I don't think that was really their goal. They wanted to make a better question and answer platform. If I wanted to talk about video games in general, I wouldn't go to a Q&A site about video games to talk about them, I would go to a BBoard type of a community. They both have their audiences and both fit needs of different communities.

Joel talks a little about Bboards in his interview on Mixergy and talks about their vision with developing Stack overflow and stack exchange in the first place. http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/