communities, the killer app of the net
01:28 12/08/2004
Dear Reader,
still catching up, I’m afraid dear reader with old subjects that were meant to be dealt with many, many weeks ago. I have not yet resolved to truly make a start at writing, having many other things that have waited patiently to be finished, including this very site and so letters like this one are not given priority. Progress is being made on these many things though, in fact, I am very happy with the number of entries struck through on my “Summer To-Do List.” A few more things crossed out, and I will be left with very few projects, meaning only a handful and then I will turn my mind to writing. When I say writing, I mean forcing myself to write even when I don’t feel like it, a page a day minimum, and also to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Then I feel I will truly have started my journey down that road.
This however is not the subject of this letter. When the idea for this letter came to me, I was in a whirlpool of change, college was finishing up, exams were looming and the future approached. I was considering my past, things I had left or finished with, my present, things I was leaving and my future, things that were only just beginning. I think it is better now that some time has passed and with it the whirlpool, my thoughts on the subject of internet communities should be less frenzied and hopefully the better for it.
In a book that I read twice in my first two years of college, The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling, he describes the various communities that were involved with the events the book is about. For my purposes though the most important part was towards the end of the book he makes the point that the Internet’s most important facet is the communities that live within it. At the time it struck me as a most interesting idea, that the killer app of the internet, was not email, the web, e-commerce or some new buzz-word, it was the communities that existed in the newsgroups, mailing lists, forums and websites. I continue to find it fascinating and it remains for me very true. At the time, it wasn’t a mind-boggling idea, in fact it was obvious even with my little experience of the net, but it hadn’t occurred explicitly to me and so I remember with fondness the dawning of realisation of what a great proposition it was.
I can chart my time on the internet through the various communities that I have taken part in since I first began. Before the start of 1999, the internet was a seldom experience for me, at school or at my cousin’s house, but Christmas ’98 saw a new computer arrive in the house and with it a modem. The web had truly taken off, and the dot-com bubble was still intact, though in little over a year it would be burst. I slowly began to find my way around the internet and its subsidiaries, the web, IRC, FTP etc. By the start of 2000, a major event had taken place for me, Middle-earth Online had been discovered and before my very eyes, when I was just starting to get involved with the community, the game disappeared like a puff of smoke. This was the end of my first era in the internet.
My feelings towards Sierra, Havas Interactive and then Vivendi (before they combined with Universal) were no less than hatred and pure bitterness. They had cancelled what I still think would truly have been a great game, but it was too risky for the new suits and so it was cancelled along with several other projects. I have no true understanding of the reasons that went into their decision, but that’s what I believed at the time and I still believe it, if to a lesser extent, then again maybe they were that stupid. But out of a dark seed of bitterness and thirst for revenge, a beautiful flower would emerge. That flower was the community that came to live in the Middle-earth Vault Network message boards. A smaller contingent than what thrived there during the actual development of the game, still there existed a relative small group of people who hung on to the dream of a great game. That is what was discussed for the most part, what would go into a good rather than a bad Middle-earth Online. I would live on these boards for the best part of two years, laughing at the antics of Morthoron and Braldor as they did some dwarf bashing or elf bashing respectively, reading some of the gigantic story that a number of the community were writing in turns, planning imaginary missions on Vivendi’s headquarters with Riddler or engaging in idle drunken banter with Danner. Everybody who was a member of that community remembers with fondness those days, when a community fought for its own survival by ignoring the fact that the game they had been following was cancelled. I would move on though, as one does….
Whilst still a regular at the VN Boards, a message was posted advertising a project which had the lofty goal of creating a MEO like game using Neverwinter Nights. NWN was a game I had been watching with some interest, the news of the possibilities of creating your own modules with a supplied toolset was too good to not be interested by. So I had a look, said “Hello” and soon got the idea that I could create a website for the project. Within a few weeks, I had moved the project onto my matrix account, and was soon an important person in the project to the extent that within a few more months I was essentially running the project. Eventually I got round to making a website. Ardan Nights taught me a lot, more I think from the things I did wrong than from the success that we had, but that’s probably always the case. I had good times there and I had bad times there…really bad, when the stress and burden of responsibility got too much that I remember having to take a break after burning out. That never happened to such an extent after that experience, maybe it taught me to pace myself better or perhaps it was like a vaccination and I became immune. Throughout college, Ardan Nights was the community that I lived with, after first year, I had pretty much left the VN Boards, perhaps the appearance of a new development team and their swift departure, due to a court case, was the final death blow for that place, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was ever the same.
