Cloud Chamber

While I haven't played it, I do believe most of the story is already written, and the resulting lack of impact on the game, or even reaction from the game - along with the up/down vote system - is quite discouraging, I feel.

I intend on giving it a whirl after the 10th, so will try to add more then.

 

I was actually going to post a thread on this and ask the same thing. From what I have seen it's more like a written story experienced through different media with a slightly annoiying 9gag chat build in, but I could be wrong of course.

 

I really couldn't have said it better myself

 

I've had my eye on Cloud Chamber for a few months now, and spent a fair chunk of the day poking at it... Bear in mind, these are still very much first impressions - I haven't made it very far in (although I believe it's possible to plow through something like 80% of the content with little to no interaction - a bit like lurking through an ARG with a fast forward button.... or watching TV)

Background
The premise is that the "game world" is actually a sort of 3D terrain metaphor used as the interface to a database made up of all the video footage, background research, notes, documentation, etc for a documentary that was being made on a series of experiments at the Petersen Institute - a high-end astro/bio/nano/quantum/whizzbang physics lab. Something terrible, wonderful, spooky, alien, tax-evasive, or otherwise world-changing happened/was discovered (involving a mysterious "signal" and, less mysteriously, a cloud chamber), and the lab director pulled the plug on the doc and tried to bury the story completely. So, in true ripped-from-the-headlines fashion, our fearless documentarian decides to leak it all. The catch being, the lab owns all the footage, so, naturally, the only way to tell the story to the public was to give everyone access to the raw materials via this huge elaborate 3D-worldy database thingy, with no explanation or guidance (err... yeah. I'm filing that with "receiving mission orders over twitter from a paramilitary group's press office" under "plot elements not to analyze too closely").

The "gameplay" largely involves zooming rollercoasterishly (real word!) between a (very) non-chronological collection of video/email/journal/news footage/etc nodes, along a linear overall path (there's much branching and reconnecting between nodes within the larger regions, but the ten regions themselves are strictly linear), and, along with everyone else at the same point in the database, discuss & try to figure out what the hell it actually means. Key to that is each node in the db having, essentially, a forum (or subreddit?) attached and dedicated to that bit of content.

Santiak's got a valid complaint with the story structure. While it seems strange to complain about any form of media having a concrete story that has already been written (I've been known to level the opposite charge against Lost & BSG), coming to a game like this from an ARG background really does make something about it feel... dead. Of course, there's also some justification for this, as there's a very strong post-mortem character to both the plot and system. Unlike most games, everything relevant to the plot has already happened - the goal has more to do with figuring out just what it was that happened, and understanding why.

Voting
As for the up/down voting, I can understand the objection, but also the need for it...

In an ARG, events progress in real-time - either you're around to participate when it's happening, or you aren't. You want to organize all the data in fixed, reliable points - sticky forum threads, wikis, shared docs. etc - so that anyone new who comes in can catch up as quickly as possible (and you don't want that list of Christie's auctions to be missed just because it's not getting hundreds of likes like the link to Templars Do The Dumbest Shit on YouTube). Moreover, you've got a largely self-policing community built around a solid core of veterans setting a (hopefully?) good example. In CC, that's reversed. The game begins with all the events already in the past, but with a constant stream of new players all starting, MMO-style, at the beginning area, and moving progressively deeper into the database. "Catching up" in the ARG sense would basically translate to "spoilers"

The idea behind the voting is, as I understand it, threefold:

1. In the absence of that stabilizing core in any given area, it reduces the staff needed for a moderation team, and provides at least a token ability for a loose & unfocused "community" to organically deal with something like a bored goonswarm.
2. Combined with a decay mechanism (which I'm still fuzzy on), this allows for a constant churn of conversation, letting new players (or players new to an area) feel like they can actually contribute something to the current conversation and have it seen, rather than a) being faced with a wall of ancient stickied topics where "the answers" have been enshrined long before, or b) having anything worthwhile just get lost in a months/years long stream of crap.
3. Gamification. Upvotes (and, I believe, mentions/quotes/replies to some degree) are the key to unlocking the extra content nodes (and, Steam being Steam, achievements). This one seems more like a desperate "how do we turn this into a 'game'?" move. Oh, did I mention there are leaderboards for this, too?

