Year: 2010

Cautious Optimism or Impulsive Pessimism?

Rants / February 5, 2010 / Shaun Hamman / 9

This post has been migrated from my older blog A Bad Case of Nostalgia.

Following a slip of the virtual tongue on the Myst Online forums, a mysterious post has emerged on the DRC Site forums that may suggest Uru Live, in one form or another, may be close to being revived from its grave. While this certainly excites me, I became quite depressed while skimming through the various topics discussing this development.

An atmosphere of doom and gloom is not exactly a rare sight around the Uru/Cyan fan community, nor is it very surprising considering the tumultuous history Uru has had. Initially being supported by Ubisoft, who shut it down before it was properly out of beta, then maintained by fan servers operating for the better part of three years with virtually no contact from the guys in charge, and finally being revived for a short lived burst of life thanks to GameTap, it is easy to see why some believe any attempts to revive this collection of virtual worlds may be a lost cause. That said, I find not the lack of optimism surprising, but rather the extreme pessimism. It goes beyond just assuming things won’t work right, to actually begging that this doesn’t happen at all.

The Uru community has been split into so many different pieces that it is amazing it is still sticking together. There are people who think Cyan could do great things with Uru if given the chance, people who think Cyan shouldn’t revive Uru themselves because they will just screw it up, people who think Uru should be forgotten all-together, and these groups are split into subgroups which are split into further subgroups. Assuming that every person in the Uru community is hoping for an enjoyable experience in some kind of a virtual world, there are generally three directions that people believe Uru should continue in:

1. Uru Live should be revived by Cyan with a publisher who gives it a real chance.
2. Uru should be open-sourced with whatever state the source is in and let the community work out the problems.
3. Forget about Uru and recreate similar worlds in popular virtual world environments (Second Life, Blue Mars, etc.)

Most people (and by that I mean the general tone that I get while skimming the forums, I have not actually taken a tally) seem to be tending toward the second option, with a handful of the less programming-oriented members leaning toward the third option. What surprises me is the violently negative reaction to the first option. For some reason, people in the Uru community seem to have this general idea that because Cyan has failed to make this game popular after two tries, the community has a god-given right to take it over from them. Where this idea came from I can’t fathom. Myst, Uru, and all related entities always have been, are now, and likely always will be owned solely by Cyan Worlds until such a time as they feel fit to give them away. Now, I’m not saying there is no support for the first option, but most people appear to feel that Uru would be better off if Cyan weren’t involved with it anymore.

To give you readers an idea of what I’m talking about, I have copied here some quotes from the forums leaving off the poster’s names in the interest of not singling them out. Note too that these are but a small subset of the posts relating to this topic. I urge anyone interested in getting all the viewpoints to visit the original threads these quotes were pulled from here, here, and here.

So, what do we have here…
An “Email” from “Tony” from “Cyan Worlds”, saying that URU Live will be live within a month…
BUT: No confirmation by Cyan. Chogon only posts weird stuff and RAWA something cryptic as always.
Cyan…You can’t fool us anymore. Please, just say either “Yes” or “no”…is it THAT hard?
Why don’t you just say something concrete that we can work with, instead of getting our hopes up for something that will never come?

URU Live, OSMO, whateveryoucallit wont come. end of message.

I don’t think we will see any news on Myst Online – especially within the next 2571 years.
Oh god, please not another attempt by Cyan to revive MOUL.
I’m not up to a 4th shutdown.

*sigh*

Here we go again.

So, we get another “Until Uru” type of iteration with user-made content.

An actual full-scale relaunching is probably out of the cards…unless whatever studio is attached to the Myst movie takes interest, of course.