In any case life continued and I found myself in another community, for me perhaps the most interesting, and best example of a community on the web, since it was the one place where it felt like a real-life community, like a small town or village. That place is Shadowmarch, a venture of Tad Williams, where he self-published a book that he was writing even as he put out episodes. There was truly a sense of excitement around that place during the Summer of 2001 and even though I did my best to keep up with the speed of the place, after a trip to France I was in now way able to keep up. I continued to visit the place, got my subscription for the first year, though sadly Tad didn’t get enough subscriptions to truly make all his dreams come true, the first book was finished over the next year and eventually the subscription button would be closed for ever. The community lives on though and Shadowmarch is due to be published some time next year.
At this stage I am in the middle of college, I am no longer a regular at the VN Boards, indeed I am a seldom visitor to Shadowmarch, soon to forget the place completely, for this is the time when I am fully in charge of Ardan Nights. It becomes my sole community and I try to serve it as best I can. Many people have left, many people have arrived, the launch of NWN brings such an insurge of new people, we are getting several new members per day. It is a time of much stress and work, trying to manage this mammoth of an organisation. However, it still remains fun. Another year goes by, Ardan Nights is in another low patch from which it never truly recovers, I finally come through with a truly great website, but it is a little too late. The project picks up for another few months, but then slides again, within another year it is all but dead. That brings us pretty much up to the date, the past and the present. But what of the future?
Towards the end of my third year in college, a desire reawakened in me, for what reason I can’t remember, for adventure games. I dipped my toe into the community, investigating what the internet held for the adventure game devotee, a genre who’s death was long bemoaned. I was surprised to find a thriving community of independent and underground developers who were making games to entertain the fans who had long been starved for games to play. I looked at several of the development tools then available and saw at least one flaw in each of them and so slowly but surely the idea for RAGD was born. Eventually, it would become my Final Year Project, and though I kept an eye on a number of websites, I had yet to play one of these underground games, or post a message on one of the numerous adventure game boards. It wasn’t until I was writing the report for my FYP that I actually got involved with the community. By the time the exams had finished I had found my new home in a Crow’s Nest.
This new community of adventure game fans and developers is different from all the previous communities that I have been involved, as each was different from the other, but I truly feel at home there, unlike Shadowmarch, which while I love to visit and believe it is one of those truly special places, it just doesn’t quite fit like TCN does. When I first arrived there was relatively little activity in the place, the webmaster in fact brought my attention to the place by posting a message in several of the other bigger boards that he was considering closing the site and wondering what he should do with it. Luckily Trumgottist was persuaded by numerous people, including myself, that TCN was well worth running and suggested in what ways the site could be developed. I have done my best to try and get some sort of activity going there, by continuously posting messages and thinking of new discussions. I believe I have been successful, since I no longer am the obvious spammer, and there is plenty of discussion going on. This, at least for the time being is my new community and in fact my only real online one, for I said goodbye to an old friend.
Just before my exams started, I came to a decision about Ardan Nights, I realised that it was no longer fun, had not been fun for quite some time, that I was no longer really interested in the project and didn’t want the responsibility of it hanging over me any longer. It was a moment of clarity when I realised my days with AN where over and that I wanted to move on to adventure games. So I resigned from the position of project leader. It was an emotional moment as I wrote the message. I remember feeling a jumble of relief, sorrow, happiness and loss. A strange mixture causing my head to float as I paced my room. As it happens, it did not surprise a number of people who could see that I had been heading in that direction some time, which even I could see though I had held out against it for a long time out of a sense of duty.
With my resignation handed in, I returned to several of my older haunts, the Middle-earth VN Boards is a dead community, though ghosts of the past like myself continue to pass through, checking in and posting notes of fond remembrance for a time long since past. Shadowmarch continues to live on, perhaps not as frenetic as it once was, but it is still a lively, intelligent and friendly place. It is somewhere where I think I would be very happy, but yet I never seem to stay for long. Ardan Nights continues to tick, if slowly and with an irregular tock, its spirit probably lives on best in a project that grew out of it, Adventure of Middle-earth. All these communities that I have spent a lot of time in, some of them many years, all have provided me with friends, entertainment and lessons to be learned. I think it is the way for most communities on the internet to be born, grow, fade and then grow again. Perhaps some die altogether, but then again maybe they’re just in a period of hibernation. Maybe it is with that hope, that I stay on as caretaker of the Ardan Nights’ website and message boards. At least it is a low maintenance job.
What I have seen is that communities will grow in the least likely of places where there is no reason for them to survive and yet they do, because the members fight for their community’s survival. Communities sprout up anywhere and everywhere, all you need is somewhere for its members to communicate and some common interest from which to begin. Lastly, a community in the internet, rarely realises how large it is. They are so fragmented, that communities such as the adventure game community are spread out all over the internet in several various places. I am unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing…perhaps it is enough to know it is that way.
Regards,
The Writer.