Dispatch from the Central Committee

You can think of "Central Committee" as being something equivalent to "Outgoing Mail"; it's where Manifesto's management and employees will post about our plans, our thoughts, and what's going on with the company.

In fact, what it really is, is a conglomeration of the blogs of admins on this site--so when Greg (costik), Johnny (DrJ), Bill (rockeater), Eleanor (RedEl), or James (neclimdul) have something to say, it'll show up here. (For the geeks among you, it's a Drupal "view".)

Why are we doing this?

Because we're taking a very different approach to business than most other companies. We started this company because we love games, and want to create a viable path to market for independently created games, free from the onerous constraints of the conventional channel. We want to help sustain the enormous ferment of creativity that is gaming's history and tradition even as big budgets and publisher conservatism tend to suppress them. We're on a mission, in other words.

And to succeed in that mission, we need to enlist your support, and the support of gamers everywhere. We think that's feasible because even though our tastes are surely not identical to yours, we have something fundamental in common: we love games. And we all want to see them prosper and thrive.

When you're dealing with a market consisting of enthusiasts, we believe the best thing you can do is enlist their enthusiasm. And you don't do that with the typical secretiveness and PR marketbabble to which corporations are normally prone.

You do it by speaking with an honest voice, and being as open and responsive to your customers as you possibly can.

I happen to know this works--or at least, know that it can work. When I was a teenager, back in the 70s, I worked for a board wargame publisher called SPI. They published a magazine called Strategy & Tactics, and in the back of every issue were several dozen questions. Some of them were demographic questions, but most asked you to rate recently published games, or articles in the magazine--or to rate a game idea, from one to nine, and dozens of game ideas were published in the feedback section every issue.

One of my first jobs, in fact, was keypunching all those feedback responses onto punch cards so they could be loaded into the IBM System/3 minicomputer and compiled.

SPI could almost always predict, with pretty fair accuracy, how well a game would sell on the basis of its feedback rating.

In addition, the company executives wrote a column in every issue of the magazine, called "Outgoing Mail." They'd talk about games in development--but also about business strategy, the company's finances, internal debates. Anything and everything. They were, in other words, dealing with an audience of enthusiasts, and adopted a policy of openness and honesty in talking with them.

The result was that SPI's fans were indeed fanatic. They probably never had more than 40,000 hard core customers, but those gamers loved SPI, and were enormously supportive.

Now--if you could make that happen in an era of snailmailed magazines and punch cards and primitive computers, how much easier could it be to make it happen in an world of instant communication, realtime response, and readily automated systems?

"Central Committee" is our "Outgoing Mail"--and the forums, which in keeping with our revolutionary theme we call "Voice of the Masses"--is our incoming mail. And yes, we will be reading, and sometimes posting there, too.

And we enable reader reviews on every title, and comments on every article. As the Cluetrain Manifesto said, "markets are conversations," and we want to embark on a long-lasting and, we hope, fascinating conversation with you.

Let us know what you think. We will be paying attention.