Hi fellow game enthusiasts. You may have noticed the new forum sticky. It's the beginning of an effort to make Maemo more of a gamer's paradise. But, it's not finished--not by a long shot: i need your help!

Here's the plan: to make the Games forum here a driver of new and improved gaming experience for the N900 (and in future Maemo devices). There's only so much a forum can do, but let's do it!

Consider this a mini-brainstorm specific just to the organization and management of this subforum.

The problems to address:

1. Maemo is new and small and has limited visibility and appeal to third-party developers.
2. It's difficult for enthusiastic community members of all skillsets to be involved
3. Knowing is half the battle. Collectively we know a lot, but it's not useful without order
4. Documentation is a problem in Maemo and user-friendliness is important in games

Any more that i missed? Share.

Proposed solutions:

1. Organize campaigns around popular games and game studios to promote commercial Maemo game development
2. Deputize volunteers to administer specific forum subprojects and encourage them to recruit and delegate tasks to others
3. Organize group knowledge to make it more useful: maintain a list of available, in development, and potential games for Maemo, and coordinate work on them. This can be in the wiki or in a thread here.
4. Provide and support "official" documentation for all games in Extras (bonus for games in Extras-Testing) by coordinating volunteers. Do the same for games under development, but with a focus on reporting issues and managing feature requests. Easy access to all pages will be through the lists maintained in 3. This can easily be incorporated into a more permanent Maemo documentation mechanism when one is available (there are some in Brainstorm).

We would obviously make use of existing facilities (wiki, talk, bugzilla, garage, extras repositories) as our tools.

So what do i need from you? First of all, refinements to these solutions or alternative solutions, and an idea of the degree of support for this concept. Second, volunteers to implement the solutions (mostly responsible people willing to make and maintain lists or documentation). I am a moderator of Games and also have a few game port projects that still need work. Everyone here has their time constraints and their skills. The proposed solutions can only be done right if done as a community.

Here are a few goals and likely outcomes i see from the above solutions:

• Faster arrival of quality commercial games as developers are made aware of the fanatical customer base of Maemo devices and given quality feedback and assistance
• More and better ports as each aspect of the process, from discovery to testing and documentation, is handled by organised volunteers
• Better awareness of the awesome gaming capabilities of Maemo, bringing more gamers to maemo and more interest from game developers
• A better experience for all gamers as they have quality documentation available
• More and better original games developed by community effort, giving Maemo its own great games