I thought and thought and thought about what I would want to use as the header image to this post. Communities… I was watching the game dev documentary on Netflix last night and when Richard Garriot’s segment came up, I remembered that glorious day so long ago when the Ultima Online community came together to assassinate his avatar, Lord British, on the day of that MMO’s opening.
Community – can’t live with them and can’t… um, can’t get fooled again.
Today’s prompt is from Kanter at MMO One Night a Week, who will ask:
Tell us about some community that you are part of and why it interests you or how it impacts you?
This is a tough question. A few prompts back, I thought I might be part of the SF reader community, but I don’t think that’s true. I read SF, but I don’t discuss it with anyone but my daughter.
I posted in Twitter last night, as I was thinking about this prompt, whether you were really in a community if nobody else knew you were in it? The whole purpose of a community is to connect with other people. Unless your name is Sybil, you can’t be a community by yourself.
That Sybil thing is gonna date me.
I’m going to start right off with the obvious – I’ve been part of a blogging community for over a decade now. Even when I wasn’t blogging, I knew I could talk with these people and share and they would be there. When I came back to Twitter (where it all started a long, long time ago) and blogging, there were some new people, and some other people were gone (some, sadly, gone forever), but there was a community and I was part of it still.
Without that community, I’d have missed out on so much. I met my boyfriend through this community :-) I got my current job from a referral from someone who read my blog back in the day. And most of this community, I have never met in real life. Some, I’ve talked to and gamed with.
But on my more depressing days, I feel that if I turned off the computer, my community would vanish with it.
Other communities – well, obviously, there’s the community in which I live in central Connecticut. My neighbors are aware of me, and I follow and respond to tweets from local town and community organizations. I use the library and try to shop locally. I can’t say the community affects me much, except that it’s the kind of town I always wanted to live in and that I moved back from California hoping to find.
It’s not the same as the community in Concord, New Hampshire, where I grew up. My parents both grew up there and knew everything and everybody. Mom could chat with the other Canadian Frenchies in French. Dad was a part of the classic automobile club, the bicycling club, a motorcycle club, Mensa for some reason, a Mason, and back during the Bicentennial he joined the Brothers of the Brush, a club where men didn’t shave for a month. Before that he was clean shaven. After that he had a mustache for the rest of his life.
During my parents’ funerals, people I never knew would come up, one by one, and talk about how my mother or father had deeply affected their lives, and shared stories I’d never heard. They were pillars of the communities and had so, so many friends. And the community was incredibly important to them.
I don’t feel like I can even make those kinds of connections with people. I love my family, but they’re my family, and I already lean on them a lot. They don’t have a choice.
I’ve tried joining communities, but I always feel like I’m still alone, just with more people. Eventually I always drop off and just head home and stay there instead.
So yay, electric friends. You’ve changed my life in ways real life friends never have. Thank you :-) Danke vielmals! どうもありがとうございます！