The diary

20/08-2001

I started on this 2 years ago, because there were so few of them around. Remembering how much Parintachin´s site meant to my addiction to Clanlord, I wanted to renew that aspect of it. Parintachin´s site was very much what Clanlords.com is now. In addition it had pictures, but also longer stories. Any player could send a story to him, and it would be published not long afterwards. Then he left, and the site died - and something valuable had been lost I thought. So, I started Baba´s diary. While others can´t post, others are still heard, their stories told. It shows of course my total lack of self criticsm, as I , the norwegian, write in a non-native language. And I, as I do in the game itself, make many spelling errors, and syntax errors. I run it through the spell checker on occasion, but mostly - I just publish it, in a hurry. I figure by now everyone know where I´m coming from, and that, if they find really bad ones - will make me aware of it. Like writing "heroine" instead of "heroin" or something like that...

Despite that my english never will be as rich as my norwegian, or as correct - I still do the diary, 2 years after. After working on an update for 6 hours, I ask myself why. Very often in fact. It takes a long time. I would guess I have at times spent even more time doing the diary than playing the game itself. Because I chase after stories ingame too. I nag players, I ask them to send me emails with textlogs, movies, pictures etc. I hunt them down, getting names over who was present, and then I hunt those. It sometimes feels like work more than a game I´m playing. And I bet all these players have more than once wanted to say some nasty things, but they keep up with me. Thankfully. There are times when I´m tired and really, really want to go to bed - but just feel that is vital it gets out right now.. Probably an illusion, I doubt many would care if I slept in between, but it just feels like it:) I get thanks, sure. Mostly from new players, sometimes from oldies. I really appreciate that.

So, want to know why I keep on doing it? It´s practically my own personal war. I am fighting on the barricades, for a game I would like to play in. With players I would enjoy playing with. Yeah, it´s like that. 2 years after, many more diaries have seen the light, and finally clanlords.com. I really hope the latter one will survive and that more will come. To me, it´s vital that something like this exists, ingame or otherwise. I have been ranting on that before so I will not repeat myself.

I want the content to be a little gossip, stories from the role-playing crowd, stories from the main quests etc, and I value the search function very much. But this last one gave me one of the biggest surprises actually. I thought players were going to use it to find out more about the ingame stories. Instead, you all searched for your own, or your friends´names:) Just after 2 months, I realized how important this was. Like an acknowledgement of a characters´ existance. A pat on the shoulder. This very much shaped how the diary came to be. I miss both having a counter, and the ability to see the searches. It usually gave me ideas for what I should write about.

I think what have warmed my heart over anything else, is when a player told me he had been thinking of leaving the game - but then he read my diary and saw, over a course of time, his character mentioned quite often. And that changed his mind.