[obit]

I was drawn towards the wiki because it fit naturally with the history of player-generated support for this particular game. Documentation, FAQ, strategy guides, maps- were all created (and subsequentially revised/updated) by the players, since the game started life in the mid- 80s. The wiki format allows our community to add to what has become a compendium of knowledge in a user-friendly manner, and saves new players from trudging through thousands of threads in our 15yr old usenet forum- just to figure out how to play a complex game that bears no resemblence to any classic style of MUD. In the past, we've kinda shrugged our shoulders at newbies and figured that if they aren't willing to take the time to learn and do a bit of research on their own, they probably wouldn't be an asset to the game, aside from a few easy points from killing them repeatedly until they move on. I'm trying to get away from that.

Perhaps a wiki doesn't have the aesthetic appeal of many of the gaming sites out there, but maybe it's a reflection of my own pragmatic (maybe even selfish?) views of how I want information displayed to me. I don't want to mislead new players by showing them an incredible looking graphic picture of a world that they won't visually see once they begin playing this (wtf?) all-text game. I'm going for a spartan, almost sterile 'feel' in the way info is displayed, while also trying to avoid making it seem like some cryptic README file that ships with a distro of an obscure UNIX program.

I agree with Mina that i need to work on the navigation aspects of the page, and I think I might add a module at the top left, rather than using the "see also" at the top of each article, which in turn, could be replaced by a clickable article-specific TOC ala wikipedia.

just some rambling thoughts
-obit