Of course, even with two solid points theoretically in their favor, the best laid plans tend to greet reality like a hamster greets a steamroller (spoiler: it ends better for the steamroller).



Interface

The interface is that steamroller. A terribly cramped cramped (no, that discussion panel can't be resized. nor can the video, except for toggling full screen) and crude (no text formatting, no paragraph breaks, no shift+arrows to select) steamroller that feels more like it's designed for blurting out passing thoughts than to encourage meaningful conversation - or bats-length posts. Also, I think that steamroller metaphor may have gotten away from me (I blame the hamsters). Having a separate forum for each little content node just seems to contribute to the problem (the conversational one, not the hamster one).

The other unfortunate feature of the interface is that, while there are plenty of quick flashes of things (the login video actually shows shots of 31 separate documents, none lasting a full two frames) the video player is pretty rudimentary, and offers no frame-by-frame options beyond "hit play and pause really fast" - although, being Quicktime (people still use that?), scrolling on the progress bar is actually quite responsive.

Mind you, nearly all my gripes with the game are interface-related. Basically, it has a whole mess of little things adding up to give the game a very cramped, stifling, and awkward feel... but few that should be too terribly difficult or time consuming to correct, if the will is there.


Content

Content-wise, on the other hand, everything I've seen has been very well done. The videos aren't going to be winning any Oscars, but they're solid indie-film-grade (and better than average for 'found footage'). The characters all have distinct enough voices - and the facts fit together well enough - that it's usually possibly to find an unlabeled scrap of someone's notebook and know who was writing it. It's too soon to know how well they can carry the plot, but it's clear that they were very careful with planning out their timeline & character histories in great detail, and knowing how everything had to interrelate - a good model to imitate, even if real ARGs need their present & future to be flexible.


Cloud Room 66 & The Situation Chamber

As far as comparisons to D66 & the Situation Room... they really don't compare. Painfully awkward interface aside (not that chatango was any joy), CC blows the Sit. Room away visually. It feels more interactive than either of the ARG interfaces, too (of course, it also works the GPU harder - my HD7950 is running around 40% at 60fps - so, not quite so accessible for low-spec machines)...

...But - and this is a big one - while it feels a whole lot more more interactive than the SR/Terminal Dashboard, there are really only three things to do: You can watch/read to the content at your current node, you can talk to other people about said content, or you can zoom over to another node. You're not going to be chatting about how excited you are about the upcoming group mission, because there won't be a group mission. No solo missions, either. No hacking, no steganographically hidden messages, no translating from morse code, binary, hexadecimal, or Latin (I did translate an obituary from Danish), no strange packages hidden on Alcatraz, no world to save, no cheerleaders to fail to save... As best I can tell, there are no puzzles whatsoever, beyond the abstract "what happened?" "why did they do X?" and "how do all these facts fit together?".

But... what is it?

Problems aside, I don't regret buying it. It's definitely an interesting project, and, as a workd of transmedia fiction, it seems very well done (whether it'll succeed on any level beyond that is going to depend entirely on the community - and it's too early to guess at that)... but, while there's really no better game genre to compare it to, I feel pretty secure in saying that, in any way that matters, Cloud Chamber is just not an ARG.

There will still be people drawing connections between TBW and CC and trying to compare the two - they're still too similar to avoid that - but, beyond both having deep stories and unusually discussion-heavy game mechanics, I'm actually a little surprised by just how different their genres really are.


-Bats
(would you believe that in high school I always had trouble with papers because I could never hit the minimum page length/word count?)
(would it be easier to believe that I may have just spent more time today writing about Cloud Chamber than playing it?)

