CIEL'S PROFILE

there are dozens of rpgmaker games that put the last 17 years of professional rpg dev to shame

anyway i think the sentiment was just a very unusually denigrating version of the 'always be a learner' bruce lee enlightened disciple mindset kind of thing

author=LordBlueRouge
Like, Darken mentioned, 2005 was arguably the golden era of GamingW, right? - but it doesn't explain what made Gamingw begin to loath rpgmaker by 2007.

Like, was there a change in administration? Did someone leave Gamingworld.net and give the reins to site to someone else?(...was it the Iron Gaia Incident?)

GW was started by a cool dude named Bart, who gradually drifted away from running the site, and after the main page went down from no code maintenance the admin duty started being passed around.

GW as a whole never hated RM, nor even a significant portion of it - it was like 3 guys who somehow ended up with admin powers and started to shit all over it because barkley being played on gamespot made them think they could run the next tigsource. they killed a great thing for the other 99% of users who didn't share their pathetic and desperate need for coolkid indie validation . now they have a smoking digital crater to call their own i guess. gg

__

i'm gonna talk about GW seriously for a bit here

GW's sense of humor didn't really appear 'toxic' from my side of it. it was basically like ribbing someone who is behaving in a slightly ridiculous fashion, not in order to maliciously drive a knife into them and make them leave, but to have a laugh about it and point it out to them. people with the self-awareness to understand this tended to fit in and have a good time, while others took disproportionate offense, usually over ultimately pretty trivial things, and harbored resentment

an example brought up in this topic was strangeluv creating rpgmaker screenshots featuring kaempher. kaempher had posted a thread somewhere on the forums concerning a girl problem, i may be misremembering and correct me if i am, but i believe it was basically asking for advice on whether he should have a threesome with this girl and another guy. from his perspective, and at his age at the time, i suppose this was a very serious issue and he was earnestly coming to this community for help

i would never belittle someone's feelings of kinship to any online community - they can feel like the only place with genuinely kindred spirits because the available pool of human interaction draws from all over the world, and targets specific interests/mentalities - it is very understandable that someone would feel a comfort with the people at such a community that they wouldn't feel anywhere else, so asking for very personal advice there is only natural

that said, there is an inherent humor to the notion of someone asking for this kind of sex advice on a site primarily dedicated to japanese tile rips. not that it is wrong to do so in any way, as i explained. the juxtaposition is just pretty funny, if you think about it

so i imagine strangeluv's line of thinking was to illustrate the humor of that juxtaposition by putting the text of kaempher's thread starkly into the overarching context we all inhabited as members of the site - rpgmaker. he used publicly available photos kaempher himself had posted in gw's photo thread as facesets, further establishing the rpgmaker framework surrounding the 'lurid' subject matter, presumably increasingly the humor of the juxtaposition

sure, this was not the nicest thing strangeluv could possibly have done, (and kaempher received legitimate advice from other users) but i wouldn't call it even remotely malicious or mean-spirited either. as i saw it, the spirit of humor on GW was more of an invitation saying 'come and laugh at this situation with us, even if it involves yourself' - not 'get the f out loser' etc

less socially developed persons might have a difficult time distinguishing between the two, and i don't mean that as an insult. i myself never had any kind of older brothers or other presence who accustomed me to the habitual social hazing/ribbing of many environments, so it was not until later in elementary school that i developed the self-awareness to understand where this kind of behavior was coming from (e.g. yes it is stupid that i am tucking my shirt into my pants, yes i probably talk about final fantasy 3 too much but i'm gonna do that the rest of my life haha u cant stop me losers)

i sympathize with those for whom gw's environment felt like actual bullying, and regret that they were never able to take the intended lesson from it - maybe that lesson was not always delivered effectively. maybe some of the recipients were very very young at the time and understandably unable to grasp this kind of social dynamic

i myself wouldn't have done what strangeluv did, but i don't disavow it either. conceptually, even today it's a pretty funny idea and i'd hope that kaempher himself would, on reflection, agree. but i can't presume to assert what other individuals should or shouldn't think. not saying the line wasn't crossed now and then, and if it was, it was probably strangeluv who would have crossed it

there were others who experienced similar things on GW and, even if not immediately, came to understand the spirit of it, and had a good time afterwards. while i used the word hazing, i think the site's tone actually served the useful function of making sure nobody took themselves too seriously, and engendered a self-awareness among members that was useful for creating better work

the tone at GW, in my eyes functioned as a sort of border check that verified you had this self-awareness prior to entry, and if not, tried to instill it via exposure. it mostly only came across as malicious to people dead set on taking themselves and their 8 rtp crystal dragon idea very very seriously, or those with persecution complexes

there lies the fundamental difference between gw and rmn, and why a certain incompatibility emerged between two sides of its userbase. it seems as though a group of people who could never rise to the task of self-examination ended up taking refuge here, and eventually dominated this site's tone. in my view, that disposition is reflected in the site's content

without a critical environment that engenders reflection on one's thoughts and actions, there is no mitigating factor stemming the single-minded obliviousness fueling production of an endless deluge of yume nikki clones. there is nothing that makes a given individual stop and think for just a moment, that maybe THEIR rtp forest screenshot isn't quite the 5-star experience that they presumed it was inside the vacuum of their own unchecked enthusiasm

there has to be someone there who can say "isn't what you're doing a bit silly?"

to put it as pretentiously as possible: GW's social environment was a filter that tried to make people better versions of themselves by inciting self-reflection - i know that i personally benefited from it and was made to re-examine to some degree what my adolescent self thought was good, or cool, or funny, or high-quality rpgmaking

maybe it didn't always do that in a productive way, and maybe in some cases the humor got out of hand and the message was lost in the mix. but the consequences of not having what GW had carry far more troubling implications than the minor pitfalls involved in actually asking people to take a look at themselves

may rpgmaker blessings be upon your families

good luck dude!

author=NeverSilent
Maybe I should make a more concise and straightforward statement:

Elitism is not the solution.

Encouraging promising, high-quality, semi-professional projects is not a bad idea. Dismissing the efforts of beginning, learning or simply casual developers however is a mistake. It would rob RMN of its base of existence. Trying to improve the site is great, denying people space because they are not ready to "advance" to a professional standard is not.

nobody wants to deny beginners space, but maybe they shouldn't receive the spotlight until they improve. and what a motivation to reach onward and upward! it's the natural order. i wrote several treatises and doctrines about this on here several years ago because i am a giant idiot