A little while back, Jeff Atwood made a comment about how Gaming was seeding members of the community with new games to help encourage them to ask questions. I was initially skeptical of the idea, but having given it some thought I believe it's worth at least posting about. If for no other reason than to start getting some proactive and out-of-the-box ideas for generating new questions posted here.
The first potential issue this faces is simply finding good candidates for the program. Unlike video games, RPGs require a group of people to really play through. And unlike board games, they require a pretty hefty time commitment. I know I probably couldn't provide a very good ROI myself, and I'd imagine that many adult players are in my boat.
But I don't think that this is a show stopper. Surely there must be a few groups out there that would be interested in trying a new RPG every N months.
The next issue would be product selection. Even among publishers that are actively producing content, the new content is almost exclusively in the form of add-on products. Which are probably too niche individually to do anyone much good.
So we'd need some mechanism to select a game, and figure out the minimum number of books to get a good experience out of it (and possibly an exemplar published module). This would probably be a good way of focusing game-specific pushes (which I believe have been brought up in comments somewhere).
Are there some angles I'm missing here? Does anyone have any thoughts on Jeff's idea?