How Yoz Linden Saved an Accidental Online Community of Douglas Adams Roleplay Fans From Extinction

The Economist has a wryly amusing article about the early adventures of Yoz Linden, better known in the real world as Yoz Grahame. Many years before becoming a developer for Linden Lab, as it turns out, he was a developer working with great geek scribe Douglas Adams (he of Hitchhiker's Guide) on a 90s computer game called Starship Titanic. Almost as a joke, Yoz slapped together a hard-to-access "Employee Forum" for the game's website -- i.e., it's a forum for workers of the Starship Titanic -- only to return to it a few months later "to discover thousands of posts. The programming crew had accidentally created a community of the sort that crop up all over the Internet." Rather than let that community die after the game had come and gone, Yoz now hosts the Employee Forum on his own. Yoz writes more about the experience in this Metafilter post:

[T]he Starlight Lines employee forum... was buried one password and six clicks into the site, [so] only a few dedicated people found it, and found each other. And once they were there, they started roleplaying Starlight Lines, and didn't stop evolving a long and bizarre narrative for the next thirteen years. When [the company that made Starship Titanic] died I moved the forum to my own hosting; every so often one of the players will poke me because something's broken, and I'll eventually fix it and they can carry on with their adventures.

There's something poignant in all this, redolent with Horton Hears a Who for the digital age. If years from now a similar fate ever befell Second Life, it's easy to imagine another kindhearted engineer (or maybe Yoz himself) carting off a server rack with several sims, and setting it up in the basement behind the camping gear, so the tiny world can keep spinning.

Photo of Yoz from his Twitter account.

Comments

[Wizard Gynoid]

kinda like killing off all the cows in the secret cow level of diabloII, and then sitting down with the other nuts who found it.

[Extropia DaSilva]

While specific online worlds have come and gone, the fact that this kind of thing has persisted in one form or other for decades is compelling evidence that it caters for some deep-rooted human needs. SL might die. Blue Mars might die. Hell, even WOW might die. But online worlds will continue.