 

I probably could've saved myself about 9000 words by saying that.

-Bats

 

I really appreciate the whole write-up and Cloud Situation Room analysis. I'm considering buying it, but this seems like something I'd enjoy more solo than the whole chat room experience, and that puts me off. It's interesting to hear that the presentation of the terrain UI made the experience more (enjoyable? complete?) and that seems like something that TBW could learn from, if they are able to spare the resources to create an interactive UI.

I'll expand on my solo vs multiplayer experience preference as it relates to TBW and CC: If I have the option to play solo, I will go as far as I can solo. Consider Dark Souls: I played the entire game in Hollow form, so no invasions and no friends helping me with bosses. In Dark Souls 2, I turned my internet off in order to avoid being forced into an invasion.

Cloud Chamber says that most of its content is available to people playing by themselves which leaves a certain amount of content 'behind a wall' to my semi-rational gaming preferences. I'm perfectly content to seek out answers and mysteries on forums at my pace and at my own liberty (would I know half as much as I know about Dark Souls without watching Vaati's videos? No.) But I don't want to have to filter through ridiculousness, trolling and internet egos in order to learn about the story, this is my primary concern about Cloud Chamber.

Bats can tell me better, could they have made this game without the chat feature? If so, I would have picked it up quickly as a solo game.

For TBW, the community is the primary experience, and story and puzzles are the cause of and the result of the community's actions. One could work on their own or in small groups, but the whole experience revolves around the community. That's where I draw a difference between CC and TBW

 

It's entirely possible to blow through from beginning to end without ever reading the forum/discussiony bits - you just miss out on unlocking some of the bonus nodes... but without the group speculation, it becomes more of a multi/transmedia TV series... or web series... or maybe a transmedia novel? but something more passive.

EDIT: I just took a look, and it appears that the first three regions of the game have about 5, 10, and 12 nodes, with 1, 1, and 2(I think?) respectively that require forum participation to unlock.

I don't know that I'd say it was necessarily any better or more complete (but do not underestimate the enjoyment potential of rollercoastery zooooom!), but it does manage to give it a much more interactive and immersive feeling that it would have otherwise. There's no real reason for all these snippets to be strewn around a topographical map with zoooom! tracks between them - the terrain is meaningless and has absolutely no relation to the content, except for a correlation between the altitude of a node and the significance of the information. Everything in the way of content and mechanics could just as well have been presented on the late 90s web (think Waxweb - if you ever saw it when it was working - with forums), but it would've come across as a big pile of pics & videos, or some weird experimental multimedia art project, instead of something that people agree is, at the very least, sort of, mostly, almost a game.

Logically, it shouldn't work - it's a inefficient and nonsensical navigation system that was randomly bolted on, and really is downright silly... but, in fact, it does give the more of a feeling of being inside some physical space with these raw fragments of whatever, instead of feeling like you're just flipping through a poorly organized gallery/library/box of this crap.

That doesn't mean it would necessarily work the same way for TBW, which really has very different demands - and a fancy UI done wrong can make for a far worse user experience than something rough and rudimentary that doesn't get in the way of the game. Just look at the Steam reviews for M:tG 2014 and see how many you can get through before you find someone fuming over the slow animated menus... or think back over some of the web sites you've used with all-Flash (or *shudder* all-Java) navigation.

That's not to say I don't think TBW could benefit from something like a spiffy Unity UI - that's the sort of eye candy that makes it a much easier sell to people who aren't quite sure about trying this whole 'Arrrgh' thing yet - but the Situation Room and Terminal Dashboard were never really the places I went looking for interactivity in the ARGs. They acted more as a delivery mechanism or vending machine - you push the right button, get it to dispense a task or puzzle, then (ghosthacky missions aside) usually take it elsewhere and tackle it on the forums, and irc, and google docs, and mural.ly, and with any of a hundred other on and offline tools. That sheer variety of possible puzzles - and even wider variety of possible approaches to solving them - makes it a considerable challenge to build UI that's more than a glorified vending machines and yet doesn't actually end up limiting the options (either for puzzles, or for solutions) instead. Also, the more elaborate the system, the more things there are to break, and the more people will find that, for one reason or another, their machine has trouble.

