Fred VT (25949) on 6/29/2014 11:43 AM · Permalink · Report

Originally, I simply used MG to keep track of my own collection. More recently, I feel like it has grown as an extension of my own; it feels like MG is my collection now. :P

The reason I chose to use this one site rather than any other is that it keeps track of all the releases, with version differences shown in both descriptions and scans. Since all these are quality-controlled, and that we strive to always have more than a bare minimum, I think it is more worth posting here than in any game catalog. "This is X genre of game, developed by Y and published by Z" is NOT, the description any game deserves, especially all those obscure ones!

Indra was here (20752) on 6/29/2014 1:49 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Care is probably too strong a word, except for hardcore tech nerds here. My own personal reason is simply due to force of habit. Just wanted to browse classic games and noticed some missing information, so might as well. Nerd bragging rights, if you will.

Any games database needs a few hardcore long term contributors, like Sciere, Oleg, und Kabushi here, among others. Then there's the everyone else who fills in the gaps. I fall under that category. The reasons why people contribute and/or continue contributing? Based on memory from reading the forums for years, in no particular order:

• The need to complete information on a game one subjectively feels they have an emotional attachment to.
• Contribution points whore.
• Fetish for researching stuff e.g. developers, companies.
• Extreme boredom, lack of an actual life, or a place to get away from your insignificant other.
• Force of habit, due to being on this website for way too damn long, hence has developed an emotional attachment to it also.
• Sense of social responsibility in preserving the history of games. Though personally, I don't think they're aware of the real reasons (see aforementioned examples).

Or just Google the keywords 'why people contribute'.

Unicorn Lynx (181769) on 6/29/2014 4:19 PM · Permalink · Report

I'm a passionate knowledge-seeker when it comes to anything that interests me. I actually like systematic knowledge for its own sake, regardless of what it represents. Basically, I love most of what modern perverted materialist, success-based mentality contemptuously labels as "nerdy". I've compiled a full genealogy of Greek mythological characters at the age of 10, and I'm damn proud of it. So helping to catalogue something is quite a normal activity for me. I do it with games simply because it's a young medium and other areas that interest me don't need my research as much.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66423) on 6/29/2014 6:13 PM · Permalink · Report

The question for me was "why game history?" and the answer was: I had nostalgia and was surprised to find that the kinds of games I grew up playing and loving were no longer made, so were there any others like them that I missed and just what happened to them, anyhow?

The answers to these secondary questions hinged on things like comprehensive lists of games published, biographies of small (what Wikipedia might term "non-notable") companies and credits rolls (well what else did these people make at other companies perhaps?)

Then it's just a small step to "I'm the only person who remembers game x, I should document it so the next person with this nostalgia won't drive themselves nuts looking for information about it", then "here's the latest project by my childhood game design hero y, I should document it to provide more continuity to their cv on the site" and "here is an exciting new retro throwback to a commercially extinct genre I happen to love, if I document one of them perhaps other people will document more of them and I'll find out about them!"

It's a good place for people who love the nitty gritty details about games; despite the site's historical gross dysfunction, the culture is relatively non-toxic, shockingly international, and besides... it's always cool to see what the game you loved looked like on 25 different platforms.

chirinea (47507) on 6/29/2014 7:26 PM · Permalink · Report

When I discovered MobyGames I was amazed that any game I searched for, I would find here. Then I saw that one game I had, Silent Steel, wasn't on file. So I thought "well, this site has almost everything, why not adding it to the database"? After being initiated on the contributing process, it only seemed natural for me to add everything I had from Brazil that wasn't on the site, as I was one of the few Brazilian contributors around back then. I felt that the history of videogame wouldn't be complete if it didn't have everything from everywhere in the world, so I decided to do my little part, contributing things from my little corner.

But that's just how it started. MobyGames became an important part of my life. Here I found people from all around the world who I've got used to hang around and even develop some friendship. This is was probably my first social network, and still is one of the most important ones. Also, here I learned to write in English in an acceptable manner (and I'm still improving it everyday), and it helped me far beyond the scope of the site.

Nélio (1976) on 6/29/2014 11:23 PM · Permalink · Report

I like lists.

Seriously though (although I was being serious), my favorite aspect of MobyGames is the early video game history. I'm more into those earlier platforms and there's surprisingly very little information on the web about the games for those systems. You can find a few pages about the technical details of said platforms, but not so much about the games. Sure, there are some abandonware/ROM download sites, but they aren't really interested in documenting the games (or they do a terrible job at it). And everything is sparse.

That's been my focus as a contributor as well: filling in what's missing for those early platforms. And I wish MobyGames had more such systems in the database. In time...

vileyn0id_8088 (21040) on 6/30/2014 2:35 AM · Permalink · Report

Because I get pissed, time and time again, when I try to look up information about a game and get a big fat load of nothing, because the internet as a whole seems to have succumbed to notions of "notability" and other symptoms of the wikipedian popularity contest, and because search results these days are a fecal mix of sponsored links, dynamically-generated stub/placeholder pages, and content copied and farmed en-masse from equally useless websites.

