Open Uru’s Actual Affect on Community Divisions

Nalates · **Posted:** Thu May 27, 2010 5:17 pm

I’m a curious type. The speculation here runs off in some extreme directions, so I am often wondering what is likely to really happen. I find the things Myst fans are doing interesting and often reveal which speculations are close to the mark.

During the Uru Live’s closings my curiosity has matured and I reacted differently to the 2008 closing of Uru than I did to the 2004 closing. Whether that difference is from growing older or having been through the experience of losing Uru Live before… I’ve not decided. However, the admonishment that the end was coming, to find a home, and make a place may have had affected me too. It certainly divided the community.

That led me, and others, to find other virtual worlds in which to play, sort of a forced division of the community. That in turn also led me to an awareness of other groups of Uru Live and Myst game fans, sort of voluntary divisions. My experience had centered on the Uru Obsession and later Myst Online forums of fan communities, preferential divisions. Arriving in SL I found there were …subgroups… circles… clicks… whatever one calls the varied interests of fans than cause them to group together than had ever occurred to me might exist, more preferential divisions but well hidden. With many discoveries it was a surprised reaction on my part of, ‘Oh, well of course, how naive of me.’ For others the reaction was; ‘how did I miss that?’

Oddly I ended up living in one of the centers of a role play community we, or at least I, seldom hear about in the Uru forums, the Age and Country Hotel. (Full Age and Country Hotel Thread Listing) The A&C Hotel has a long and playful history. Starting December 4, 2003 KismetKat decided the Cavern needed an active pub with planned activities and a menu of yummies. That thread runs 725 pages to April 2006.
Part III of the posted story currently runs from January 2007 to May 2010, 178 forum pages of fan story like the Devokan fan story here. Yet, I knew nothing about the Hotel. The hotel has been around for almost a long as Uru. So, I think that is another large division in the community.

While many participate(d) in the Ubisoft forum for Myst games Myst Worlds and came from sites like Complete Chronicles (which is a nice intro for those unfamiliar with Uru Live) some percentage of them never made it to the Myst Online forums. I know some in the community have …less than loving… feelings toward Ubisoft and suspect some have avoided the forums there for those reasons (you can label that division). Whatever the reasons, some of us have not participated in the Ubisoft forums. So, in SL many of us were meeting up for the first time.

SL is where I met Jandia Writer. She and other fans from the Ubisoft side of the family built the Age & Country Hotel in SL, where I have a room, in a region formerly named Minkartah and now Minkarta. In Minkarta I was crossing a divide I had not known existed. I had no idea how much history the Hotel has.

On Monday nights at 6 PM SL Time they have Story Hour, which Jandai recently described as:

Jandia Writer wrote:

Come and sit by the fireplace and tell us a story, or listen as wondrous tales are told. The first part of Story Hour is as always the best of creative original works told by you, in voice or text chat. The last 40 minutes of the hour is devoted to telling a story called "The Eight-Man Austin" solely in voice - no text, no note cards. This is the final installment, with permission, of the next offering from a published author who is a friend of the A&C Hotel in its original forum form.

Earlier this year Jandai and friend Taimaru opened Crux Isle (SL region) a spin-off D’ni mystery and puzzle using a Cyan granted FCAL. While not directly related to the hotel, some of the same Myst-Uru fans are involved. I think this build is exemplary of what can be done with FCAL’s used in other platforms. It shows what a very Myst-Uru like puzzle can be in another platform and free, unrestained environment, somewhat like what open source will be.

The Hotel is about to undergo another change. Jandai writes this about it:

Jandai wrote:

With the closing of the Port Luskan medieval RP island, a new RP is coming to the A&C. Half a dozen or so of the islanders are about to escape their fate and land in this strange world. What will they make of modern conveniences (like toilets)? What trouble will they get themselves in? Will they ever solve the mysteries that haunt their past? When drow, gnomes, and dragons descend on the A&C, things may never be the same... See attached notecard for details on joining the new RP!

For many I suppose the idea of drow, gnomes, and dragons being added to the story is horrible. For many the experiment will be educational, fun, and funny. It will reveal what people do with such changes to the role play framework. So far everyone has written about how fun or destructive they think such changes would be to Uru and the story. But, those statements are opinion and conjecture. Here is the chance to see what actually happens.

I also think this it is a good example supporting vidroth’s ideas expressed here and moves some of his conjecture toward the realm of actually happening.

People are going to do strange and odd things with open source. In many ways I think SL, OpenSim, Blue Mars, and other virtual worlds offer some of the freedoms that open source will present and foreshadows how some things will happen in Open Uru. As vidroth pointed out, much if any of it is unlikely to have much effect on the majority of fans and the Cyan run shard. Those that are looking for fun will enjoy role play in the historic A&C Hotel and see it for what it is.

Whilyam · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 1:04 am **Posts:** 4134

The problem is content on the Cyan shard.
If Cyan takes the time to approve content, Cyan wastes its time. I'd be fine with this if Cyan were able to take the time to do this AND there were still more open areas where people's content can come out without the same canon guidelines.
If fans approve content, we see the resurrection of Liaison-type fights over real and perceived power.
If too little content gets approved, we will run into the issue Uru Live always has: not enough to keep people happy.
If "too much" (that is, too much non-canon or quasi-canon) content gets approved, people who look to the game for canon will fall away. We can get into debates here over how well Cyan itself maintained its canon (which seems to be a sticking point for some people who can't understand that an Cyan CAN write a story that breaks its own canon and thus degrades it).

In the end, the most likely scenario is that people will do whatever they want, whether in tandem or in spite of Cyan's wishes. Those areas will rise or fall on merit, with some ideas becoming popular and others remaining isolated. I think all the shard owners will need to be flexible in listening to what people want, including Cyan.

Zander_the_Heretic · **Joined:** Sun Mar 14, 2010 2:37 am **Posts:** 278

Ah, how well I remember the old A & C. We had some larks. (They used to wake me up at dawn every day whether I'd been to sleep or not.) I didn't follow the others into SL because I don't like the game so much, but I have fond recollections.

Thanks for the memory, Nalates.

BAD · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 2:10 am **Posts:** 372

I think it may be important to say up front here that the Age and Country Hotel was and is a fantasy role play where you can basically do anything you want as long as it doesn't step on other people's toes.

I was a part of the A&C for a while in the early days and found it to be tons of fun. I never saw the A&C as a part of Uru, rather that Uru was a part of the A&C. The A&C is far to expansive to be shackled to Uru, and I am elated to see that it still grows into new frontiers.

Nalates · **Posted:** Sat May 29, 2010 7:43 am

Bad, that is an interesting twist to how I was thinking of the A&C... Uru as a part of A&C Hotel... I think that is more accurate than my initial take.

The Hotel with mid-evil types arriving and Winterfell being a mid-evil era and both having Myst-Uru fans playing in them will be interesting.

Open Uru’s Actual Affect on Community Divisions

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