(now, maybe if the kickstarter goes into super-stretch territory you can get someone who's really ace at ergonomic UI design & hook them up with a flashy artist & unity dev to build the web/mobile front end, then someone big on old school linuxy modularity to put together a server back-end allowing for IRC clients to connect to chat, ssh into ghosthacky missions, and an open API custom user clients connecting to whatever other strange and wonderful services are coded in with all that leftover dev time...)

You sound a lot like me... I usually end up treating MMOs as single player games that just have lots of really obnoxious NPCs jumping around and yelling setting-inappropriate crap.

Yes and no... The forum system isn't integral to it in the way that a forum is usually integral to an ARG. The only role other people play in CC is to exchange ideas with - essentially like hitting a fan forum after watching the latest episode of a TV show with a really ambiguous plot... so in that sense, yeah, they could strip out the multiplayer (and the online) aspect of the game entirely, without changing anything more than completely unlocking that last bit of content.

There's only one thing I can think of that would be irreparably broken if they did that... and that's their ability to market it as a game. Content and navigation-wise, it would all be identical... but aside from clicking on the next node and going zooooom! to it, the only thing that can be loosely called "gameplay" is the discussion itself.

Actually, by that description they're largely the same, except that CC is missing the fixed puzzles/missions, with only the one vague and abstract goal of trying to understand the contents of the database. In that sense, the community is the game, with the focus being this collection of facts and media snippets. That's why I'd said in my original post that for it to succeed as anything more than a transmedia SF narrative would depend entirely on the community - I meant it in the most literal sense possible, because, outside of the narrative (and zoooom!), the community is all there is.


-Bats

 

I know I have said this before, but personally I am not a fan of hub based ARGs at all. To me it always feels a bit artificial. The thing is that the missions themselves are always a lot of fun, but what I have been asking myself is "do we need a hub like this to deliver a mission to the player?" Some of Funcom's early ARGs also used a hub (such as the Sanctuary of Secrets), but personally I am a much bigger fan of the ones that didn't (such as The Photo and They are Coming Back).

Hubs over-all just feel less organic and make you more aware that this is a game, which takes away from the over-all ARG experience and give a feeling that is closer to playing a game rather than experiencing something that is "real". A lot of it though comes down to the use of said hub. What is often done is having the hub being acknowledge in the lore by having it being created for the player by "Organisation X", but that doesn't really help. Over-all I am still a fan of the more free ARG experience with alternating websites and social media platforms.

But keeping that in mind, I actually like what I am seeing from the new hub. It seems to have a lot of useful tools and information that the community could really benefit from. With rooms, classes and missions and everything this is bound to become a very indepth game. I just hope that you guys don't become fully dependant on the hub and to be honest I am a bit scared that this is what will happen.

I did really like having a Division66 Twitter account and all the countless websites you created in previous ARGs though, you guys did a great job with that and I hope we see a lot more of that in the future!

 

That is a very good point. It is also one of the reasons why this particular ARG might be more beneficial of a hub than others. Normally speaking a raid wouldn't be anything that is even closely related to an ARG, but it would be a "Game" mechanic and not so much an Alternate Reality. Here it has a lot of potential to be really great though.

This I can relate to after making a few smaller ARG. It's hard to keep track of things and having all the information in one place is great for the devs. However like I said before I feel for the players it is more exciting to spread things out.

