I was listening to the 20th anniversary episode yesterday and towards the end of the episode Patrick Miller talks about how he wouldn’t be where he is without Insert Credit and how the website and its work legitimised people’s work and their careers.
It made me think back to a time between circa 2003 - 2013. I’d been a member of multiple spin-off forums and projects (not all at the same time) of the then Highbury Entertainment games magazine forums (publishers of games tm et al) after they were shut down not long after the magazines were acquired by Imagine Publishing.
One thing that began to emerge from the spin-offs was a greater diversity of discussion of the games people liked that either didn’t fit or wasn’t really permitted as relevant to the original magazine forums and multiple attempts were made to create a place for forum members to publish their introspective writing on games, going so far as to (attempt to) launch a new website entirely for that purpose. I remember one person in particular wrote a series of articles that were titled something like “X game from the perspective of someone with no interest in the game” that were each followed up by an article once the game had been played.
None of those attempts to create something more succeeded; either through a lack of commitment, personal circumstances, death by committee, lack of leadership, and inevitably any budding writers either kept their articles on an ill-equipped forum or ended up publishing them separately during the initial blog boom.
One other notable part of those particular communities was that, being primarily a UK-centric forum we were able to arrange meet-ups, to the point that I arranged an invite-only (entirely based on trust - I wasn’t deliberately excluding anyone in particular) weekender where around a dozen of us rented a cottage in the countryside and played games all weekend. These quickly grew to a week and for several years were extremely harmonious, with a growing invite list. Thankfully there are a number of people that I still get along with very well, even if we talk less as we’ve grown older.
Inevitably with a growing number of people (at one point we had nearly 30 people) there was a greater risk of division, toxicity and so on that eventually spilled onto the forums, which at the time I happened to be co-admin of thanks to having the task unceremoniously thrusted onto me, and, well things fell apart pretty quickly and eventually everyone in charge made the decision to kill the forum.
Which brings me back to what Patrick said; that time of earnestly trying to create something as a means of talking about games in an interesting way, or about lesser known games in a regular way was, despite the failures, something that put me where I am now - I’m in arms-length public sector PR and part of that work includes a degree of community management and network fostering.
Similarly, in the same episode Brandon talks a little about how lessons were learned after the initial incarnation of the forum, particularly in terms of quickly stamping out people that tried to push what was acceptable to post (something that I failed to do during my later organised retreats), and has also put me where I am now. Going back to my job, it also involves crisis management and let me tell you that dealing with forum toxicity certainly prepares you for nipping issues in the bud in the corporate world.
Which all brings me onto my final point (and probably the point where you’re waiting for me to actually tell you the point of this post); where attempts from my previous communities, and no doubt countless others, have failed to create something despite the efforts put into them - something as a means of an alternative, legitimate voice against a backdrop of blockbuster reviews and menial news, and to create a community around that shared something - Insert Credit actually succeeded, and the fact that the current incarnation, as a podcast and forum community, has revitalised a positive sense of community against a new backdrop of toxic social media, clout, and anything-for-a-click news is testament to the often unspoken hard work that goes into making a place like this a success and to bring everyone together to where we are now.
