in first...

The reaching out should probably wait until the issues of the intimidating large amount of games in general and relatively large amount of games with questionable quality have been tackled, though, in order not to immediately scare away anybody who decies to check RON out.

I agree with this for a 100%!! I actually had my suggestion for getting the world more on the AGS site ready for a later discussion. BUT, the reason why I wrote about it now, is the problem of the quite dead RON forum. There are some people posting there but I think they're all posting here as well, and more people get involved here. More people are needed if we want to get a better voting system in. If we get one on the RON site now, we might have to use the votes of about five people as a basis. It's a problem.

I think everything can fit neatly into those categories, including non-AGS and non-adventure games which shouldn't be treated any different IMHO. I see no reason to treat games by a specific author any different either. If you want further granularity, then you should probably use tags in addition to the categories (non-adventure game, works as a standalone game, dream game,...) rather than have an intricate hierarchy of categories.

Well, would it be so intricate? Take the AGS game page and look at the different folders there. Non-adventure games are moved to a different folder there as well.
You may put five out of every eight games in the 'third folder' but that would make such an unorganised bulk again. If people start playing through that they still fall into an endless junkyard, is what I think.
Additional tags are neccesary anyway.
Hmm, well, maybe I was a bit too subjective & mean when I voted against the DT games, but earlier in this very thread people were already referencing them as clear examples of low quality products that only made for a more confusing world. The nature of these games is so unique, but they are similar to each other, which is why I thought - and still think - that they'd best be heaped together (so, about like it is with the current RON link on the AGS game page).

You could do it with three folders, have the essential stuff and the good stuff and then move all the other games with a certain low rating in the third folder. But I think it would be similar to sweeping the trash under the rug. It's still there and it's still a mess.

I always regarded the timeline more as a developers resource than as a playing guide and I always appreciated the all-inclusive approach, so I'm a bit skeptical about removing stuff from it.

Yeah, me too. I wouldn't want to remove stuff from a timeline (actually I'm an archaeologist so by nature I prefer to add to a timeline!). But how do you feel about having an all inclusive timeline as well as an extract with the really major events and need-to-know stuff?

Oh, and indeed, the Simpsons analogies don't work anymore.

Hi Rui,

Maybe. The thing is, what I would say: the openness of RON, the whole liberal idea of 'anything goes' (save for about three minor conditions) used to be the whole point, but also made for it's inevitable demise. I actually think we'd have a more durable RON-world should the main list (at least the 'canon'/'essentials' folder) become 'AGS only'.
You won't get the RON of 2002-2003 back but you'd have a more stable system. RON make II.
Removing the arcade games/quizzes all together is probably way too extreme (not to mention not so nice for their creators). It's of course also really nice to have a 'franchise' going on and see your fave characters in different presentations. But in any case, I think separation, like how non-adventure games have their own category on the AGS game page, is necessary if the huge game list is to be re-organised into something more accessible.

Dan, speaking for myself: I'd love to make another RON game! But I have other projects going on which I want to finish first and I can't see myself starting on any game within the forthcoming months. And should I ever start on one it may take more months to finish. But I love to share thoughts about how to keep the series alive, since I like the concept so much and think RON still has so much in it, and could still appeal to many people.

Good to read your thoughts, Ozzie, I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.

The problems I listed were what I, based on other posts in this thread, thought that people in general would see as the main inaccessibility issues. I also don't think that there are too many main characters, but it is indeed as you are saying; right now all characters are listed on the site's characters page.
(Let me quickly add that I've always liked the contents and presentation of the website myself, but I can see how newcomers might be put off by a list of about 90 characters)

Your 'canon / recommended / other' division is about what I opted for as well with 'essentials / good stuff / collectors'. Sometimes it's better indeed to choose 'canon' over quality. The very first game (Lunchtime of the Damned) and something like Reposessor are both very nice games but wouldn't top the list. Still, they're essential in shaping the RON-world so they should go in the main list for sure.
You understand my Star Wars analogy correctly (the Yahtzee comparison works much better!). If you would force an order going by what happened first and what happened later, it will take some time before 'the newcomer' reaches games like Purity of the Surf, the Melt & Drake triology or III Spy... most of the games of which I would say they make up the very best of RON.
What I now think is best is to have one extra piece of information with each game: a 'games referenced' list. What do you think?

I totally agree with you on the graphics point. It's just that some people were complaining about poor art in some games. But I guess the games that don't have much to offer in any department will be filtered out to the 'third category' anyway, and badly drawn games which are in one of the main categories will be there for a reason. So I don't think this will present much of a problem.

Well, maybe you're right with 'the more subfolders the messier'. I thought since people seem to have issues with the Davy Jones games, to have them separated (but of course still available), and to get a less messy 'others/collectors' folder by getting more stuff out of there that is just loosely connected to RON (the arcade game, at least the 'dream' games, ...). I was actually thinking of something like how Reality on the Norm is now featured on the AGS games page: simply one entry that links to all (=>the site). I'm still of that opinion but I can see your point here.