My biggest problem with hub design feeling a bit more artifical (other than not spreading out information and not really having to search for the "game" itself - which I personally feel is a huge part of an ARG) boils down to this:

With Divsion 66 we would go to this website every x hours where there is a timer and a set of mission (6 in this case). This shows several things: the amount of missions has been planned and they have been timed beforehand. If this would've been handled for example via the Twitter account: "A concoy is going from A to B in approx 10 hours from now" and then a call to go to the website at the aproriate time for the mission briefing that would feel a lot more natural.

It does however make it easier for people to catch up after the mission is completed which is advantage because I am often very busy IRL.

Sounds like a plan.
*magical moderation moving powers in t-minus 15 seconds.*

 

Copied related posts to a new thread - left old ones in as they still do hold some relevance to the Cloud Chamber discussion.

 

Before I get into this reply, I want to make something explicitly clear. I'm absolutely not arguing that TBW needs to have some sort of run-around-in-a-3D-world hub (I think that would be taking a major step away from the spirit of an ARG), or even that I think the hubs need any changes (whether hubs should be the focus at all is another debate entirely). I just want to clarify a few comments I made last night, and the narrow sense they were meant in.

No, actually I didn't say that at all... and no, (as I'll try to explain), I really can't.

Actually, that's just is (or at least a large part of it). You can move through it in 3D (and even though the nature of that movement is severely limited, the character of it is quite smooth). It's the difference between moving around (or around in) a sculpture and looking at a framed photo - it would take side-by-side video to compare the two, rather than side-by-side screenshots. I'll try to put up a clip of it later (I suspect, if people think I'm recommending it over the ARG interfaces, that my description has failed to fully capture all its flaws)

As for shaders, CC has a deliberately lo-fi/wireframey look to it (it's meant to evoke William Gibson's "you are inside a computer" rather The Matrix's "you are inside a computer") which looks downright crude when a screenshot is placed next to Gate 33... but being able to travel around within this (vaguely) plausible spacial visualization of the content gives a sense control and a sense of place, whereas when you encounter Gate 33, you're seeing something far more detailed, but as a flat image in a browser.

You're trying to compare the two environments as flat, static, screen shots, and then, based solely on aesthetics, you're trying to figure out how the HE UIs are lacking. You're confused because, in that context, they're not. Any one of them beats out CC hands-down.

Aside from that, the problem is that, like nikel, you're reading more into my statement than I actually wrote or intended. I never said that CC's interface was better than any of the ARG hubs, or better designed (in fact, I believe I actually described the very idea of the interface as being silly). I said specifically that it feels more interactive, and I meant precisely - and only - that (there's a reason I tend to use so damn many words in these things - it's so that I can say, with some exactitude, what I'm thinking. minus the odd obscenity and... oooo... beeeeer.... ).

I believe I already explained in the last post that the feeling was, to a large degree, illusory (just because you can look around doesn't really mean there's anything more you can do), but let me try to illustrate what I meant by being (or seeming) more interactive:

Which one of these two (hopefully familiar) screenshots shows the more interactive game?

HINT: It ain't Myst[*], although that's certainly the prettier of the two. Myst looks great in screen shots, but a collection of pretty screenshots is really all the game is - there's not a whole hell of a lot you can do, beyond poking at some buttons. Deus Ex, on the other hand, is, quite frankly, ugly... but it's a whole lot more interactive (again, be careful not to read too much into this analogy - it's only intended to illustrate a very narrow point regarding interactivity vs aesthetics in CC's terrain metaphor UI and the hubs within HE ARGs).

Actually I've always thought of the hubs being as very Myst-like. They're a beautiful looking way to interact with pseudo-physical puzzles... but they feel much like opening a browser to look at a picture with buttons on it.

