This is going to be a running series, as it happens — so I’m not sure how long it’s actually going to be, but should be good stuff.

So I want to start with the basics.  Last week, a game that I adored announced that it was closing down in a little under a month.  Up until this point, none of the community had any idea that any was wrong with the game, and it came as a pretty big shock.  

The game is called “Glitch,” and it’s a browser-based MMO that was wonderfully goofy, kinda psychedelic and had no combat.  Its focused primarily on exploration of the world and crafting.  It uses a system similar to Eve on-line, where training skills and in games requires real world time.  Start out at just a few minutes, and towards the end can take weeks.  

Anyway, the zany story which is ripe with innuendo and adult humor, all wrapped in a colorful animation style that’s utterly unique in the world of gaming, Glitch captured the hearts of a lot of people …. just not enough it would seem.  

The game closes on December 9th, and it’s pretty sad.  In light of it’s imminent demise, satellite communities started to pop up everywhere: Flickr groups, DeviantArt, Facebook, Tumblrs just to name a few.  

But what all the screenshots in the world wouldn’t capture was the community.  People had seen saying that it was the community that made the game, not the other way around (there’s probably a deeper lesson in here someplace), but a lot of people were upset about the loss of the community, in addition to the game itself. 

My first instinct was to create a game as a home for these displaced Glitchen (players of Glitch call themselves Glitchen), but as I’m not a dev (even if I was a dev) it was going to take a long time to get something like that in place.  By the time it was ready, the community as a whole likely would have fallen apart, or been greatly diminished.  

My next piece of inspiration came from the amazing Jane McGonigal.  She started a site called Gameful.org that a while back I helped with a while back.  The site had originally been on WordPress using a plugin called BuddyPress, which turned it into a social network, kind of on-demand.  From there, the team used CubePoints and Achievements to gamify the site.  Completely custom branded.  

So I thought - holy crap, I can do that!  I posted in the Facebook group, found a couple partners in crime, and set off to this vision of someplace for our community to live that felt distinctly Glitch, and had a feeling of game — hopefully get the best of both worlds.  

Thus, my journey of building a home for a community begins ….