The Art of Sims Storytelling

This seems like the best place to mention what is happening with our story threads in the new forum.  Because of how jumbled up and weird this forum is, I've been having a little trouble finding everyone again.  If anyone else wants to use this thread to tell us how to find your story threads in this chaotic mess, please do.

The old Seventeen & Maldusk thread actually did end up getting migrated to the new forum, even though I thought it wasn't supposed to meet the criteria without being nominated.  That's okay.  It doesn't have any of its pictures (not a big deal mostly since they were just teasers for the chapters, and the story is hosted on my own blog).  But once most of the bugs are worked out of this new system, I may see if I can re-link them just for old times sake (and because getting some familiar images back up has the same psychological effect for me as digging through all my moving boxes and hanging up my favorite posters on the bare walls of the apartment I just moved into).

Here's where the thread is: Seventeen & Maldusk: A Supernatural Soap Opera

I will use that thread to post updates on Season Two progress and to let readers know when (finally) I'm planning to start posting chapters again.  But when Season Two is ready to start, I will create a new thread for announcements and we'll go from there.

And just because I feel so drab without my banner:

Ta da!

I start with a warning, today I'm in a "cosmic pessimism" kind of mood, that today is directed against these new forums. Summarizing:

• The forums are hard to navigate and it's very easy to miss threads and posts I would be interested in reading. It too way to long to find again all the stories I was following, and the fact that the Creative Corner section is merging several formal sub-sections threads are getting submerged even quicker than they used to
• The whole forum is slow to load and full of glitches (it just logged me out when I was trying to finish this long post, and it's just the last example of a long list)
• The new "load more" layout makes it very tedious and confusing to navigate long threads and is painful to apply to SimLit, as it doesn't use chronological order and it doesn't get along well with long posts
• The threads in the "Questions & Feedback" section suggest that pages won't be implemented again
• The "load more" feature is glitchy too, and often cause the page to reload to the first post you were reading and start opening new messages all over again
• We don't have spoiler tags in replies (as far as I know), which makes it difficult both to hide long posts under a spoiler (like we used to do when posting many pictures or walls of text in stories updates), or also to hide the comments to new chapters to avoid spoiling other readers
• Custom avatars may be implemented on this template (if they ever decide to allow it), while I'm even less hopeful about the custom signatures we liked so much. The general mood kills the joy of any creative exploit! 

All this makes me wonder on the future of our hobby, which is to share and read SimLit. With this rhythm, I can imagine the activity/motivation to drop in the next few months, with less and less people continuing their stories and less and less people reading the new updates. This would really sadden me, I liked a lot the community on the old forum and I would find it very sad to notice people were quietly starting to move away.

Anyway, I'm not writing this long rant-ish post because I'm surrendering, I'm here because I want to continue with my hobby and I want to find new ideas and solutions to make the situation a bit less dire than it seems now. In this respect, the main points I'd like to discuss are:

• What do you think it's the most effective way to adapt this messy new platform to SimLit? Should we start some new thread were to post the updates to stories and legacies, start to advertise people saying to bookmark to our threads (it sounds so desperate, but...), should we start new reading circles, other ideas?
• Should we push to move more of the activity to external blogs (meaning, using the forum just to "advertise" the stories, and keeping ordered chapters and comments on blogs)? It's a bit sad, a lot of the community aspect is lost this way, yet it could also be less confusing than storing everything in here
• Should be consider an alternative (like another forum, AHQ (my first though about this forum was that even AHQ was better than this), discord (which I don't know at all), some social media (I used to have a sims Instagram, but I wasn't a fan of that community), or else)?

I'm quite in a brain-storming phase right now and willing to discuss any idea, what's your idea on the situation and on the possible solutions?

I'm here too, and only plan to interact with this one thread 😅
Snow from the original forum

have you ever turned your SimLit into audio versions? Would you listen to instead of read SimLit given the option? Any thoughts or moral support is appreciated 😅

Interesting question!  For my own simlit, no.  My simlit is not merely picture heavy, it actively uses the pictures to do a lot of the actual storytelling.  So it wouldn't work well as an audio book.  Could probably be a fun animated series, but I definitely don't have the time or skills for that.

For other simlit stories... depends a lot on the story.  Some are more visual, like mine, and wouldn't translate well into an audio format.  But there are others where the written narrative is really good and the pictures aren't such an important component, which would probably do quite well in audio format.

Personally, I love listening to audio books because I love being read to.  It's easier for me to get really absorbed in the story in a fully immersive way when I am listening rather than reading.   But a lot depends on the way it's read.  I have actually encountered readings of books I love that just fell very flat. 

In your case, it sounds like specific readers, perhaps people you know, are requesting this audio format.  I think that if it's something you want to do, go for it.  You will improve your skill in it as you do it more.  If you enjoy doing it, and they are happy that you are doing it for them, it would be 100% worth it.  But if you don't want to, I don't think you should feel obligated.  It's your story, and your time.

