Community Organizer
I'd played card games before, both Hoyle-approved and Garfield-spawned, so when I saw their cards on the cafeteria table, I knew enough to walk up and ask - "what's that?"
"It's called Legend of the Five Rings. Ask Mateo, he likes to explain it to people."
This was in December 2003 in a noisy room at the community college. Mateo did explain, at length, and I wound up giving the game a try - and then giving it money and time and thought, lots of them. It was nice. The makers of Legend of the Five Rings were very good at pressing their audience's emotional buttons. I'd learn later that that aptitude was paired with shaky game-design skills, but in the moment, I thought - "hey, they know how to market this, I trust them to know how to make it good." Somehow, my lifelong distrust of marketing let that one slide. Maybe it was on vacation. Their game-design skills were so questionable that they once printed a card more broken than Yawgmoth's Will, notable both for absolutely dominating a tournament season before a fix was applied and for being a gratingly easy-to-avoid error that they failed to avoid because they weren't paying attention to the lessons of Magic design.
Importantly, though, that marketing did work. People got emotionally involved in L5R. Alderac/AEG, the game's makers, released short fiction frequently. They built a fully realized world with a compelling cast of characters. They embraced moral ambiguity. They rolled with it when their audience told them to write crazy things - that was one of the other things about L5R, the audience feedback. One of the standard prizes for winning a major tournament was getting to decide how some plot point would work. This led to some ridiculous things, but not very many - people were, again, emotionally attached to the game. It wasn't impossible to grief that shared world, but it was a lot harder because you had to win a tournament to mess with the whole world. By the time that they'd invested enough in the game to win something, people generally weren't interested in doing anything for the lulz.
L5R led me to the community of nerds that inhabited one corner of the college's cafeteria. Later it led me to the local comics shop and to several online fora. The cafeteria is physically gone now, the crowd at the comics shop has changed, and the forums have lost their appeal. During the time I was there, though, they were all my community, they were all parts of home. They gave me comfort and a crowd of like-minded people. I was introduced to the 4chan style of humor through one of the forums. When I'd established a community identity, it led to the first time anyone ever offered to pay me to write something - quickly followed by the first time that anyone ever failed to pay me for writing something. Those communities are how I met spiceworms and how I started loving the Internet again.
This brings me around to scans_daily and its death. It's a temporary death: I know it's already back in some ways, but it's also been transformed. This is a bit navel-gazing since I read the community without contributing much, but it makes me melancholy. What I'm melancholy for is not a person, but a point of view.
So this is to ask - tell me/us about a community that you used to belong to that's gone now.
"It's called Legend of the Five Rings. Ask Mateo, he likes to explain it to people."
This was in December 2003 in a noisy room at the community college. Mateo did explain, at length, and I wound up giving the game a try - and then giving it money and time and thought, lots of them. It was nice. The makers of Legend of the Five Rings were very good at pressing their audience's emotional buttons. I'd learn later that that aptitude was paired with shaky game-design skills, but in the moment, I thought - "hey, they know how to market this, I trust them to know how to make it good." Somehow, my lifelong distrust of marketing let that one slide. Maybe it was on vacation. Their game-design skills were so questionable that they once printed a card more broken than Yawgmoth's Will, notable both for absolutely dominating a tournament season before a fix was applied and for being a gratingly easy-to-avoid error that they failed to avoid because they weren't paying attention to the lessons of Magic design.
Importantly, though, that marketing did work. People got emotionally involved in L5R. Alderac/AEG, the game's makers, released short fiction frequently. They built a fully realized world with a compelling cast of characters. They embraced moral ambiguity. They rolled with it when their audience told them to write crazy things - that was one of the other things about L5R, the audience feedback. One of the standard prizes for winning a major tournament was getting to decide how some plot point would work. This led to some ridiculous things, but not very many - people were, again, emotionally attached to the game. It wasn't impossible to grief that shared world, but it was a lot harder because you had to win a tournament to mess with the whole world. By the time that they'd invested enough in the game to win something, people generally weren't interested in doing anything for the lulz.
L5R led me to the community of nerds that inhabited one corner of the college's cafeteria. Later it led me to the local comics shop and to several online fora. The cafeteria is physically gone now, the crowd at the comics shop has changed, and the forums have lost their appeal. During the time I was there, though, they were all my community, they were all parts of home. They gave me comfort and a crowd of like-minded people. I was introduced to the 4chan style of humor through one of the forums. When I'd established a community identity, it led to the first time anyone ever offered to pay me to write something - quickly followed by the first time that anyone ever failed to pay me for writing something. Those communities are how I met spiceworms and how I started loving the Internet again.
This brings me around to scans_daily and its death. It's a temporary death: I know it's already back in some ways, but it's also been transformed. This is a bit navel-gazing since I read the community without contributing much, but it makes me melancholy. What I'm melancholy for is not a person, but a point of view.
So this is to ask - tell me/us about a community that you used to belong to that's gone now.