The Ancient Gaming Noob
Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?Wilhelm Arcturus
And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here? I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then. We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I st
17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead. And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case. As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time. There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day. I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere. Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist. Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going. A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates. Others are around, but on different mediums. Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive. Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter. They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky. You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following. I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!) Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games. We argued with each other. SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars. I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up. There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers. And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well. I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr. I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that. Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line. It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from. The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that. But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things. The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim. Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game. That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience. Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists. Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words? Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures? Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it. I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform. Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true. Zero readers might be too much quiet. But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined. For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis. Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one. That one is for another day… or maybe never.” Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written. The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed. Did I soften on this expansion or that release? Am I nostalgic for some title I panned? Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online. Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes. Was it really that bad? Did I miss something in it? Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly. My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture. Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust? Look at them all! Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants. We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

The Ancient Gaming Noob
Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations BlossomWilhelm Arcturus
So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have. -Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all. But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway. Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like t
3. Srpen 2024 v 15:15

Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations Blossom

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

3. Srpen 2024 v 15:15

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all. But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway. Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site. After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

Part I – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded. I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought! This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention. I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline. All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it. Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture. I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise. Those questions are:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again! There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how? That is very nebulous. I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up. Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie. Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing? I don’t know why. It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to ran dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons. It has the classic hallmarks. The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all… even themselves in the longer term. But when does business think about the long term these days?

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds. One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one. Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand. Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended. But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order. That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet. Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that. It was no big deal in the end. What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders. Everything had to be done at the local level. Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules? Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem. First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need? Too little and then Usenet is your destination. But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every month, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet. Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players. Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations? They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad. I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together. He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash. He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes. We used to call him the garbage nazi. That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything. I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone. Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends. Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online. I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching. But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

The Ancient Gaming Noob
Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations BlossomWilhelm Arcturus
So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have. -Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all. But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway. Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like t
3. Srpen 2024 v 15:15

Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations Blossom

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

3. Srpen 2024 v 15:15

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all. But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway. Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site. After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

Part I – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded. I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought! This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention. I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline. All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it. Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture. I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise. Those questions are:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again! There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how? That is very nebulous. I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up. Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie. Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing? I don’t know why. It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can before to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to run dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons. It has the classic hallmarks. The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all.

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds. One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one. Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand. Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended. But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order. That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet. Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that. It was no big deal in the end. What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders. Everything had to be done at the local level. Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules? Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem. First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need? Too little and then Usenet is your destination. But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every mont, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet. Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players. Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations? They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad. I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together. He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash. He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes. We used to call him the garbage nazi. That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything. I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone. Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends. Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online. I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching. But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

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