Giant Bomb Video Game News

Hello everyone, and thanks for being here. It's been an amazing few days here at Giant Bomb. When we launched the site early on Monday morning, we knew that a sizable chunk of people would really enjoy the site. But we had no idea that we'd attract this many of you this quickly. It's been amazing to watch you use the site in a variety of ways, and you're growing in numbers every moment.

We're getting a ton of submissions from you, from full-text changes to basic info to images. My favorite thing has been seeing all of the different crazy little niches that people are filling in. Sure, the big games get their share of edits, too, but seeing someone go hogwild on a Tetris Attack article or seeing someone fill in as many games with Fog of War in them as possible made us all realize that the ideas we've been building from for the last several months are actually viable and interesting.

Of course, the overwhelming response has led to some interesting issues. Actually, they're really good problems to have. So many of you are submitting things that it's been tough to keep up. We've brought on a handful of volunteer moderators to help with the load, and we'll probably find a few more over the next week or so. We also have some interesting plans in the works that will let all of you have a say in the content moderation process. More on that soon. Just know that we're doing what we can to keep up with you, and we won't stop improving until we're well within the 24-hour turnaround time for all submissions--that's our goal.

Let's talk about the forums a bit. I want Giant Bomb to be a respectable site. Something that we--the people that run the site and the people that use it--can be proud of. When I see people posting threads full of nearly naked women "because they can," it sort of makes me sad. The Internet is a big place, and 95 percent of it is already devoted to women in various states of undress. Let's all try to keep that sort of stuff off of our boards and continue to make this a web site that no one feels embarrassed by or ashamed of.

For the record, the other five percent of the Internet is devoted to online poker sites and Sean Connery screaming catch phrases on a loop. I'll leave it to you to decide where this site falls.

If we all pay attention to this and keep ourselves in check, we could actually manage to have a respectful community going on. If it goes nuts, we're going to have to go and develop a bunch of tools to prevent users from acting like a bunch of tools. I'd really rather maintain that open spirit that the site has right now for as long as we can. And yes, I know how crazy that actually sounds. But hey, so far, most of the posts have been just fine. So, for the most part, keep on enjoying yourselves and keep on doing what you're doing.

OK, I'll close with a few submission things to help get everyone on the right track. We have some ideas on how to make robots solve this problem for us in the future, but in the meantime, here are a few specific examples that should help guide most of your page submissions and writing.

- Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) is a Warcraft III mod. It is not a game and doesn't get its own game page. We have some good ideas for handling mods and add-on content that we'll be rolling out in the future, but in the meantime, DOTA info can live as a subsection of the WC3 page.

- Tagging Portal or Team Fortress 2 to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is incorrect. Both of those games were only released on consoles as part of The Orange Box. Only the PC received separate versions of these games.

-Games of the same franchise don't need to be attached to each other, only to their collective franchise. Don't attach Guitar Hero III to Guitar Hero: World Tour; just stick them on the Guitar Hero franchise page. However, Guitar Hero to Rock Band is cool. They're similar games, right?

-Characters only go with games they're featured in. Big Boss should not be attached to every single Metal Gear Solid game ever, only the ones he physically appears in (MGS3, Portable Ops, etc.). He's mentioned in 1 and 2, for instance, but he ain't actually rolling around in those games, so he doesn't go there.

- Be sure to use search before suggesting a new page. It's been funny, seeing people try to add games like Halo 2 or Assassin's Creed to the site. Trust us, we have both of those already, just try to look a little harder if you're running into trouble.

Minor stuff, I know, but hopefully all of this info will give you a little better idea about where we're at. Mostly, Brad, Vinny, Ryan, and myself are spending our days working on your submissions. As we start to catch up with the submissions, you can expect us to shift back into full-on fun mode, where we'll be making videos, reviewing and previewing games, busting out the weekly podcast on Tuesdays, and so on. But you and your submissions are important to us, and we feel like we'd be doing you a disservice if we weren't giving you our full attention in these early days.

Thanks a lot for visiting the site and I hope you find multiple reasons to join us on a regular basis.

Jeff Gerstmann

Giant Bomb