A new Delphi forum for game professionals, the Game Professional Symposium (theGPS.org) will launch soon, according to forum manager Dave Wheeler of Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy stores in
The new forum will be retailer-moderated with an initial board of nine moderators:
- Jay Adan, Owner,
- Jeff Abramson, Co-Owner, Rainy Day Games, Aloha, OR
- Brian Guenther, Owner, Diversified Games,
- Gordon Lugauer, Board Game Barrister®, LLC,
- Linda Ross-Mansfield of Pendragon Games & Hobbies
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- Scott Thorne --owner and head janitor, Castle Perilous Games and Books,
- DeQuan Watson, Owner, Game Closet,
- Dan Yarrington - Managing Partner, Myriad Games,
In the future, the Board of Moderators will organize elections to these positions, according to the announcement.
There are also three advisory members of the board of moderators:
Mike Webb, distributor representative (
Heather Barnhorst, retailer emeritus
The new forum is “an independent, online community of professionals in the tabletop games industry,” according to the announcement, which “encourages the active participation of industry professionals from the entire industry including publishers, distributors, and press.”
Wheeler’s announcement characterized the types of discussion the forum was seeking as “open, active, and positive,” and noted that “it is not our intention to focus on
We asked Wheeler why he was establishing a new forum as an alternative to the GAMA-operated Games Industry Network, a
We asked Wheeler why he thought that wasn’t happening on the GIN forum. “A lot of publishers feel afraid to express themselves there,” he said. "It's not as genteel a place as I would like, and publishers want to get the benefit out of expressing their opinions there. We need a place that's more polite and respecting of everyone's ideas.”
Asked whether there had been efforts to get the GIN’s moderation policy to change, Wheeler said “We communicated with [GAMA Executive Director] John Ward but didn’t hear back and started to form GPS. We eventually heard back from GAMA, but things were under-way. We want to re-engage publishers in the discussion.”
We asked Ward if GAMA had any reaction to the formation of the new forum, and he said that he was allowing the new forum to promote itself on the GIN. “I talked with Dave Wheeler and he wanted to know if it was ok if they shared the press release on the GIN, and I told him that was fine,” Ward said. “We've got a good forum that we're continuing to have a lot of people sign up for, and some of the same moderators. The content of what we do is different from what they want to do. They're trying to do a retailer-based forum, and on our forum, it's all members of the industry. We're moderated by the community at large. As far as the board, it's a similar type of organizational structure.”
We asked Ward about whether there had been forum moderation issues that had caused problems. “GIN's moderation rules are posted, but probably need to have some enhancements,” Ward acknowledged. “When we talked about this with the [GAMA] board, the intent was to turn the moderation of the GIN over to the forum itself. We may not have done that as quickly as some wanted, but that was the intent.”
“There is now a board for the GIN and we’ll meet three times a year (at GAMA Trade Show, Origins, and Gen Con) and talk about semantics and make sure all the moderators are on the same page, discuss where we would migrate if there were ever a problem with Delphi, and any other issues.” Ward said.
Ward said that the GIN forum was a lively, growing community. “We have a very large number of people signing up every month,” he said.
The quality of any forum depends on the contribution of its members. The GPS has some important supporters, and the GIN has a significant track record and member base. It will be interesting to see if the GPS will carve out a role for itself, as the GIN once did after dissatisfaction arose with an earlier forum, the Game Industry Forum (GIF, see “GAMA Notes”).