The Game Center

Here is a problem that sounds trivial and was not. You cannot copy and paste out of a video game. If you met someone in a match and wanted to invite them, you had to read eight random characters aloud and hope they typed them correctly.

So I built a website. One page, one button. Go to the address, click join, you are in the room. That was the whole product, and it worked.

I was not a web developer and it showed. That site is long gone, but the idea was right — this page is the same idea done properly, nine years later.

In 2017 I wrote myself a set of messages to send to people who had joined and then never said anything. It was not a moderation thing. I just did not like the idea of somebody sitting in a server for months feeling like they were not part of it.

One was written specifically for people who do not talk because they are shy, or because walking into a room where everyone already knows each other is hard. The gist of it: the regulars are good people, we post nonsense daily, and not knowing anyone yet should not be the thing that stops you.

That is still the whole idea. I wanted the bar where everybody knows your name, with considerably more Dota.

Wanting a place where quiet people feel welcome sounds simple until you have to enforce it.

It started with slurs, which was easy — nobody serious argued the point. Then it was people telling each other to go kill themselves, and that is where I stopped treating any of it as banter. I brought in bots that caught those phrases, deleted the message, and sometimes removed the person with it.

Then came the pushback: too much censorship. I never agreed and I still do not. What actually got removed was a short list of things whose only purpose is to make somebody feel small. Everything else was fair game. We opened an uncensored channel where anyone could say whatever they liked, and almost nobody used it — which told me the objection was never really about wanting to say those things.

A server where the loudest people set the rules is a server the quiet ones quietly leave.

We ran Dota 2 in-house nights: twelve against twelve, any rank welcome, a voice channel per team, with fallbacks for when not enough people turned up. In hindsight they were held together with tape — I was organising instead of playing and the teams were assembled largely on vibes. They were also some of the best nights the server ever had.

For four Decembers I ran holiday giveaways: mugs, shirts, stickers, and a pile of games bought out of my own pocket. No sponsor and no angle. People had been good to each other all year and it seemed like the right way to say so. I stopped after 2021, which felt like the right place to stop.

The server worked. That is also what broke it for the people who were there first.

The original group slowly stopped showing up — too many people, too many strangers, too much noise. One of my oldest friends has never liked being in a room with people he does not know, and by then that is exactly what this was. I spent years pushing to get more people in, which was the same act as pushing my friends out. I did not see it that way at the time. So I made them a smaller, private one instead, and that is the one they still use.

Which brings me back to owning things. I like making things I control — servers, apps, mods, this website. I hardly ever use the power, but I like having it, because I do not entirely trust other people with it. That is why it took me so long to hand anyone else the keys, and why some of the drama that eventually split the server was other people wanting exactly the same thing.

Someone who joined here as a teenager and left for college once told me this was the server he grew up in. You cannot design that. You can only leave the door open long enough for it to happen to somebody.

I figure I own about a tenth of a percent of a lot of people's brains. Somebody mentions Discord servers, and somewhere out there a person goes: oh, The Game Center — yeah, I used to be in that.

It happened almost entirely because I would not stop asking people to join.

The door is still open

If that invite ever stops working, this one goes to the same place.

The Game Center is the oldest of four Discord servers I run, and the rest are on the Community page. Dlonem's Den goes with the YouTube channel; the other two are for my Crusader Kings III mods, The Long Night & Azor Ahai and Supernatural.