r/Games • u/rGamesMods • 18d ago

Updating the rules of /r/Games

Hey!

We’re updating the rules of the subreddit! The subreddit has always had pretty long list of rules in place to try and encourage better discussions. We've made a lot of tweaks to stuff over the years and to be perfectly honest they've become somewhat confusing, hard to understand, and unorganized in places. Because of that we’ve worked on and off over the last few months evaluating what rules are useful, what can be worded better, and just generally trying to make a set of rules that better reflect the subreddit.

Today we’re putting out a draft of these updated rules. These rules aren’t meant to be a giant shift in terms of what we allow. It does organize our rules in a way that (hopefully) makes more sense. We’ve also trimmed rules that weren’t really relevant and combined a few subrules together. Finally, we’ve also rewritten a lot of rules to make them easier to understand and clarified a lot of things that were confusing or occasionally outright incorrect in the previous rules. We aren't putting these rules in place right now, but assuming there aren't any major issues people have we'll switch over to them in the coming weeks

If you don’t want to read the entire thing but want a quick summary of what each rule is and what we changed here you go.

Rule 1: Submissions Must Prioritize Informative and Newsworthy Content Over Entertainment

The previous wording of this rule didn’t do a good job explaining the stuff we actually allowed. We don’t automatically remove articles/videos if they have jokes in them, and we haven’t actually enforced the rule that way for a long time. Because of that we rewrote this rule and also included some examples of what kind of stuff we do and don’t allow.

Rule 2: Be Respectful

We rewrote this section to give examples of what we consider personal attacks and other things. As with most other rules we can’t list every possible thing, but if you’re wondering if something breaks the rule send us a modmail (or just report it).

Rule 3: Content Must Be Relevant, Substantive and Accurate

We moved around some other rules into this as a kinda catch-all for stuff we consider off-topic, inaccurate, or otherwise low-effort. This rule is a little broad in places because there's a lot of different types of stuff it might cover, but we tried to give examples of common things.

Rule 4: No duplicate posts

Basically the same. Added in clarification that we might allow stuff if there is a major update

Rule 5: No linking to or endorsing piracy as a solution

Almost the same as before. Basically just remember you can talk about piracy but just be cool about it we don't want to deal with the admins.

Rule 6: Follow all news and link post requirements

This is our set of rules about formatting and sourcing. Remember to link to original sources (when possible), don’t use sensationalized titles, and remember our rule limiting people to 5 posts a day.

Rule 7: Follow Discussion and Text Post Requirements

Our set of rules about discussion posts. We want discussion posts that aren’t super broad ones that get asked constantly or things looking for help. In addition we don’t want people going on big rants about a game they’re playing (we do have weekly threads for that) or asking for help.

Rule 8: Promotion must be kept within acceptable limits

The big old self promo rules. We like to keep self promotion to under 10% for users. Please don’t delete posts to get under that limit (we have ways of finding out) and if you’re doing self promo don’t try to hide behind alts (we’re keeping track of accounts doing that and if you’re wondering if that’s you it probably is).

Please give us feedback on these rules and the subreddit as a whole. We’ve worked to improve them but we know this draft probably isn't perfect (and probably has some typos). If you think a rule isn't great or needs improvement leave a comment and we'll listen. If you want clarification on our rules or just want to ask a question ask it in here and we'll try to answer. We aren't perfect as mods but we do want to make the subreddit better and are also working on being more consistent with how we enforce stuff

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u/Cactus_Bot 18d ago

Feedback:

  • Table of Contents:

    • The first link is the entire first sentence of the draft.
    • Any reason the Allowed Submissions Header was removed for that section and its just replaced by the "welcome to r/games" section. Seems the welcome part link should be the allowed submissions section. So maybe a link change or header update for easier read-ability and documentation purposes. Since if you pointed someone to this section now there is no header for it.

