Yan of Glutter has asked me to write something on why I consider myself a global citizen. This is part five. (part one, two, three, four)
Fun and games
When I was young I used to play PBM games. PBM stands for Play By Mail. The idea was that all the players filled in their moves on a form and mailed that to the game moderator. He would process them with the aid of a computer and mail the results back to the players. This meant that you could play very complex games with lots of players, though you usually played one turn per fortnight. Some games were so complicated you could wallpaper your room with the printouts you got back. Tactical coordination and diplomacy were usually done by phone. It wasn’t a very big phenomenon and I live in quite a small country. So if you wanted to fill a game for a hundred players, you had to look abroad. This meant the gaming scene also had some Germans, Belgians and Brits. But it was a primitive technology and a limited phenomenon.
Now I do the modern thing. I play online. Games have evolved incredibly since those days. One of the most interesting features of the current games is that you can chat while playing. This means not just a lot of added value to the game (I have once lost a game because I was busy typing the lyrics to The Lumberjack Song by Monty Python). It also means that people can exchange e-mail addresses and urls. And, human beings being social beings, they have formed networks. Players have formed groups, known as clans. Since playing via the internet isn’t bound by the practical concerns of the mail system, like PBM, this attracts players from all over the world. And so do the clans. Clans like ST and LW have very nice visual representations of that on their sites. The clans regularly have matches and tournaments. Right now, these small networks are being merged into a gaming society. We already have a few central points where we could find information on each other and the game in general, like nolfgirl. We are now busy founding a council, which will act as a sort of United Nations of all the clans playing our game (No One Lives Forever 2). I will be a representative for my clan (TNT). And something else is happening. The clans are differentiating. Before, they were all very much alike. The only major difference was the quality of the players. Now they have started differentiating. Fox Force Five is the first clan I know of with a carefully crafted image. To be in that clan you have to like Pulp Fiction, The Avengers and Nancy Sinatra. You have to call yourself monkey and shout cocoa! a lot. It’s very much a subculture with its own rules and habits. To quote [FF5]YourMathTeacher; “we’re building a way of life here”. And that is how it will be. People will use the web to form communities with all the elements our real life communities have, but without the constraints of place. They will be global communities.
This is the last part of the series. I hope I’ve been able to explain what I think a global citizen is and why I think I am one. And good luck to Yan with sorting it all out. J
1:21:07 AM 
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