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 The Progression of the ROC by Martin the Warrior February 2001 Imagine, if you will, that the internet is no more than a countryside to be explored. There are communities out there just waiting to be found by you-- Star Wars, Harry Potter, Beanie Babies, 'N SYNC, and Redwall, just to name a few. One day, you wander into a very small village with maybe three one-story houses. They're more like huts, really, but that's not important. The doors to each are open and you can hear laughter coming out of them. On an impulse, you decide to enter one and you find yourself in a large room. There are people there-- not an overwhelming amount, but not too few. Some are sitting around a table telling jokes, some are playing games off in a corner, some are drawing fan-art together. Each one, upon seeing you, smiles and says hello, welcoming you to their little hideaway. The people are so nice that, before you know it, you're friends. Every day you return to the house, having fun with the friends as your bonds grow stronger and stronger. More houses are built, but they don't change the village all that much and everyone is still greeted as cheerily as you were. For the days you spend at that house, things couldn't be better. You laugh with your friends, you cry with them, they cheer you up when you're down, they're there when you need them. Then, one day, one of the faces doesn't appear anymore. You're sorry you can't see them again, but you and your other friends still have fun. Then another friend disappears. Then another. Pretty soon, only three or so remain of those that greeted you that first day. Then it hits you, too. It can be school, it can be sports, it can be anything..... Suddenly, you don't have enough time to come back to this little house where you've had so much fun. You bid your friends farewell and leave that house for the last time. After that, you live your life. Then, somewhere down the road-- maybe a few months, maybe a few years-- you get things under control and you have free time on your hands. Remembering fondly all the fun you had at that house with your friends, you go back to the village. Only, that village isn't a village any more-- it's a city. Whereas there had once only been one-story houses, now there are multi-floored towers. Some doors are closed with notices posted on them. Some require passwords to get in. Some require oaths. Some are open. Some even stand in place of the houses you remember from before. Wandering through the streets, you finally find the clubhouse where you and your friends had spent so many days together... ...only the house is boarded up. No lights are on. The windows are broken. Peeking in between the boards, you can see the table you once sat at, now broken. Torn pictures drawn by people you'd known flap on the wall. Dust covers everything. And most of all...... your friends are missing. You quietly walk through the streets until you find one of the towers with an open door, the sounds of people ringing from inside. Cautiously you enter, overwhelmed by the sheer number of those inside. This is no cozy little room like the one you'd known, this is a mob. You weave your way through them all, trying to see what they do for fun. You see someone playing a game with dice. "Now," you think, "this I remember." You ask to join in, but you find that the rules are far more complicated than anything you remember. Your rank determines how many you can roll, what the values can be, and who you can attack. You politely inform them you have no rank and don't know what they mean by "attack", so they tell you you can't play and that's that. You explore the other floors of the tower to find they're much the same. When you reach one floor, you're told it's only for certain ranks. When it's found out you don't have a rank, you're sent back down. Silently, you leave the tower to try others. They're much the same. You try to ask about a place like the one you remember from before, but it doesn't exist. You ask about your old friends, but when you find the people you're directed to, they're not your friends. They're someone else with the same name. You try to let people know how much fun the old clubhouse had been, but they brush you off. They didn't know it. They don't care. You're just dampening their fun. Dejectedly, you return to the deserted clubhouse.... your clubhouse. You take one last look inside, calling up the fond memories, then you lock them inside. You pat the board across the door, then you leave the city that had been a village. You no longer belong there. It is not the place you knew. It is time to find someplace else. Time has passed. That is the ROC. The houses and towers represent websites. They're torn down, built over, or boarded up. They all change. What started in simplicity (first-gen websites... the houses) grew into complexity (the current multi-rank/ship/mission/etc. club systems.... the towers). Where once it existed as a group of close-knit friends, now most Redwallers hardly know one another. That was the ROC. This is the ROC. And this is what those labled as "old-timers" are talking about when they speak of the "good old days". The majority of them are not trying to put your ROC down. But, they have fond-memories of the places when they were "one-story houses". Don't begrudge them their memories, because you'll have them, too. You're still making them. But, the day will come when you're forced to leave the ROC. And it will change while you're away. It will change so much that if you ever come back, you'll find something foreign. And you will begin reminiscing about the old days you begrudged others. And you'll be begrudged your own memories just as they were. I wrote this for one reason and one reason only-- "old-timers" needed their voice heard. This is how we feel. This is what we try to tell those who will listen. We aren't cranky old beasts who live in the past. We aren't angry at every Redwaller who wasn't around way-back-when. We're just trying to give others the opportunity to make the same memories we did and to bring back the good-naturedness we knew. That's all. Unfortunately, we're met with disdain. We're told "tough" and that if we don't like it, leave. Sadly, many of us-- many very-cool individuals who were great people to know and even greater people to call friends-- have. We would never have imagined being greeted with this kind of hostility in the ROC we knew, but as I stressed earlier, the ROC has changed. And we're left with our memories. | |