It’s been a while since my previous post: Episode 2 in my Stack Exchange Challenge, on Programming. Work, a new table-top RPG experiment, a Twitter vs Voice Recognition experiment, some playing around with MVC 3, and a big-ass painting on our living room wall (see pica) were all keeping me from writing on my blog.
In addition, even though I’ve been mildly active on various SE sites, I didn’t have a real drive to dive deeply into one of them. However, I did experience one peculiar effect of the SE engine last month: you can earn badges while not being very active on a site anymore.
One of the sites stood out the most, awarding me a gold badge for asking a (now apparently) famous question. And that’s as good a trigger as any to grab some more writing experience, et voila: a blog post on Gaming.StackExchange!
Current Statistics
Again, like last two reviews, some of the current facts for the site:
| Fact | Gaming.SE |
|---|---|
| Questions | 18,629 |
| Questions with no upvoted answers | 845 (4.54%) |
| FAQ (questions with most links) | 4,573 |
| Top 3 questions | 156 votes, 130 votes, 112 votes |
| Questions active last hour | 8 |
| All-time rep for top 3 users | 75.6k, 34.6k, 31.6k |
| Meta questions | 1,240 |
With 18k questions about as big as Programming, examined in my previous blog post.
My Questions
At the time I write this I’ve asked a measly three questions. In my previous blogpost on Programming what held me back in asking questions was that I found it hard to ask “good subjective questions”. On Gaming there’s no such barrier, and as you can see in the FAQ they go for a totally different kind of questions here. What held me back in this case is just that on most games (the ones I play, at least) there’s already a ton of information to be found through Google search engines, rendering it useless to ask it again on SE. Of the three questions, these two were most interesting:
- Where to sell Dragon Bones and Scales on the great recent game Skyrim earned me the famous question badge.
- Change alias / nickname / callsign for Steam friends was a question I truly couldn’t find the answer for with my Google-fu, so was particularly glad (and still am!) to get a satisfying answer.
My Answers
Wups! Bad, bad community member. I haven’t written any answer yet. I came close once though.
Interesting Questions
Although I guess what gaming-questions are interesting depend heavily on what games you like, there are some questions that stand out if you have a look at the top questions:
- How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat? Okay the question isn’t all that interesting, but the title is great.
- The question What can I do with Dragon Bones and Scales? is the counterpart of my famous question (and has 10 times more votes).
- Is Minecraft Turing-Complete? Of course as an AI student this one has to be mentioned as noteworthy too.
Community Wiki
Not too many fun questions in this category at first sight, besides perhaps the Starcraft 2 skill improvement question.
Conclusion
The site is great for browsing through occasionally. It’s probably more fun if you go with the hype and by AAA titles the moment they come out. Surely the site will be flooded with Diablo 3 questions soon. Not intending to play D3 that will probably chase me away though, but perhaps that will push me to another SE site for my next SE challenge?
2 thoughts to “Episode 3: Gaming Stack Exchange Challenge”
Comments are closed.