Yeah, I know, blogging moratorium, interrupting my writing flow, yadda yadda — but this is important.

I fled the Evil Avatar community a long time ago. Quietly, and under my own terms. There were a few reasons for this, not the least of which was the venom and disgust with which some members regarded any Nintendo fan, rational or otherwise. Other reasons include the more marketable answer of “the site is blocked at work”, which it IS, but is a minuscule fact that sidesteps the more anti-Nintendo community sentiment issue with a gait that is every bit as troubling as it is WIDE.

The other problem was the fact that visiting the site sank me into a deep timehole from which minutes and hours would never be regained, regardless of the amount of quantum math tossed at the equation. I couldn’t function. Hitting refresh was just too accessible a drug.

I was happy I left, but I missed some of the community terribly.

Then, sometime this summer, there was a strange bit of drama on the boards that I caught wind of through various channels. Evil Avatar (I’m referring to Philip Hansen, the site owner here, not the site itself) began a rampage of bans and thread deletions, all surrounding something to do with “magic PCs”. You can read a bit about it on PlayItReviewIt. I don’t fully understand all the details, but from what I DO understand, the fallout from that caused a few people to leave and take up permanent residence at any number of sites started by previous Evil Avatar members: PlayItReviewIt, Immortal Machines, and Co-optimus. Not a huge deal, but some feelings were hurt, some relationships changed, and I had reasoned that things might never fully recover from that ordeal.

Turns out I might have been right. I received a message this morning from the Evil Avatar Facebook group with a link to a website, saying that this was where everyone I know and love ended up. The link went to a new site called Colony of Gamers.

I would come to discover pretty quickly why Colony of Gamers was created. In essence, everyone was sick of Philip’s idea of what a “community” was. For Philip, it was his way, or the highway. And truly, since it WAS his site (as he was wont to remind everyone, many, many times), this much was technically true. But an authoritarian dictatorship does not a thriving community make. People understood this, and began to reject his governance on principle.

The “magic PCs” incident was apparently just a starting point (or, for many, and ending point). A more recent situation occured that I have exactly zero details on that culminated in long-time Evil Avatar editors Nick Puleo (bapenguin) and James Young (fitbabits) to tender resignations and permanently leave the site, helping to start up Colony of Gamers.

These are intelligent, level-headed people that have been deeply involved with day-to-day operations within Evil Avatar for years. Their departure was not only surprising, it was substantial.

Not only that, but Scott Benton (Psykoboy2)–the power and voice behind the excellent Evil Avatar Radio podcast–also left the site, taking his program with him, and dropping it down at Colony of Gamers as the newly-christened In-Game Chat. Also substantial.

And most of that just happened yesterday.

So, today, things aren’t terribly different from yesterday, as far as my perspective, except that a lot of the people from Evil Avatar that I enjoyed conversing with are now over at Colony of Gamers, which is a site that is not (yet) blocked by my work. I obediently setup my account, though I don’t expect I’ll be spending an extraordinary amount of time there. The timehole issue still manifests itself menacingly. I just don’t need the added pressure of maintaining an online presence on a gaming forum. It’s there, for the times when I see a conversation that looks interesting, and I find I can add some small morsel of value. The site and community there, I can already tell, will be fantastic. I can practically guarantee that. But essentially, things will be mostly unchanged for me.

As for the Evil Avatar “community” that once existed, I don’t think it will ever be the same again. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing.