I’ve been thinking about a Sims website for a while. I have websites for other interests so why not?
Why not, indeed? I’ve owned the domain name for over a year and still no site, so… why not?!
Ok, so life happened, but it wasn’t really that. I find myself very ambivalent about sharing in the community. Sometimes, it’s just that sharing makes me worry about what other people want and can sometimes interfere with the freedom and joy I find in just creating what comes to mind. This is a game. It’s supposed to be fun… though, for me, it’s really more a toy that a game, but still… supposed to be fun. Why else would I do it, right?
At the same time, some negative things in the community both made me feel I needed a website if I want to share at all and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to share at all…. Oth, I kept making stuff and telling people about it, so I guess that means I wanted to? (Can we say ambivalence, boys and girls?)
Finally, simfileshare stopped accepting my larger files and, then, despite all their promises (that are still emblazoned across their front page), they deleted simmers’ files. This was very discouraging for already-ambivalent me. If your files weren’t “popular,” the one place we all trusted, just arbitrarily and with very short notice, deleted them. This just seemed, to me, to send a really sad message that you must be popular to be accepted by the community. The fact that the community was not united in outrage just made it seem worse to me. I found it all… not fun. So… if I want to share at all, I needed a place of my own to coddle my precious-possibly-unpopular files and keep my little links alive.
So, here we are. I’m still ambivalent and really not all that interested in building a site, but I’m slowly poking at it. So, either this will be a place to dump files I want to share and display the pictures I’ve just been linking to in a plain, open, crawl-able directory (i know, for shame, right?). Or, maybe I’ll get into it and record all the SimScience I work on and my thoughts about the game and… you know… playing and stuff. If it grows up to become a website, I will be bringing over and post-dating all my stuff from tumblr and SFS, Facebook and MTS, and adding details that I may have edited before on social media, because, if I’m going to the trouble to create this personal space, I’d like it to be personal – a picture of how I really think of the game, how I’ve participated in the community so far, and how I go about creating. We’ll see.