And okay, maybe not remove the arcade games and the quizzes all out. But these really do need to be separated from the bulk, as to not make more bulk where you'd still have to fish out the normal games. In my opinion, at least.

I'm all for a better voting system and then base a new presentation on that. One problem here is that there don't seem to be so many people hanging out on the RON forum these days.
Would it be possible, perhaps, to get ALL the games on the AGS game page? This was actually something I was thinking about for the 'step' of attracting attention. The current 'one entry that links to the site' isn't really the advertisement RON needs.
Speak of subfolders. Here you have "short games / medium length games / full length games / MAGS-games / non-adventure games / joke games / demos".
Would it be possible to get another folder there for RON-games? Have all games there? The voting system in here is pretty alright, at least it's way more reliable than the one on the RON-site.

Cheers,
Valentijn

Thanks for your viewpoints LUniqueDan.

I hadn't thought about the problem that some games won't run on WinXP. Does anybody know how about many games have this problem and which of the 'important'ones they are?

The Davy Jones thing seems to be a huge problem indeed, in terms of making the series inaccessible.

RON and the Simpsons/Springfield have always been similar in idea. They make for a good comparison. Are you trying to say that while the Simpsons are always consistent in art and design, RON's art varies between awful and alright? I could see that point. I can also see your points regarding narrowing the 'important' contents of RON down to a handful of characters, similar art and to ditch the complex timeline.
Those measures still seem a little too extreme for me.


I think the steps that should be taken in order to resurrect RON are these:

1. Make RON accessible.
2. Attract attention.
3. Govern RON so it won't fall back to its comatose state.

The remainder of this post I will focus on point 1, so not to become as complex as the RON timeline.

Besides my large post above I recently posted another long post on the RON forum with my ideas and viewpoints (http://ron.the-underdogs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3501#3501). I'll now try to get my main points through here along the lines of these steps.
I may also repeat some of what I said in my above post but I think it bears repeating within this organised scheme.


1. Make RON accessible

Problems:
-too many characters
-too much difference in quality of the many different games on the game pages
-too much difference in styles of the many different games on the game pages
-too much difference in graphics of the many different games on the game pages
-too complex timeline
-Davy Jones is dead and alive and both and neither

Solutions:
Filter the games. Get a list of main games. Get rid of games that won't really appeal to anybody. Separate specific categories. Narrow it down to a list of main, essential games that draw attention and make people want to make their own game.
The timeline is important. I suspect most people love continuity and getting things to fit within the frame. It's what keeps it all together. But while respecting the timeline, don't take it as a basis for getting an 'essential' game list: take into account that nobody would make anyone who has never seen Star Wars watch the Phantom Menace first in order to get into the movies (I mean, everybody would still start out with A New Hope right?).

I wouldn't have thought that Davy Jones' death would present such a problem. There's one really vague game with a unique style wherein he dies (Davy Jones C'est Mort). There's a non-interactive thing which tries to make more sense of it than the notice of Davy being sexually molested to death by a man in a cow suit (the Universal Equaliser). And there's a -quite nice (in my opinion)- game which brings Davy back in a very clear way (Davy Jones Is Back). I don't think it should be so hard to follow but apparently people have issues with the series, perhaps because of the controversial first game (featuring a rather disturbing rape scene)?
My solution would be: separate these games and put them into a subfolder, giving an explanation of the history of the games next to it.

So how should the games be separated? There should be an essentials list with the best of the best. HOW to compile this list should be collective thoughts for later, I would first like to know if others agree with my ideas or not.
Similar to the essentials list, there should be another page with 'the good stuff', featuring all games which are just nice to play but you wouldn't miss out on too much (save for the occasional odd character development) if you'd decide to skip them.
Then there is a bulk of games that are considered to be of lesser quality. All should be heaped in another folder: collectors only.
An obvious way to decide which games go where is to make a rating system or voting system, or maybe go by their current ratings on the RON page although those may be not too reliable (says the guy whose game ranks on the third spot...) Food for later!

Please get rid of the arcade games and the quizzes. They don't contribute anything to the series other than making it a haphazard inaccessible mess. A quiz can be made in HTML. Who would care to download an AGS quiz featuring five questions that you either know if you played the relevant game or don't know if you didn't? What's the point of having a paratroopers game supposedly connected to RON because it's said to be one of the characters' dream?!

Demos should be removed. You see a demo, the first thing it tells you is that it's not finished. That equals inaccessibility, especially since the real games of the couple of demos featured were never finished.

The text parser games could go under another folder: 'non-AGS' games. But it should then be a subfolder of the 'collectors only' folder as that is what they would have been anyway.

My ideal RON game page would be:
(based on some sort of rating system)
-essentials
-good stuff
-collectors only / optionally with subfolders for Non-AGS, Non-Adventure, Das Tobi-as' games
-the Davy Jones debacle (<= possibly a subfolder of any of the above, maybe even within essentials!)

