The night before last, Mrs. Sipwell and myself had a thorough discussion on Powersoccer. She is intrigued by the game – although not interested in football and let alone football games at all – and especially by its community. She also knows how much her “hubby” cares about the game and reflects with him some of the things he writes on this blog. That night however, she did not only comment on or substantiate an entry I wrote, she launched an idea herself. So here goes: the idea is all hers.
Introduce “Generations”
In real life, every person is a “member” of a so called Generation. I for one, together with Powdersnow (fortunately or unfortunately), am a member of Generation Y, also dubbed the Millennials. We are the children of the Baby Boom Generation and we tend to have two important traits: first, we are peer-oriented; second, we somewhat have the Peter Pan syndrome: we don’t want to grow up. We try as much as we can to delay the rites de passage of adulthood. Looking at both Powdersnow and myself, that makes a lot of sense. Both of us are very much community-focussed and consider that to be more important than our personal profit (I hardly play a game, yet am logged in at least 1,5 hours a day). The mere fact that we ARE playing a game… even if we are in our late twenties/early thirties… is enough proof for the Peter Pan syndrome, is it not (Powdersnow is also said to get 100 krona a day to buy candy in the store next to his office)?

Generations create a sense of belonging yet they are completely missing from the game even if the partner game Managerzone does have Generations (in the sense that they organize generation cups for people who started with the game in a specific season).
Why not create Generations in Powersoccer? When you create in account in a given month (or 2 months), you are dubbed Generation 1,2,3,4… It is a tag you get never to lose again. Everybody can see what generation you are (it is on the team page) and you can see what other people in your generation do: what level are they at now? How are their ranking points? O my, person X from our generation just won a cup or a league!
You could create Generations cups in which people can compete for the title “Best of my Generation”. There could be a Generation Forum, just like there are Clan Fora. And there could even be inter-generation competitions, just like there are fan zone competitions.

People want to feel part of something. People want a sense of belonging. People want to be able to say: “This is me! I am part of this.” A generation is a good start, is it not?