On second thought, I think there's a symmetry to this misunderstanding. Warlight is like a bus stop.
For the players, it's more than a small indie game: it's a place. It's someplace where many of us have formed memories, created bonds, found communities, and shaped identities. What might be a simple bench to an outsider is to us a place with a deep story- and that's what a lot of this site is, deep stories like the lore of any clan (
https://bit.ly/fcc-history,
https://bit.ly/corp-history,
https://bit.ly/tlw-fanfic) or the history of Clan League or even the stories of individual games. Just like any other game- Warcraft, CoD, Halo, agar.io- it's a place that's made by its people. As humans, wherever we go, we write stories and create bonds with one another. We can't help it, and it's happened on this site. This I think explains the players' sense of ownership- when Fizzer reworks the clans or changes the features or even tweaks the color scheme of one map (#RememberGreenNorthAmericaOnSmallEarth), it's almost like a destruction of identity. It's like changing a little detail of a beloved bus station or messing with the schedule... it changes the meaning and future of something that has a lot of unseen significance to people.
For Fizzer, well, in this metaphor he's the bus station architect. To a passerby on the street, Warlight is one of millions of sites and as many indie games. It's perhaps unremarkable, a small corner. But to Fizzer, this bus station on the corner of Fairview and Mercer has been a decade and a half of his life. He's poured himself into it. Even little details on it are things that he had visions for, ideas of what it would grow up to become. The rounded steel corner of each handle on each bench looks just like an object but... to him, it's an extension of his identity too. When we request changes, we are asking him to rethink his vision, to change the story in his head of something that he's poured a large part of himself into.
No one will really admit it, because it's a little embarrassing, but this site is full of unseen significance and that's the natural cause of our conflict. Warlight means something to me. It means something else to you. It means another thing to Fizzer. And those meanings are important to us, enough for us to fight over them, enough for us to have a hard time letting go. From the outside, getting banned is just not being allowed anymore on one tiny game with many similar replacements (chess, for example). But in reality, leaving this site or seeing it change or even seeing one corner of it- like TSFH- go away... is losing friends and a part of yourself.
I think we, the people on the bus station, should cherish our memories but learn to let things change and to let the little details of the station go. It will become something else to someone else and to them the new station with its new route, which we felt so destructive, will hold the same meaning as the old ones did to us. Let the bus stop architect build his vision and ignore ours, because he's already been doing that for ages and we found a way to enjoy it- so will the people who come after us. He builds the station, we build the community meaning around it. Neither of us has much power over the other.
Edited 8/29/2022 20:33:38