You may notice I'd like to separate the 'Tobi-as' games. This is partly because of subjective, personal dislike of his games but also because I think the unique style, pretentious 'surrealism' (is it, really?), crude graphics, nonsensical puzzles, poor dialogue and most of all lack of critical beta-testing makes these games very inaccessible, and the large amount of DT-games is, at least in my humble personal opinon, one huge factor of the overall RON-inaccessibility. I may be a bit too harsh on the poor guy, I wouldn't like to offend him personally or incite a nasty argument here or a personal attack or anything - I really don't blame him, the lack of rules and (acceptance) standards are what 'killed' RON and it simply had to happen.
My point is that these games are so 'unique' that they shouldn't clog up any of the main folders but get their own space. They probably have their target audience and fans, somewhere. This is just how I feel, I'd be interested in other opinions.

Speaking of other opinions, I'd love to hear what people think of the points I made above.
Do people agree that my 'three steps' are the issues needed to be adressed to save RON?
If so, let's first discuss the accessiblity issue. Do people agree with my folder division idea? If not, please tell me why and share your own ideas; what would make up an accessible RON game list in your opinion and why?
Who is going to take control of the situation? Renegade Implementor, you are the guy behind the RON site, right? How do you feel about revamping the website?

Keep the discussion alive, we might save a town!
Thank you all for thinking!

Hi all,

I'm Valentijn, the guy behind 'Defender of Ron'. It's the only game I ever made and I've been quiet ever since. But I've been lurking on the RON forum ever since, and read about this discussion going on here.

It's really great already that people are thinking about how to revitalize RON! (Personally I'm also really happy to read several people mentioning my game as one of the better ones!!)

I've always loved the whole idea behind RON and in fact I do intend to get back to it one time. I have many ideas for an epic game called 'Lord of the RON' (now what could that be about?). While never actually getting around to start on it, I also sadly noticed the RON-world dying out. I enjoyed the occasional small game but in my opinion, the last really really good game (one of the best even) was III Spy, released in September 2003.
From about a year up until that point and still around the same time the RON site got massively overflooded with very meagre games. I think the-one-person-nobody-actually-mentions-not-to-be-offensive-while-everbody-knows-who-we-mean-anyway sort of killed RON by releasing an overload of games under the pretentious banner of them being 'surrealistic', while those games were -in my humble opinion- really nothing but heaps of pointless empty childish digital manure, quite possibly mainly flawed because of a lack of beta-testing. And also because of a lack of standards.

I recall that whenever somebody raised an argument about quality standards back then, they instantly got the argument back that RON was RON because it was so liberal and it had to have as little standards as possible. That whole idea always put me off a little. And the world got inaccessible indeed exactly because of it.
Personally I have issues with the 'no killing established characters' rule as well: if you could do that you could make games more surprising and thrilling, while you can also use the death of one character to develop another character, but I do understand what made people set this rule and I can see how out of hand things can go without it.
Although, problems are easily fixed if some sort of quality committee is formed. One might put question marks to the justification of who such a committee's members would be, but why not get some sort of election together? It may be necessary. If the presentation of the RON games gets a revamp, it may benefit from people in charge.

And I do think a revamp of the site is a great idea. Getting different categories together and putting the trash out seems to be exactly the thing to be done.

I think categories should be:
-essentials: canon games, games that develop major characters and games considered by many to be the best of the series (Dave Gilbert's games, Creed Malay's games etc)
-quality stand alone games: games which don't do anything for the timeline or major characters but still are of high quality (maybe Grundislav's excellent 'the Chef'?)
-non-adventure games (which could even be removed as far as I'm concerned...)
-collectors only
(Sorting games simply on length won't work. You can have crap long games as well as magnificent short games. A quality division is needed above anything.)

...and of course, there you'll easily get to the questions of who decides what's good. This can be solved easily by getting a good working voting system together, although I'm all up for combining it with giving a group of people some authority. Those people should also check any upcoming RON games to see which category they'll fall under, and perhaps also to check if they can be accepted at all in the series.
Why the latter? Because there have been games like the original 'Intergalactic Life'. It's a text parser game made with poor grasp on the English language, I think it wasn't beta-tested, and many people said it was hardly playable when it came out. But the creator thought of it as being finished and the non-existant acceptance bar made it possible for the game to be incorporated in the RON game list. This is exactly what you shouldn't to if you want to keep the series accessible.

So apart from the re-categorization of games, and having the RON-world governed, I think there should be a reconsideration of rules. The liberal idea of allowing anything that has something to do with RON as long as it doesn't kill of established characters and it doesn't reveal the bum's identity... it simply doesn't work. More rules are needed.

My two cents at the moment. Thanks to everybody again for thinking about it; keeping RON alive is a noble goal! I'll keep following this discussion!