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State of the Union – Part III

This seems to be becoming a yearly event. Maybe that’s a good thing. To start off, if you’re not familiar with these yearly soliloquies, you may first want to read:

This: State of the Union

And then This: State of the Union Revisited

Or maybe you can’t be bothered. That’s fine too. You see the State of the Union series has become my yearly summation of the Sydney and to some extent, the greater Australian Magic community. Not so much about how successful we are on a local or world scale, but more towards how the community is shaping up.

Last year I shamelessly plugged the Sydney Games Centre (SGC) – left, right and centre. And to be frank, they deserved every single word of it. I’ve been playing Magic now for 10 years. Ten! During those ten years I have played in what would literally be a hundred games shops around the country and back in the US where I used to live. I am incredibly thankful that the SGC is in fact in Sydney, because out of all the game stores I have been to, they are hands down the best of the lot. This was true a year ago and it is still true today. For the average hardcore gamer, the games shop™ is not just a place where you go once in a while to play a game or two. It’s not even just a place to hang out. For the average hardcore gamer, the games shop™, is a way of life.

If you are a person such as this, think for a moment what it would be like if all of a sudden the shop you go to those 2 or 3 times a week, the place where you spend more than half of your disposable income – didn’t exist. What would you do? I’d be lost! Distraught! I don’t want to go to some other shop to play, I want to go to SGC and hang out with the guys who I’ve grown accustomed to hanging out with. The fact of the matter is that the Sydney Games Centre has changed my life in not-so-subtle ways.

I’m the better for it. My wife would even agree. Maybe because she believes it or maybe because she looks forward to the peace and quiet at home while I’m there.

I like a good anecdote. This doesn’t really fit here, but since I’m on the subject of SGC anyway, two small titbits about the guys who run the SGC. Chris and Kieren – the SGC owners, only really get about a day off a week, if that. They are there all the time. Running a games shop is a hard slog. It’s not all the “champagne and caviar” that you might expect. Anyway, the night before one of these days off, I was chatting to Kieren, who was packing up to go, and he had a Star Wars TCG display box under his arm. You see on Kieren’s day OFF, he was going to open a box and build some Star Wars decks. Chris. A little while back Chris had a week off. A whole week in a row. I don’t believe Chris has had more than 2 days off in a row since the SGC opened it’s doors. So, what wild and woolly adventures did Chris get up to during his week off? Tahiti? Fiji? Of course not. Chris brought home some boxes of “dead” cards games to sort through. On his week off. Now that, my friends, truly shows the love of the game.

A lot has changed, personally, for me this past year in relation to this game – specifically in the last 5 or 6 months. As you may know by now, Paul Van Der Werk and I took over MTGParadise a little while back and that has greatly impacted my perceptions of the Magic community.

So while in my first year I waxed nostalgic about the Magic community I had back in the US, and in my second year I gushed about the fantastic turnaround of the Sydney Magic community, this year I’d like to focus on another community. The online community. The person reading this column. Yes, I mean you.

What I have found over the last few years is that the presence of the online community here in Australia, largely based around the Paradise forums, is a very real thing. It’s palpable.

If you’re a regular forum member, you know how it is. We all know about wasted’s antics. For a significant period of time I was a moderator, so I for one know a lot about wasted’s antics. Pardon me, ^wastedo^. We all know that Phlufe and Tripod are really having a very long, long, long, long, long exciting day. We know that Boris and Inquisitor and the other Tasmanians are perhaps a bit kooky but that’s ok cause we still like them. We have Western Australians and Brisbanites, Victorians and Adelaidians, Northern Territorians and Sydney-siders. Townsville, Toowoomba, Geelong, Ballarat, Newcastle, Wolllongong, Armidale, Dubbo, Albury, Gold Coast, Noosa, Launceston, Queanbeyan, Central Coast, Blue Mountians, and on and on and on. From Nundah, QLD to Geilston Bay, TAS to Applecross, WA. We’re all here and represented.

This is something I never REALLY took notice of until we took over the site. I never realised just how far the forum membership here stretched. My address list of people I trade with now has hundreds of entries. Hundreds of people that I know and trade with - week after week, and now year after year. That’s a really good thing.

You see in Sydney we have the SGC, the aforementioned gaming Mecca. The place where I can go pretty much any time of any day and hang out and play. For me, this is fantastic and I know for a fact that a lot of Sydney-siders take that for granted.