LizzielilyyA slideshow of screenshots with audio narrative is a really cool idea!  I haven't seen anyone take that approach with simlit.  I think that could work really well.

Anyway, I guess in terms of this thread: have you ever turned your SimLit into audio versions? Would you listen to instead of read SimLit given the option? Any thoughts or moral support is appreciated 😅

Lizzielilyy  (btw, how does mentioning users work, do I just need to write the name after @ ?), I'm probably not the target for this question, but I'll give it a go!

The reason why I say I'm probably not part of the target audience is that I'm not a native English speaker, and for me reading is generally easier than listening. For the same reason (even more so, I would say) I would never record myself reading my story, the "It's me, Mario!" effect would be too strong to take me seriously! 

Anyway, even if I would probably not listen to it personally, the concept is for sure very new. If I think of an audiobook, I think about being able to close my eyes and just listen to the record, but with SimLit I guess that the visual side cannot be excluded (otherwise the "Sim" part would be gone, and only the "Literature" part remains). If I imagined it, I would thus think about a video with static imagines with a voice recorded over it too. Curiously, most The Sims Machinima stories I saw were quite the opposite, they were using videos from the game and used subtitles for the dialogues. 

It also sounds like a lot of work, I would not know at all how to edit such a video file! However, if it sounds like a fun new way to make SimLit, go for it, try and see how it goes! 

@GlacierSnowGhost , I missed the Ion avatar so much! I'd like a lot to have his attitude right now, I'd probably still be confused, but probably less stressed about the change... 

And thanks MonaSolstraale (I hope I spelt it right, I still cannot copy text most of the time), refusing to use nested answers could indeed be a nice turnaround... 

@HermioneSims I think these are important questions you ask and Lizzielilyy  shared the same thoughts two days ago in her post "New Sims Forum Feedback" She was thinking about creating some kind of Forum on her own WordPress blog. I replied there that it is possible to create a free Forum on forumotion.com. The template is roughly as we know it from the old Forum. I know the template from the Danish Forum DK.Simlinger which we started when the Danish Sims Forum was shut down in 2018. I have included some links if you or others are curious.

You could start a forum called The Art of Sims Storytelling. First of all, it requires someone who has the time and energy to be responsible for that project. After that, it requires spreading the message. Since I am already a moderator on the Danish forum, I am probably a little semi-interested in having to stand behind a new forum.

Like you, I have probably lost confidence that the current Forum format will ever cover our needs. Forming new treads a new "Art of Sims Storytelling I think is useless. We will quickly end up in the same problems as here. Long threads without page numbers and answers in several layers. Is there interest in starting something outside EA auspices ? Maybe AHQ could be an alternative? In any case, the format is better than this.

I would suggest you copy your post (or significant parts of it) to Lizzielilyy Post which she shares under the Questions & Feedback on EA Forums' functionality. This is an important feedback in the flow of all other feedback. There are a lot of people right now who are reporting that they intend to leave this Forum. I think we could live with run-in problems if we believed that a good product would come out of it when it's over. Unfortunately, I don't believe in this template.

NB: I'm getting tired of myself writing this. I feel like I'm an old grumbler and nobody takes them seriously. I leave the lectern to others now. Keep your spirits up. 😇

In the long term, AHQ seems like the best place to go. It's still run by EA and, in contrast to this place, the posts there can actually be read. I've not yet returned to being active with the Sims, but I don't think things are dire yet.

Simmers are still here, so I want to continue giving feedback about how fundamentally unusable these forums are and give EA a little time to improve them. I obviously don't know what's going on internally, but some EA employees intended for these new forums to foster a community, know that the user experience here is currently atrocious/unacceptable, and want it to get better.

Honestly, I don't think the odds of this becoming an acceptable forum are great, because there appear to be some extremely hard-to-change issues with the chosen host/platform (ex. no pages), but I want to wait for a little bit (not months) and see.  They can still throw the whole thing out. 

Ironically, because the user experience here is so awful (the more I use this place, the more broken it seems), it also seems like the forums might fundamentally break under their own weight.

@MonaSolstraale, I agree that starting a new forum could indeed be an idea, and probably less hard to implement than people could think at first. There are many platforms allowing for free forums after all, the first one I think of is ProBoards, in Italy Forumfree is quite popular too (but I wouldn't suggest it because nowadays it's loaded with ads). 

I think that the main issue would be to find a person willing to manage the site and a few moderators. I've been a moderato on a small forum in Italian since 2017 (I think?), so at least I've some experience in managing sections and moving/editing posts around, so in principle I should know how to do. However, on the other hand, I don't have much free time from work, so moderating two forums at once could be a bit too much for me 😵 I have to think about it...

Also, I'll take a closer look at @Lizzielilyy thread after dinner, and add a few comments in there too.

As for the last sentence instead, I feel like a even more grumpy and annoying person being the one who started this kind of discussion! However, if the alternative is to sit and watch this place die out, I prefer to be the grumpy and annoying one instead. Sul sul, let's see if someone else had some other genial idea!