Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 6.2K All Categories
- 3.1K Everything Achaea
- 1.5K North of Thera
- 26 Archives of the Terraformer
- 257 The Matsuhama Arena
- 885 The Golden Dais of Creation
- 299 The Scarlattan Theatre
- 149 The Blank Canvas
- 2K Getting Help
- 412 General Questions
- 258 Quick Class Questions
- 1.3K Tech Support
- 313 Client Help
- 486 Curing Systems and Scripts
- 841 Off-Topic
- 255 The Wander Inn
- 586 The Universal Membrane
- 298 Class Discussions
- 298 Individual Class Sections
- 20 Alchemist
- 9 Apostate
- 30 Blademaster
- 9 Depthswalker
- 14 Druid
- 4 Infernal
- 20 Jester
- 19 Magi
- 34 Monk
- 11 Occultist
- 8 Paladin
- 7 Priest
- 29 Runewarden
- 18 Sentinel
- 26 Serpent
- 20 Shaman
- 9 Sylvan
Achaea in the Atlantic
Could not believe it! Read the opening 7 paragraphs. I've managed to figure out who this is (and saw the character log in for the first time in forever today), and it's definitely about Achaea. So cool! The Atlantic is one of my favorite publications/sites for intelligent analysis.
30
Comments
one of my buddies growing up posted this on my facebook wall a couple days ago (well, when the article was released) because i had convinced him and a bunch of other friends to play for some time. they recognized that it was almost surely talking about achaea.
What do I win if I tell you who her Character was?
Don't quite follow, Santar. Clarify?
@Vyktoria Heh, took me about 5 seconds to find her character. Also emailed her to thank her.
This is a really neat article. It's awesome and exciting to see Achaea in something so well-known!
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
Just read it. Awesome.
No... no. Your contributions to Achaea are beautiful and timeless -- you will never be forgotten.
If it is who I think it is, and I'm pretty sure that it is based on the map posted in the article, she's the only reason I ever managed to get anywhere. This was back in the day when there were no maps IG, and you had to walk up hill, both ways, without landmarks!
Some of us may have changed faces and names, but she is remembered and always will be.
It's not Asara...
Huh! Then no idea. I feel stupid. -blush-
I really think I know who it is, but everyone's being all cagey about it, and the author didn't even name Achaea for some weird reason, so I'm afraid to post it, because people are weird, and will probably freak the hell out if anyone names her. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong anyway.
Whatever, Achaea got Atlantic press, and I'm pretty excited about that, more than anything.
As I have Krypton sit in his own grove while I read this, I'm struck by how much meaning I've poured into nine lines of digital text. Nine little lines I've "owned" for probably 10 years now. Ten years of experiences and friendships that began in cyberspace, but are permanently engrained in my memory. What happens if/when the day comes that Achaea runs its code for the last time?
Thank you, <redacted>, for giving Achaea its 15 minutes of fame.
Can the Economist be far behind?
Herenicus said:
It wouldn't surprise me, to be honest. I believe (from Matt's old blog) that Achaea was the first online game to introduce the idea of an in-game currency purchased with real money and a pay-for-perks model, rather than subscription or ad-funded. There could quite reasonably be an Economist article on the rise of microtransactions...
Aha, found a reference! Nothing is ever truly gone on the Internet!
So much emotion from reading this. Having played for over 10 years I can tell you that I have derived so much enjoyment from Achaea. It's nice to be back but it's also really interesting to come back from dormancy, where nobody knows who you are. Luckily, I had one or two familiar faces, but I can see what the author is talking about.
It's a pretty good read. I think it is pretty accurate too. Thanks for sharing!
This article was holding one of the top spots on YC Hacker News for like a week and I didn't read it because I assumed it was some crap devops story written by macbook-toting starbucks-drinking hipsters. Who woulda thought!
You are probably still right. Mudlet is Mac-compatible
Yeah, I just stumbled across that in my regular Atlantic reading, and was pretty pleased. I made the comment under "Leoniceno" that let people know the name of our game.
Only disappointment was...why didn't she just name/link Achaea?
I was trying to figure out why the author didn't just name our game last night, and my best guess is that she feels it makes a better device that way. The other obvious possibility is that she does NOT want her real life professional name associated with her long dormant char for some reason, to the point that while she might use Achaea as a device, she didn't even want to name the *game*, much less her char. Both of those scenarios seem very possible, so who knows. Anyway, of course I wish she'd just named Achaea outright, but I'll take the press for our little old MUD either way
I'm sure that's the reason. The story about groves, about this small piece of digital ownership, is just to frame the narrative. The name of the game is irrelevant, and giving it would be distracting -- after all, Achaea is currently NOT like the article's other featured entities (GeoCities, Second Life, Glitch), i.e., online communities that fell into disuse but nonetheless have been preserved in some small way.
I'd disagree with that. While Achaea is still running, it's not just one community but tons of small communities, cliques, and circles - doubtlessly countless of them have since disappeared from the game as players, well, stop playing. Yet they remain potentially archived in the form of news posts, journals, old clans, dormant characters, and of course logs.
That is nowhere near the same magnitude of flux as experienced by the three other communities described in name by the author. And not even your typical, smart Atlantic reader is going to be able to grasp the intricacies of the archived Achaea histories you mentioned without knowing exactly how Achaea operates/what Achaea is -- which is not going to happen in a five-page article.
I'm as happy as the next guy Achaea got mentioned here. But an advertisement of the game would have absolutely nothing to do with what the article is about.
Personally, I think the great thing about explaining but never naming the MUD is it let's the readers relate. For me, it was a bunch of IRC channels, even more obscure than Achaea in terms of magnitude. Also BYOND taught me programming.
You're right in terms of magnitude - far more people know about geocities than they do about gamefaqs forums or whatever else. So that's why having this anonymous world no one knows about really helps the piece - it let's it be about digital communities in general, even if most of the details are about some mainstream supercommunities that most readers might be familiar with. At least that's my impression of it.
Since our old girl is almost 17 and still going strong, it would have been interesting to see the author contrast Achaea's sheer longevity and continued vibrancy with all these flashes in the pan, because while the device as used is effective, its effect is just to further evoke all of the things long gone, and there's plenty of more well known (and defunct or close to it) examples in the article already. Our "MUD" is especially interesting because it's not a wasteland, even though by all rights it probably should be, and because it still gets an emotional response from her - which she in turn uses to get one from her readers
There's my Thursday morning backseat driving quarterbacking non-Atlantic published person answer. The author does know how to turn a phrase, so I don't want to come off as harsh at all, and I obviously have an agenda!