Thinking long-term about OtherSpace...

A conversation came up in Director chat last night among staffers who are worried about keeping the new momentum on OtherSpace and what steps we can take to prevent backsliding in activity and interest.

Well, lulls happen. But it's easy in retrospect to look back at the history of OtherSpace - more than a decade - and understand why it became harder and harder to attract and keep new players. As a result, it's also pretty easy to understand what we have to do to prevent a decline of our own making (rather than the usual seasonal slumps that come and go).

One of the great strengths and interesting features of the original OtherSpace was our willingness to turn the theme on its head and really shake things up. It was gutsy and it was fun. But, ultimately, it was detrimental to the long-term health of the game. We shoved everyone onto Sanctuary, dumped a bunch of old theme, added new theme, threw in some wackiness with alternate worlds due to the Moebius Effect, let one player blow up a world, brought that world back from the dead, and created a thematic morass that was just far too complicated for total newbies to bother to wrap their brains around.

So, the obvious solution for the long-term health of 2009 “reboot” OtherSpace: Avoid overcomplicating the broader theme of the game universe and focus instead on smaller stories. Starship crews come and go, but our universe should be relatively constant. So, if we want to do shake-it-up events, focus them on the starship crews instead of the universe at large. When possible, let the commanders of those starships run their own internal “shake-it-up” events.

We need to run events that expand and enrich canon, rather than changing or replacing it.

Long ago, I was enamored with the idea of kicking down the sand castle once we finished building it. Now, I'm much more interested in adding new wings to the castle, maybe moving it further away from the eroding forces of the tide, and strengthening its foundations for the long term.