The other thing I'm probably going to get called on if I don't clarify is that I said "visually, CC blows the Situation Room away." First, remember that the original Situation Room was, for the most part, a web page with a picture of a rack of TVs showing animated GIFs, a scrolling marquee, and a Chatango popup. While it made quite clever use of that setup and served its purpose well (and, more importantly, offered something almost universally accessible for a vast number of simultaneous users, regardless of hardware), it never set a very high bar for game visuals. Second - and probably worth more consideration - is that I wasn't referring only to the interface, but to the content. Their static documents are nothing terribly special (HE has made both prettier and uglier - and both more and less convincing - printed material, and HE's web sites are actual sites you visit, instead of just screenshots of sites), but the video work is another matter entirely. As I said last night, it's not going to win any film awards - for all their heavily hyped Game of Thrones/Quantum of Solace pedigree the acting and dialog are both on the campy (or at least distinctly video gamey) side, but in terms of indie films/web series, it really looks pretty good - especially the location shoots (vlogs are vlogs, and webcam footage will always look awkward).

I uploaded the 3min opening video, which is a good cross section (and even includes their flimsy justification for the whole "database leak" conceit)
http://bats.purp.org/CC/CC_StartupMovie.bin
It's Quicktime (VLC works just as well), and it's stockish footage until around :45.

-Bats
[*] actually I believe that's Riven (somewhere I still have the box, from the morning it launched - I think I took the day off) - but they're functionally the same.

 

I played Cloud Chamber and even have the director in my friend list since he likes my reviews ^^
The game is cool by his concept and ambitions, but it's very different from TBW since you can't write the story of cloud chamber and there's no class concept or roleplay of any kind. Yet, it is full of other qualities !

 

^ Anashel the interface is shown in there, the video starts with it and they show more at about 02:48

I'm often on Steam talking with Christian Fonnesbech and other creative directors, they truly work together with the players in order to improve. I also advertised The Black Watchmen a few times in the Cloud Chamber community and they were cool with that, several CC players mentioned they would look into TSW/TBW after that.

I would love to see you guys do a collaboration, according to Christian they want to create a season 2 for Cloud Chamber, perfect time for something cool http://steamcommunity.com/id/Gr3ylok feel free to add me Anashel, I could invite you to a chat with him if you have any interest in a collaboration or just discussing ARG in general, he's quite the laidback guy.

Anyhoo, I was asked to write a review for Metacritic and IMDB so that's what I did, votes be appreciated they'd love to see your review posted Bats, I'm sure of it.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Gr3ylok/recommended/290710
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur54590578
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cloud-chamber

Screenshots
http://steamcommunity.com/app/290710/screenshots spoilers yadayada

Review :

From the beginning Cloud Chamber has introduced me to a new form of gaming, it's an immersive play style that captivates its players into an intelligently designed world. The community as a whole is great, I doubt you will find many other communities that present themselves to be this "unified" and who have achieved so much in such a brief time.

The developers (Investigate North Aps) have expressed a keen interest in involving themselves within the community, to the benefit of improving the game, through integrating the thoughts and ideas of community members. I was surprised that the development team did work so effectively and efficiently in such a short time to overcome any quandaries that community members have faced and have already began to make improvements to Cloud Chamber.

The creative team behind all this is also very active within the community, answering questions, discussing improvements. I have found that they are not only working for the progress of the game, but also express an extremely friendly and dedicated passion towards the entirety of the community.
Investigate North have proven that they are not money orientated nor avaricious, I truly get the feeling that they want to please us in any way or form they can and believe me, they do.

The game can be slow or fast-paced, it can be tailored to your play style, and it's whatever you make it. For instance whenever I find a new clue, I'll drown myself into research about said clue, while others go through it at a much faster pace, you can play this game the way you like. That being said I find that the game urges me to play more and more as I progress, as with this type of game you would believe that it can become repetitive, however through every single event of playing Cloud Chamber, I have felt that the story has only pulled me in deeper and deeper.

Personally I stopped reading comments from other players, first I write my own speculations down and only after that I start reading what other players have to say. Which is often jawdropping due to the higher levels of intelligence I have witnessed within the community. I have witnessed that everyone has their own unique way of developing and concluding the ideas and evidence they have found from the events within Cloud Chamber, not only this, but I find that it is beneficial being able to compare and contrast my ideas with that of others, making the communal aspect of Cloud Chamber an integral but also distinctive part of the game.

