I've mentioned before in a few blog posts a sort of worldbuilding game, or coöperative worldbuilding project, I got involved with that was taking place on Discord (and which I keep saying one day I'll make a blog post about, which I still haven't done). What I don't think I mentioned before is that the project actually got its start on Reddit, in a post on the r/worldbuilding subreddit... and that that post was later deleted by the subreddit moderators, for supposedly violating the following rule:

Worldbuilding exercises or games that do not promote substantive discussion are not in line with our community's focus. For example, worldbuilding exercises must not encourage users to create small, insignificant content on the fly, or serve as impromptu collaboration projects.

Which struck me as... a bit odd, given that the post already had promoted what I would consider pretty substantive discussion; there were two hundred and seventy comments at the time the post was removed. But the r/worldbuilding moderators seem to have... kind of a high bar for the amount of actual description of a world that must be in a post for them to leave it up, and as fun and interesting as I thought the post was, I guess it didn't actually have much information about the world where it was set. I would of course much rather personally the post had not been deleted, but it's their subreddit; they set the rules; and if I would have done differently in their place... well, I'm not in their place, so that's moot. And anyway, by that time the original poster had created a Discord server for the project, and it continued there.

Then, a few days ago, it happened again. "It" being another post inviting reader participation that I thought was fun and interesting was deleted by the r/worldbuilding mods, with the same rationale.

All right, so as fun and interesting as I found that kind of post, and as much as I'd like to see more posts like that, apparently the subreddit mods didn't want that kind of content on their subreddit. So the obvious solution would be to create my own subreddit where that kind of post was welcome.

So I did. Introducing r/WorldbuildingGames. I was kind of surprised that name wasn't already taken.

(This actually happened two days ago, and I meant to make this blog post yesterday, but unfortunately I ended up unexpectedly working most of the day yesterday in a location where I had no phone signal or wifi connection and was unable to access the internet.)

While I was creating a new community on a social media site anyway, I figured I may as well go ahead and... create a new community I'd been considering on another social network. Tumblr last year introduced a new "communities" feature of its own, and I had already been invited (on the wizardposting account I'm still spending more time on than I should) into one community, The Wizards Council. But I hadn't seen any communities about worldbuilding. Probably they existed; I guess I hadn't actually looked hard; but I hadn't run across them. Maybe I should create one.

Well, there was already a community called "worldbuilding". Unsurprising, but okay; well, if a worldbuilding community already existed, I could just... join it. (Under my Wongery Tumblr account, of course, not my wizardposting accounts.) Except no, I couldn't, because it was an invite-only private community with only eighteen members and fourteen posts, the latest in February. What a waste of a perfectly good community name. Well, what if I added a hyphen? No, "world-building" was also already taken, and was an even bigger waste, an invite-only private community with only one member and zero posts. Ditto for "worldbuilders". Ah, but there was no community called "world-builders"... but that community name was not available for reasons Tumblr did not deign to specify.

I finally did create a public worldbuilding community called "Worldwrights", which also presently has one member (me) and zero posts... but unlike the aforementioned communities it is public and not invite-only, and I hope to grow it over time. How I'm going to do that, I'm not sure; I've always been very bad at self-promotion (witness the fact that the Wongery itself is still getting no interaction and as far as I know no visitors, which of course makes this blog post entirely pointless, like all these blog posts, but oh well), but... well, we'll see. The same is of course true of the r/WorldbuildingGames subreddit: it exists, sure, but how am I going to let people know about it and get people to join it? I don't know! (It didn't help that, as mentioned above, the day after I made the community I didn't have any internet access. Although frankly even if I had been able to get online that day I'm not sure what I would have done.)

It has not escaped my consideration that if those communities become popular, they may end up drawing some attention to the Wongery itself. (The Wongery subreddit is linked under "related communities" in the r/WorldbuildingGames subreddit.) But that's honestly not why I created them... and besides, that's a big if. If I don't know how to attract attention to the Wongery, it's not like I'm any more likely to be able to draw any attention to those communities either. Which means their creation was, I guess, fairly pointless... but then I feel like pretty much everything I do is pointless. My life is an exercise in pointlessness. But I guess I continue to harbor the faint, vain hope that somehow someday I'll actually... get somewhere with the Wongery and my other projects. Whatever. I don't know. We'll see.