Bad accesibility of user-made games

There’s a tab “make your own games” that leads you to the user-made games. The problem is that only people who want to make their own games will see those games, while the others will leave the page.

Please make a diferent tab for “make your own games” and another for “user-made games”, thanks.

I remember when I first clicked make your own games, it was a pleasant surprise

Actually, If you click Make Your Own Games, Then Click The Highlighted Word Choicescript, it’ll lead you to the Intro.

OK, it was a surprise, but what if you had NOT clicked in that tab?

They have the same link in About Us, As Introductory Guide To The Choicescript Programming Language.

I hope you guys don’t mind me posting here.
I agree with Miguelinileugim.:open_mouth: It would be nice if they made the page for the user-made games easily accessible from the home page.

I think tons of people leave the CoG site never knowing the user-made games exist because of the poor interface.

I’m in complete agreement with those who feel that the tab taking people to the list of user-made games should be something more intuitive than “Make Your Own Games”. That’s downright misleading.

Yeah, i would have been here about a year ago other then a few months if i had clicked on that, but at the time i didnt want to create my own games i wanted to see other people‘s games, which made me surf the site but (ignorantly) not clicking the tab that led me to what i wanted

I think the main reasoning in this is they want people to play their games FIRST.
Not sure, though.

I agree with all this. With the old interface, both official and user-made ones were on the same page and labelled so. I understand that the reason is to distinguish between offical and user-made ones, and that putting them on the same page might give the wrong impression (how people can miss the labelling I don’t know but that has happened), but the casual visitor might not even know that there are user-made games based on reading the tabs alone. Personally when the interface was changed, I wondered where the user-made ones went until I clicked around.

If CoG won’t do what we think they should, we can still do what we can. We can spread the knowledge of the user-made games by posting direct links to the user-made games page from our blogs, social media posts, etc. With more and more links pointing to that page, it could start to show up in more relevant searches on search engine sites. Use words and phrases in your blogs and posts such as “interactive fiction,” “text adventure,” “online game”, “choose your adventure game,” “user made,” “user contributed,” “hosted games,” and so on. Have the link go directly to the user-made games page: http://www.choiceofgames.com/category/user-made-games/

If every member of this forum posted one link on a public site (one that the search engines index), that would significantly boost the visibility of user-made ChoiceScript games, especially if those links are surrounded by pertinent text, such as the words and phrases indicated above.

@Daisuke, I definitely don’t think that’s the case. Remember, CoG gets a cut from sales of hosted games, too (and these days, with most “official” games written by outside authors rather than CoG partners, they’re splitting that income too).

They do have an interest in separating high-quality games from average ones, which the distinction between “Our Games” and hosted games roughly approximates. (Though I’ll be the first to say that Zombie Exodus is at least the equal of any official game; in the past, I’ve suggested that they should do more to rank the hosted games by quality). But with that distinction made, the CoGsters don’t have any interest in keeping people away from the user-made games.

I suspect that at the website rejig, someone just thought that “Make Your Own Games” was a more exciting, attractive way of saying “User-Made Games” – which you have to admit doesn’t exactly have zing. I agree that it’s confusing in practice and should be changed next time they’re tweaking the site interface. The more people find the User-Made Games, the bigger the CoG ecosystem gets, which is better for everyone involved…