The Wongery

So, I seem to have been posting a lot about social media lately (well, my last two posts were about social media, but given how much I have(n't) been posting, I guess "a lot" is relative), and against my better judgment (such as it is) I'm going to continue that trend.

I mentioned two weeks ago that I had created a Tumblr account for the Wongery; what I didn't mention (but maybe should have?) was that I had in fact several weeks prior created a Discord server for the Wongery as well. This too was something I had sort of planned to do at some point; what precipitated it was that I wanted to ask some questions of the creator of the open-source Strike Engine card game, and the easiest way to do that seemed to be to join the Strike Engine Discord, and to do that I had to create an account for myself first. (That is, an account for "Clay Salvage"; I already did have a Discord account under another name—not that I used it much—but I didn't want to use that account because... actually, let me table that for a moment.)

As for why I wanted to ask the creator of Strike Engine questions (as Clay Salvage)... well to answer that, let me engage in a multiparagraph digression with no direct relation to the purported main topic of this blog post. As is my wont.

So, I've mentioned in a few past blog posts my resolution to not only have RPG stats for Wongery material, but also cards for open-licensed customizable card games. At the time I decided this, I didn't actually know of any open-source CCGs, but I figured it was likely that some existed—and sure enough, I did find a few with a web search, though perhaps not as many as I'd expected. In the first blog post where I went over this, I'd said that most likely the first open CCG I'd add cards for in the Wongery was Arcmage, this being "the only one [​I found] that seems to both be in a finished and playable state and still be under active development."

But my plans have changed since then, and now I think not only that Arcmage won't be the first game we support, but that we probably won't be including cards for Arcmage at all. Not—as I said in a more recent blog post—because it would be hard to do given "the very world-specific nature of the five factions". Rather, because of an underlying issue of which I think that's a symptom. Namely, on reflection I'm not sure the Arcmage developers intend for other people to create cards for the game. (Certainly they don't expect people to create cards associated with other settings, hence the specificity of the factions.) The open license of Arcmage does permit anyone to create Arcmage cards, but I get the impression that's something of an unintended side effect; the Arcmage developers put it under an open license to make it easy for people to print out the cards themselves and use them without requiring special permissions, not because they were hoping for people to make their own card sets based on their rules. I've seen nothing on the Arcmage site encouraging outside development of cards, and all the card sets posted on the site were created with the Arcmage developers' involvement. (Of course, if that was their intent, they could have used a No Derivatives license, but that may have had other unintended consequences.)

Again, given the licensing terms, I still could legally create cards for Arcmage set on Wongery worlds (working around the world-specific nature of the factions would be a challenge, but not necessarily an insurmountable one)—but the developers seem to intend for Arcmage to be an in-house thing and focused on their own fantasy setting, and I want to respect their wishes. And I can sympathize with a desire to keep that focus—Magic the Gathering recently started releasing cards associated with the settings of other intellectual properties in their "Universes Beyond" sets, and I honestly kind of hate that, so I can understand why the developers of other systems wouldn't want something similar to happen to their games. (Note that I am not saying that Wizards of the Coast should not have released the Universes Beyond sets. I personally may find them abhorrent, but, notwithstanding a small but vocal dissenting minority, it seems that most Magic the Gathering players do like them, and after all they're the target audience; I'm not.)

So if I'm going to be creating cards for an open-licensed customizable card game, I should be picking a game whose creators intended to open it up to different settings. And the game I found that best fits that criterion is Strike Engine, so that's the one I'll be focusing on. The only other game I've found that even comes close is Libre, and it's not that close—while nothing on its description seems to be explicitly inviting people to make cards in other settings, its "metasetting" of a war across time certainly seems to allow for it. But the Strike Engine rulebook does explicitly say that the game is intended to "mix and match any characters and worlds", so it fits my purposes precisely. Besides, the Strike Engine is being actively developed, unlike Libre, which doesn't seem to have had any updates since 2013 and to be effectively dead in the water.