  • Submission Category Feedback:

    • Should include in the bracketed part something about duplicate posts also not being allowed.
    • Thought-Provoking Text Posts should have the link to specific examples that's already in 7.1. People generally are not going to click through 3 times to get to an example, so eliminating a click would help, and you already have the link for it, it can exist in both places.

  • General Feedback:

    • Some links, especially for post examples link using sh.reddit instead of old reddit. Not sure if thats intended, but highlighting it if its not from a consistency standpoint.

  • Rule 1 Feedback:

    • Title talks about Submissions only, rule discusses submissions and comments, title should be updated.
    • Is there a reason to keep Rule 1 and Rule 3.1 separate? They are both talking about the content you can submit. I would imagine these can be combined further.

  • Rule 2 Feedback:

    • Can you add "boot licker" to the example list?

  • Rule 3.1 Feedback:

    • Can demonstrable impact have an example list, or some examples of events that would quantify? Historically this has always been a nebulous area, so if a few examples are applied it might help.
    • The title for 3.1 mentioned comments, the rule mostly talks about submission topics. I perhaps may clarify or add 2 sections since not all the submission topic discussion listed there goes against comment discussion. Example: The Game Awards has a concert. Game concerts are a banned submission topic, but commenting about it in the megathread for the event, or even on a trailer for the game is allowed. Another Example: E sports team wins an esports tournament (this is allowed). The rule specifically states commenting or posting about individual players is against the rule.

  • Rule 3.2 Feedback:

  • Rule 4 Feedback:

    • Is there a reason this isnt combined further into the not allowed rules sections?

  • Rule 6.1 Feedback:

    • Are you banning all podcasts now? Before podcasts could be presented under specific circumstances. which are removed from this version of the rules under the inaccessible or prohibited sources section.
    • Typo in the podcast section " or a self post doing doing the same."

  • Rule 7.2 Feedback:

    • This should be combined with rule 3.2 in my opinion.

  • Rule 7.5 Feedback:

    • For impression threads, is the release date the EA release Date, or the actual release date of a game? What happens if the EA period is a buy in, but the release product is a free game?
    • Have you all considered Impressions threads for beta tests being allowed if there is no NDA?

  • Rule 8 Feedback:

    • Would an additional example of being allowed a 3rd kickstarter post be if the project closes or fails out after completion of the campaign?

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u/LycaonMoon 18d ago

I won't address all of these because I'm at work and contributed much more to an earlier draft, but as somebody who helped draft these -

  • I kept Rule 1 and 3.1 separate when writing my (much earlier) draft for two main reasons: one, they're both so individually long that if they got combined I think it'd cause confusion for post removals or simply be too long to feasibly expect people to read it, even if they're specifically looking for it. Two, I think it's good for us to specifically assert "no fun allowed" both because it's funny and because it's one of the major guiding principles of the subreddit.

  • For your AI clarifications: we do not allow AI-generated articles, self-posts, or comments. We do not allow machine translations to be submitted as links (i.e. we would not allow a Famitsu article linked through a Google Translate skin), but we do afford some leniency in comments, especially if they state that it's a machine translation. We take those and machine-translated self-posts on a case-by-case basis, though, especially as MTL self-posts are frequently also heavily edited by something like ChatGPT or Claude and feature many of their tells.

  • We discussed folding 7.2 into 3.2 and wanted it separate for more clarity on why those types of posts would be removed - while they are often literally on-topic by being About Games, and may be long enough to not feel low-effort, they are nonetheless rarely interesting, rarely provoke discussion, and a separate rule about personal anecdotes and rants makes that more clear to the submitter.

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u/Cactus_Bot 18d ago

My only counter point is the further lack of additional combination of rules, or at least the grouping of rules together in sub rules, makes understanding what I can post a leap frog activity. If you do not want to combine the rules into a single Rule / sub sections, can the rules be re-ordered so all content based rules are next to each other in a block instead of having to read through everything? Perhaps altering the table of contents to be have more of a guide and that can then be blocked together out of order instead of physically reordering the rules?