Building a Better Hobby: The DFG Community Project

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dark Future Games is changing and we are taking you with us. Old School here to ask you to join us in building a better Dark Future Games. We have always been kind of a commune of sorts, but it has been poorly represented here to the web. We want this to be a blog for other bloggers and for our readers as much as it is a place for us. The problem is that this format has always been a way to talk at people instead of with them. That has all changed as of today.


Helping the Community Serve Themselves

First, we are opening the blog and it's pages to fellow bloggers and forum-goers by helping people find your tutorials, reviews, guides and hobby articles whether they are on a blog -or even on a forum thread. We aren't going to do this through blogrolls alone, we are re-building the pages to be an archive for links to your material. This will allow the 60,000+ monthly DFG readers to find your stuff and your blog or thread! We will not publish whole articles, just a way for them to reach you through links.

Notice we have no ads. We aren't doing this for some profit, we are doing this for the community.

To add your links, all you have to do is either e-mail us at darkfuturegames@gmail.com with the subject line "Links for DFG" and include your links in the body of the e-mail. After a review, we will add your links to the page they best fit into, under the best category for them. I don't care how many you send or how old they are, as long as they are relevant and useful to people in our hobby.

We will also do community round ups that will include links based on the theme of that round up. The idea is to create a place where our audience can stop and find more stuff - thus promoting our hobby as a whole!

We would kindly ask that you help promote the archives on your blog or thread once you are included. It would be nice and would help more people get involved.

Having an Ongoing Conversation with our Authors Through our Face Book Group

We have also opened up a new Face Book group that is specifically designed to have a conversation with our readers and fellow authors and bloggers on any topic we want (we, being everybody). We will post ideas and talk about them, possibly take those ideas and develop posts and maybe even grab some good stuff and create guest author material. The idea is that hobbyists are really at their best when sharing ideas and DFG has always been about that exchange, now we will actually put that idea into practice.

If you are interested in joining the conversation, join our group!

Get on with It!

Look, what we really want is a more meaningful way to communicate. Blogs are great and the Dark Future Games blog isn't going away, rather, we want to improve it by actually interacting in a more meaningful way with our readers, helping people find their material and promoting the hobby - all while actually meeting people (even if it is just over the Internet) and finding out what they think, beyond just the random post comment on the blog! Think of it as crowd sourcing, think of it as networking - call it whatever you want, this is where we are heading.

Of course we will still provide you with our own content, brought to you by our authors. We love sharing that stuff too, but some stuff are better suited for a forum where we can openly talk about it. Then, maybe we can direct more people to the conversation via the blog, or maybe we can just post the best parts of it here.

Get Involved!

Look, I know how much hard work goes into posting and how many blogs or forum articles go unrecognized. I have been at this myself for a very long time. I'm not going to beg you to get involved, but I will hold out my hand to you. Help us build this community together.

Now that I have said my piece, if you are an author, please send your links from your blog or forum tutorials, reviews, how-to's ect. Help us get the word out about what we are doing and by all means join our Face Book group so we can meet you and join the conversation!