Because I'd like to give something back to a place that's served me so well over the years, and I conveniently fall into both Rola's "Indiana Jones" and Oleg's "catalogue geek" camps. So when I first realized just how false my old assumption used to be (that if it ain't on Moby, it doesn't exist), I had to pick up the slack.

Because we live in a world that slobbers over the new and the throwaway, and discards knowledge of its past like so much dead weight. When it does look back, it does so through a distorted lens. MG has a good (and hopefully, still improving) set of tools for getting an accurate perspective of gaming history. Unlike, say, Wikipedia (again), whose idea of documenting the "reception" of a rock album from 1972 is to first cite some rubbish spewed by an allmusic.com reviewer 30+ years later.

Because our digital age directly endangers information - making it susceptible to bit-rot, link-rot and brain-rot, and I'm a preservationist at heart.

And because, well, what is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentations of their women, and document their terrible BBS-fodder text-mode games that they wrote when BASIC was hip 'til the cows come home.

'Struth.

Havoc Crow (29904) on 6/30/2014 6:49 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

Because I'm obsessed with putting stuff into lists and databases.

Because I'm a preservationist, always paranoid about seeing information and knowledge vanish, leaving behind only vague memories.

Because I think that every game, big and small, is part of gaming history, and every man's contribution to the video gaming world--whether it be a trend-setting game, a game that embodies a trend, or a complete outsider--is worth remembering. (WillyWombat's paragraph about games being an expression of your soul reads about right to me.)

Especially if there was a community, however small, around the game. This automatically means that the game was part of fond memories of many people, and is proportionally more worth writing about. (Now if only there was a MobyMods website...)

Because it gives me an excuse to show off obscure games that I liked, as well as fangames related to my favorite fandoms. :P

Because the moment I saw news items celebrating contributors who beat the 10,000 point threshold, I wanted to be featured in one of these :>

Tracy Poff (2095) on 6/30/2014 7:53 PM · Permalink · Report

Video games are a part of our culture, and I have a great interest in how culture develops: how 'good game design' has evolved over the years, how new techniques have come to be used in film, how the art in cartoons has changed, how storytelling in novels has changed. I think it's fascinating how decisions made in one game, one film, one cartoon, one novel, can influence others until practically all the work in a medium shows signs of it--and in other media, as well.

To be able to see these kinds of influences, we first have to know what exists. What we are doing here is the kind of basic historical research necessary to do more interesting things. For example, it's nice to know that Dungeon Chess existed and how it was played, but it'd be more interesting to know how chess games evolved over the years, or what the whole landscape of OS/2 games looked like, or what gaming was like in the early 90s. If all you want to know is about Dungeon Chess, you can probably just play the game, but if you want to know about more general things, you probably don't have the time to play (for example) every game released in the early 90s. If there are good, thorough, concise descriptions of games available, you can read those and get a good picture of things in much less time. And maybe you write about what you learn, and then someone who wants to know about the whole history of games can read about games in the early 90s, games in the late 90s, etc. So it's all a continuing process of building knowledge at varying levels of abstraction, to suit various purposes.

But that's all in general: that kind of argument applies to any medium. Games do present a particular challenge and opportunity. Games, especially, are poorly documented and in danger of being lost. An anecdote:

I recently added a game, Computerized Repeat by Harry N. Allen, released in 1988. It's a simple little game, not worth much, maybe. But, look at the google results for "computerized repeat" harry allen. Nothing. Nothing but MobyGames. In the quarter century since this game was released, not another human being has written about it in enough detail to connect the author with the game's correct title. The game could be lost. Or maybe another 25 years would pass without anyone documenting the game. Either way, this is work that someone ought to do, and there aren't a lot of people willing to expend the effort on something so 'trivial' as video games.

Why MobyGames in particular? Because I came across it, years ago, when I was young and impressionable. Because it was one of the first databases that would accept my work. Because the people here are knowledgeable and dedicated, and it's good to surround yourself with people like that--people who make you want to work harder and do better. Because we've accomplished a lot here, and I want to see us accomplish even more.

Havoc Crow (29904) on 7/17/2014 7:30 AM · Permalink · Report

This is a bit of an old thread, but I wanted to say one more thing that I've been thinking about recently.

This is about memory. Preserving information about that one game you played with your siblings as a child--it's like preserving a bit of your life, even if the game in question is another Breakout clone that influenced nothing. About telling the future generations that this or that game developer existed; that this or that niche community existed; that this or that trend and genre existed at one time. It's similar to preserving information about daily life: not map-changing wars, not world-twisting politics, but important history still.

Michel Jone on 8/8/2014 8:39 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

spam