(That being said, it's still possible that I may end up creating cards for Libre as well. When I do add support for CCGs on the Wongery, I'd like to include more than one, and while the Strike Engine seems to be the game best suited for the purpose, I think Libre comes in second in that regard—a distant second, but second nonetheless. It is, of course, possible, however, that I'll find another, more suitable open-license CCG that I'm not currently aware of... I missed the Strike Engine the first time I searched for open-license CCGs, after all.)

So, anyway, I kind of started designing some sets for the Strike Engine based on the worlds of Dadauar and Curcalen (even though yeah, I should be spending my energies on actually writing articles), but I had a few questions about the system, so I joined the Strike Enging Discord server to ask them.

(Which now supplies the necessary background to explain why I didn't want to use my existing Discord account. (Okay, accounts; I actually already had more than one.) Because I was asking questions about things I wanted to use for cards that would eventually be posted to the Wongery, it would become obvious, once those cards were posted, that the questions had been asked by one of the Grandmaster Wongers, or at least by someone associated with the Wongery. If I had used (one of) my existing Discord account(s), that would then give away that the owner of that account was associated with the Wongery. Again, I'm trying to keep my real identity a secret (for some reason), so I want to avoid linking any other account I've used to the Wongery. Of course, there is, nevertheless, definitely a nonzero chance that despite all the pains that I have taken to protect my real identity there is something significant that I have overlooked and/or I will slip up dramatically and upon the hard launch of the Wongery my legal name will be revealed almost immediately. I'd like to hope it's not a big chance, but it is nonzero.)

Exiting digression; reëntering main topic of blog post in three, two, one...

So, okay, I created a Discord account for myself (as Clay Salvage), and I figured as long as I was doing that anyway I may as well also go ahead and use that account to create a Wongery Discord server. So I did. I haven't done anything to customize it yet, and of course there are no posts there, but it exists. I haven't put a link to it on the Wongery main page yet (or here in this blog post, for that matter), but I may in the future. Or I may not. I haven't decided yet.

Why not? Well... because I'm not sure I really want the Wongery to have a Discord server. I'm not really a fan of Discord.

Not because of the change in username policies I mentioned previously. As unpopular as that change seems to be overall, I'm not that bothered by it myself. (Though maybe I'd be more bothered by it if I used Discord more.) What I find more annoying, though I haven't seen it remarked upon as much, is that Discord now only allows paid accounts to create invitations that don't expire... though such invitations that have already been created by free accounts are apparently grandfathered in. I guess it's a good thing I created the Wongery Discord (and the invitation) when I did. Or it may turn out to be a good thing if I end up actually using it.

But anyway, that's also not the reason that I'm ambivalent about having a Discord server. (Well, okay, I guess I have a Discord server that I created just in case, but I'm ambivalent about using it.) Those reasons go beyond any changes in Discord policies to the nature of Discord itself. The thing is... I think Discord may be making the web worse?

It's not that Discord itself is necessarily inherently bad. People like chatting online, and Discord provides another way to do so. That's fine. What bothers me is a trend I've seen where a lot of sites seem to see Discord as a replacement for other venues like fora, and... it's not. It's really, really not. (I've already remarked in the past on the Arcmage site's lamentable deprecation of its fora in favor of Discord (and Matrix, whatever that is), but that's not the only place I've seen this.) Discord may be fine for real-time communication, but it's terrible for archiving past discussions and finding things later. On a forum, there are generally multiple subfora; within each subtitle there are multiple threads with their own titles; there are permanent links to each thread and even to each post. On Discord, you can scroll up and see old messages within a channel, but they have to be loaded sequentually from the server; the messages aren't threaded; it's much less conducive to browsing past discussions. Discord is not a replacement for a forum; it may serve a purpose, but it's not the same purpose; and removing a forum in favor of Discord removes a significant part of a site's usability.

(Yes, I know style guides recommend that in English "forum" should be regularly pluralized as "forums", but, eh, I like using irregular plurals when they exist, so I'm going to keep doing that, and you can't stop me. (As far as I know.))

