Hoo boy. Nightmarishly, this topic reminded me that I’ve now been regularly participating in online forums for over half my life. Just put me out of my misery now!
So! In 2011, I was gifted a Nintendo 3DS by my dad for my birthday, right within the console's launch week. Excited about it (but with few actual new games to play, because the 3DS launch was infamously poorly-handled), I instead logged onto the world wide web to see what other people were saying about the platform. By this point, I'd already become familiar with then-modern "web culture" through YouTube and a few in-browser MMOs, so I felt comfortable enough to begin participating in online discussion.
My search lead me to the first forum I ever joined, which were called the
Nintendo 3DS Forums. This was a pretty standard forum built on the xBulletin platform, and I was getting in pretty early – it had existed for maybe a few months before then, but I was part of a "newbie boom" of kids who had just got the console. It wasn't a mecca of incredible conversation or anything, but I quickly got in good with the forum regulars and especially became common on the "chatbox", a built-in chatroom hosted on the site's main page.
I was 13 and probably posted a bunch of stuff that would absolutely send me into suicidal nausea today, but it
was fun – we all were sheltered, middle-class, North Americans between the 13-22 range, even the site admins, so we all essentially had the same life experiences and personalities. I'm sure I annoyed a lot of people, but I also made a ton of friends, and some great times across online multiplayer games were had. I stopped visiting this forum regularly when a user I hated got promoted (fortunately, that would never happen again), and the site kind of died a few months thereafter. I still miss and love a lot of people from that place... I wonder where they all are today.
That same year, I also joined a pretty exclusive forum for an age-old Sonic the Hedgehog fansite that was in its waning years. (I'm not going to post it here for privacy reasons, but anyone "in the know" will immediately understand what place I'm talking about.) This site had a MUCH older userbase than I was used to – everyone was in their twenties or even early thirties – and, as such, conversation was the highest-quality I've ever seen on the internet. Everyone was
endlessly witty, intelligent, and cynical, and posts regularly made me laugh my head off. As a pseudo-intellectual teenager who desperately wanted to be seen as smarter than he was, I was in heaven.
I never really became a major member of that site – by the time I was on the scene, it was very close to dying – but I actually trawled through like eight years of post archives, just devouring all the fantastic discussion people were having and absorbing it into my head-space. That forum heavily, heavily defined my personality and tastes, and I have no idea what my life would have been like without it – it's the reason I learned to focus on my writing, which is now my profession. A
ton of people from that forum went on to become successful – one had his own cartoon on the Disney channel, another had a 20-year-long-run as a web comic artist, another is now a very successful indie developer – it's crazy! Totally a little internet treasure trove that I'll probably never find again.
In my mid-to-late-teens, I also briefly participated in another forum on its last legs that was just called
Nintendo Forums. Not much to say about this one – it had been huge in the 2000s, but when I joined it was just a small collection of regulars peacefully discussing Nintendo games. It was nice to be part of a little community, but I didn't have the history these people did, so I never "fit in" as much as anyone else. I made a few friends here and there, but the forum had a Sword of Damocles floating over its head long before I arrived, so it only lasted a year or so before burning out. The last active thread was about – and I'm not making this up – the first election of Donald Trump. Classy!
Finally, the most recent forum I was part of before this one was for a now-irrelevant gaming journalism site that had been slightly notable in the mid-2010s. (The site is still up and I don't
think you can access the forum anymore, even through archives, but I'm still going to be vague for privacy's sake.) Like this site, I joined very early on and immediately became a popular member, making friends with every regular and solidifying myself as part of the community.
Things were nice for about a year – discussion quality was high, there was a lot of in-jokes, and the forum wasn't really big at all (message board culture was dying off at this time), so we could keep things intimate without being suffocating. We even got a few industry people – mostly Nippon Ichi America localizers desperately trying to damage control their shit games – posting, which was pretty cool.
That forum died for two reasons: first, the admin (who, hilariously, modelled his profile off of... Jet, from Cowboy Bebop!
Is that a requirement for you psychos!? Please send me to the forum where Faye Valentine is the webmaster!) was a brown-nosing, sell-out hog who would immediately delete threads and impose dictatorial rules the moment it looked like someone from the industry was considering giving him an interview, which made posting anything of value pretty pointless. Second, at the height of the forum's popularity, Discord came out, and most of the userbase (myself included) just started talking on that server, instead. (Which had its own problems with another crazy admin.)
I eventually broke off from that community because, basically, they were all just a bunch of 4channers posting the same rote memes again and again, and I'd gotten tired of it. (I've never liked "chan culture" in the slightest.) Having one of their biggest members leave abruptly essentially killed off interest in the remaining regulars, and everyone just disbanded. Not long after that, the main forum was deleted outright so the admin would never have to deal with a community again. Nice! I didn't even keep up with anyone from that place, and I think about them precisely never.
And, about ten years later (well, more like nine, but who's counting), here we are! My internet personality solidified during my late teens, so if you hated me there, you'll hate me here, too. (And vice versa!) RGT is a very, very different forum to the ones I've posted on before – even with a much lower set of rules, modern-day internet culture simply isn't made up of the wit, sarcasm, or constant sense of playful cynicism that it was when I was in my heyday. The shift can be summed up in a single meme, which you'll see to the right. I prefer the old stuff, but I love you all, too.
Oh my god, did I seriously just write all that out? What the fuck is wrong with me? I need to go soak my head – please excuse me.