This is not your average gaming experience, trolls, racism and swearing do not exist here, instead Cloud Chamber pertains to a much more mature audience, in which I can work together with people who also want to dedicate themselves to an enhanced gaming experience. That's something I rarely see in any type of game and it's what sets Cloud Chamber a universe apart(pun intended) from the rest.

In the end I'd like to suggest this game to any person that likes to think, re-think and think some more. Space enthusiasts, Indie lovers, sci-fi fans, fantasy geeks, daydreamers, philosophers and just most gamers in general are up for a treat with this little gem.

Storyline (so far) 9/10 (I'd love to give a 10, but there's always room for improvement in any game).
Graphics/Visuals 8/10 Original, never seen anything quite like it.
Audio 8/10 It's either your taste or it isn't, nonetheless it's great and really adds to the experience.
Community 9/10 As mentioned before, the community is one of the best I've ever encountered.
Innovation 10/10 For an Indie developer to take such "risk" shows balls, and it turned out they've put their money on the right bet.

As a last note, the game requires Quicktime (mentioned on the storepage) which many people didn't realize.

 

Agree, you and Chris should be partners.

 

I know A&S is working on an agent interface, there are elements in KS updates that point to answers for the topic I'm posting here. In this thread Anashel asked for feedback about Cloud Chamber. I started CC 2 days ago. I think their design of having self-curating forums attached to each node is brilliant. The geographic metaphor is just a pretty gimmick that shows paths between story elements.

I've been re-looking into Rosenberg, trying to find unresolved mysteries. One of my problems is "Did somebody already try this? What was the result?" A lot of the time they are questions I don't have the skills to answer myself. I really hope we can make the stretch goal of Replay Engine and it can be applied to active missions so agents can catch up.

At the moment we have forums, IRC and googledocs. I worry about scalability and curation. Many ideas that work get posted but some don't, sometimes we're left to guess how an agent discovered a link from A to B. Results of ideas that don't work are pretty scarce compared to the ideas we've tried and information evaluated without success. I suppose agents hesitate to post an idea that doesn't pan out, leaving lots of other agents to try the same thing.

I think something similar to CC's forum system would work well for us. A self-curating thread for each topic, narrowly defined topics created by agents as they appear during an investigation. Up/Down votes are a necessary part of self-curation. Player scores and awards based on up/down votes would be bad in our collaborative environment, but would be good feedback to A&S so just keep those hidden. Heck, maybe even allow posts to be anonymous so no agent need be afraid of their idea being judged silly. I'd also add the ability to search a topic's thread by keyword.

Now I'm rambling. Suffice to say I'm impressed by that one piece of CCs design.

 

i was thinking, maybe something similar to @MoPono's suggestion - for each mission could we have a seperate thread, with the first post updated every time a concrete breakthrough is found? this means people aren't constantly catching up, and also so we have a clear timeline of what happened when for people coming in later. personally, this would be very helpful right now, especially for people whose timezones aren't in their favour :'D

 

In CC i'm only doing four nodes every few days. There are 10 chapters and each chapter has bonus content that unlocks if other players thumb-up your post. I'm hoping the slow pace allows me to collect enough thumbs to get the bonus content while it is still relevant. This means I am obligated to post hoping to get some thumbs-up and that I thumb-up other people's posts when they do well.

IMO, on the scale of critical thinking skills, few CC players can even compare with TBW agents - often it is difficult to find a recent comment that deserves a thumb. So, all-in-all, the competitive thumbing each other is distracting. It seems like the point of bonus content is to get us all to thumb each other. (think whatever rude pun you like.) I think if they took the thumb scoring out of it and the bit about unlocks, and left it so the thumbs just help the good posts float to the top, everybody would benefit.