Okay, maybe it's not entirely fair to blame Discord for this. The removal of fora is a decision by the owners of the individual sites; I'm unaware of the Discord developers having actually recommended it. Still, the fact that it has been associated with the removal of fora instills in me a certain antipathy to Discord that make me reluctant to use a Discord server for the Wongery. Maybe I will end up overcoming that reluctance and put a link to the Wongery Discord server; maybe I won't; but I wish fora were still more of a thing than they currently are.

At the risk of seeming like a cantankerous old fuddy-duddy (which maybe I am?), that's not the only way the web has gotten worse. Are there any search engines anymore that actually search for your search term and don't try to guess what you meant to search for and search for that instead? Okay, I understand that people make typos, and it may be helpful to account for those, and sometimes it may be helpful to include results that are related to your search terms even if they don't use the exact words. But sometimes I do want to search for exact words, and there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to do that anymore. It used to be that you could enclose a search term in quotation marks to signify to the search engine that you're only interested in search results that include that specific word or phrase verbatim, but now that doesn't always seem to work. Nor does the use of the minus sign to exclude specific words. I often want to search for relatively obscure terms, and it's so difficult to find results including those terms when search engines insist on erroneously assuming I meant to search for something entirely different from what I typed.

(This post was initially supposed to be mostly about Discord, so I guess I'm digressing again. Well, it's my post; I'll digress if I want to. Heck, I think I may digress even if I don't want to. I'm not sure I can stop myself.)

Obviously, the potential functionality of the web is getting better in many ways. Heck, I remember the years when most people (myself included) had dial-up connections and images in websites were rare because they took too long to load; the first web browser I used was an all-text browser called Lynx (which, huh, I just discovered is still being actively maintained). Now, with much higher bandwidth and with CSS and JavaScript there's so much more websites can do.

But what people are actually doing with the web has changed in ways that aren't necessarily for the better. I'm not the only one to remark on this, of course; I've seen Tumblr posts lamenting the centralization of the web, how many more people used to have their own quirky personal webpages devoted to their special interests, and now everyone just spends their time on a handful of social media sites as well. I've seen posts discussing how even company's websites used to be more fun and have more personality and more to explore. The web—like, come to think of it, a lot else about the world—has become and is becoming more impersonal, more homogenized, more corporatized.

Okay, this is not at all what I had intended to write about when I started this blog post, but what the hey; I'll ride the wave. I think I'm almost done, anyway.

Here's an example of the kind of Tumblr thread I was referring to, by the way, although this one includes not only the decrial of the blandification of the web but also something of a call to action to do something about it... namely, an encouragement of people to make their own personal websites, using a site called Neocities that makes it free and easy to do so. (There were more such sites in the past, including GeoCities, which presumably inspired Neocities' name.) And you know what? I think I approve of this. Neocities looks like a good thing. I haven't created a site there myself, but not because I'm not interested in creating my own websites. The Wongery isn't the only website I've created—I have a lot of other websites, which I'm not going to link to because of that whole, you know, not revealing my real identity thing. But I have a paid hosting plan, so I use that for all my websites. (Though before the hard launch I should probably consider moving the Wongery to a separate hosting plan so people don't connect it with my other sites by comparing the IP addresses...) But for people who just want to make a fun little personal website and don't want to (or can't) pay for hosting or set their sites up from scratch, Neocities looks like a good option.

You know what? Yeah, I'll officially second the recommendation in that Tumblr post. Make your own website, if you haven't already. Go forth and create. Sure, use Neocities, if that fits your needs, and support them if you can. Make your own weird and wonderful corner of the World Wide Web.

I guess in the end that's all I'm really trying to do with the Wongery, after all. Sure, of course it would be great if the Wongery ended up being hugely popular and made me a lot of money, either through Patreon or through merch sale or through licensing or whatever, and if that happens I can devote a lot more time to it. But like I said before, even if it never makes any money I'll keep working on the site anyway. Ultimately, it's just something I want to put out there. I just like to create.

Go, and do thou likewise.