But what about the guy from Yeppoon? What about the guy from Alice Springs? Where does HE get to go every day to chat and trade and hang out?

I know exactly where – the MTGParadise forums.

At any given time there are up to 30-40 people ‘online’ in the forums here. I was on last night at 2AM (I’m on every night at 2AM. Case in point, it’s 2:04AM right now) and there were still around 15-20. Posting, PM’ing, using the chat room, reading jokes about Gibbers_1, and just generally hanging around.

And I couldn’t be happier. Paul and I have a very real responsibility now. One that we don’t take lightly. For better or for worse, we are what amounts to the community leaders of these forums. Personally, I’m pretty honoured to be involved. At nationals this year, I met around 20-30 or more Paradise regulars that I’d never met before. I probably caught up with that many more that I did know. For me, that was the best part of Nationals. These are people that I talk with every day and seldom, if ever, have met IRL (In real life – get with the times, Moe). Gush and Rain and Phlufepig. Human Tripod and Moakek and Ike E Bear. Boris and 2lip and Inquisitor and DrWorm and Dalo and AdelaideRegionals#1. Sage and Gibbers_1 and OptimusPrime and Pirie. Stangg. Tokes. Deleted Member. And more. A lot more. These are the people that I interact with every day, so when I met them in person, it felt like I knew them already.

And then there were those who weren’t there. TheCrimsonScribe, Sisqmund, GNU and Cabal. Couchie, Ianinozzie and Quivering Mage. At times it felt so much like an MTGParadise gathering that these people were actually missed.

And really that’s what I’m getting at.

A couple of weekend’s ago I wasn’t online much. When I say that what I mean is only 3 or 4 hours a day, as compared to my usual 12. Because of this, I didn’t get a chance to post much in the forums here for about 3 or 4 days in a row. Now, after that period of time, I had actually gotten a couple of PM’s and an MSN or two from forum members asking where I was, if I was ok, etc. Besides being somewhat endearing, that really shows what sort of community we have going here at the site.

Then, of course, a few months ago, we had a major outage. It seemed that our little chat room was in violation of our hosting agreement and as a result, we were cut-off. Cut-off without the possibility of reconciliation – without recourse. So we moved. But moving takes time. All said and done the site was down for at least 4 to 5 days. 4 to 5 days in Net terminology is an eternity.

And all hell broke loose. SMS’s… MSN’s…. Emails…. “What’s happening?”, “Is something wrong with the forums?”, “Will they be back up tonight?”. One, clearly distraught individual, after having been told that it would be a few days until it would be back up, muttered with obvious desperation, “But…. But… what am I going to do NOW?”.

An MTGParadise Island appeard on our sister-site, VSParadise. Phlufe and Tripod even got a thread going there. And we laughed and refreshed and waited. And waited. The community metaphorically battened down the hatches to weather the storm.

And we all realised, self-included, just how much a part of our lives the MTGParadise community is.

Now, some people may say that this behaviour borders on dysfunction, or at least is, well, very sad. My perception is different. The way the world works is changing. Chat rooms and SMS and IRC and Forums and PM are becoming viable. They are viable in the sense that they are more than just an accepted form of communication; they are an accepted way of life. When I was a kid, hanging out with your friends meant you might go by their place and watch Transformers or play Nintendo. Nowadays the “going by their place” part of the equation is often removed, as you can just as easily hang out playing Everquest online with voice chat. Now is that any less valid? We have to get past the idea that this is a behaviour to be judged. This is life. Perhaps Mr. Gibson wasn’t all that far off after all.

I’ve just counted and on any given day I check for messages in 19 different locations. This includes 9 different email addresses. Fair enough I may be an exception here, but I daresay most of you have at least 2 or 3.

So what am I getting at? Basically this: Online communities, including our own MTGParadise, are increasingly being recognised not as a diversion to normal life, but as normal life itself.

So the next time you grunt at Wasted's inanity, or chuckle at 2lip’s bravado, or remember fondly such things as Team Pineapple, have a thought to what it means to be a part of the MTGParadise community.

We’re here 24/7, 365 days a year.

And if you are not a member… well, the door is open. Most of us are nice and only a few of the Tasmanians smell funny.

Scott Hunstad.