Ehh… I’m not gonna get my hopes up until Cyan or someone gives me reason to hope.
I don’t think we will see any news concerning OSMO… Especially not in 2010. 🙁
I would love to get back into the cavern along with the friends I made all those years ago. And if Cyan thinks they can provide us with new content to keep it from getting boring, I say we let them try. The absolute worst thing that happens is that it gets closed down again. And if that does happen, oh well. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. But this pessimism has to stop. There is a big difference between “This will never happen, stop trying to get us excited about nothing.” and “Hopefully things will work out better this time around.” especially considering that we now have at least a glimmer of something stirring.

Cryptic posts and a possible leak of upcoming information would normally excite people because it’s a sign that things may be about to happen. Instead it gets half the community saying “Stop with these stupid cryptic posts. You’re not doing anything. Just give us the game and go away.” and there is really no reason for that. Yes we were told Cyan would be open-sourcing Uru, and yes Cyan has had a spotty track record when it comes to keeping Uru alive, but that doesn’t give us the right to essentially spit on them and tell them to get off our yard, especially when this yard isn’t actually ours… it’s theirs.

This little rant has changed directions a few times as I was writing it, and in the interest of length I’ll save my rant on Uru community hacking for another time. But for now I want to know what you people think, not about whether or not Cyan should or should not bring Uru back, but rather what you think about the pessimism in the community. Is it absolutely overwhelming and largely unjustified, or are the anti-Cyan-run-Uru comments well deserved?

A New Year… With Old Memories

Rants / January 9, 2010 / Shaun Hamman / 0

This post has been migrated from my older blog A Bad Case of Nostalgia.

The first post of the new year! What better time than now to finally talk about the title of this blog? You may notice that at the bottom of this page there is a random quote relating to the topic of nostalgia. Go ahead and refresh the page a few times, read some of the different quotes I put in there, and think about your own views on nostalgia for a minute.

What is nostalgia? Merriam-Webster Online offers the following definition:

a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

Cutting away the fancy formal English, nostalgia is wishing for things to be the way they used to be. Everyone, at one point or another, wants things to go back to the way they were before.

The question that many people seem to be at opposite ends of however, is whether or not nostalgia is a good thing. On the one hand, constantly preferring the things that used to be can prevent progress and lead to being unprepared for the future. On the other hand, sometimes things get so muddled and messy that the best option is to backtrack… return to something simpler and pick it up there, carefully avoiding the same mistakes that made it so difficult to progress further.

But the biggest reason some people find nostalgia to be a bad thing is because it tends to shine a gold light on the past. The “golden times” probably weren’t really all that golden. In David Tennant‘s final episode of Doctor Who, there is a quick mention of exactly this phenomenon regarding the Time Lords.

Wilf: I’ve heard you talk about your people like they’re wonderful.
Doctor: That’s how I choose to remember them.

Even if it’s unconsciously, this is the effect nostalgia has on our memories. It takes the best aspects of what we remember and amplifies them, while simultaneously dampening the negative memories.

I am a big fan of nostalgia. I am always thinking of the way things used to be and comparing it to how things are now with disappointment.

I remember when popular new music was about something other than “humps” and “milkshakes” and when television had something a bit more substantial than “Gossip Girl” or “The Biggest Loser“. Don’t even get me started on cartoons. It’s a sad day when “Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo” is considered superior to “Freakazoid!“

It’s true that things weren’t as great as I remember them to be. For each good song I listened to back then there were another twenty terrible songs, just like today. For each good cartoon I watched back then there were another twenty terrible cartoons, just like today. However, the reason that nostalgia can hold such great weight, even if you account for the bad things, is that very often the great stuff of the past is likely better than the great stuff today. Certainly we didn’t have such great shows as “House” or “Psych” back in the day, but honestly, I’d probably rather watch a new episode of “Quantum Leap” or “Home Improvement” instead.

Things just aren’t made quite like they used to be, and there are a good number of reasons for that, none of which are particularly good reasons in my book. But that is a discussion for another time. So what is your position on nostalgia? Is it a good thing, bringing out the best of what used to be and providing an escape from the disappointment of the modern day? Or is it a bad thing, making the past look better than it was and downplaying the achievements and progress that have been made since?