Incoming rant because I’ve had a bad day:

I think we make a mistake in calling the people who run sites ‘staff’. Staff implies employment. It implies servitude. It implies that we are there to be at the beck and call of members at all times. It leads people to feel they can treat us however they fancy because we are there to serve them and provide them an experience.

News flash, we are not. We are roleplayers who have decided to create a world we want to write in, and we’ve chosen to invite others to join us in that world. We get to pick the rules. We get to decide how it runs. But we also get to decide who is in our world and, news flash again, players are not entitled to be there. The better term for us would be authors. Authors with our assistants, who are there to create a world, to share it with others, and to write and tell our own stories. Not staff on hand to serve.

In my opinion, these attitudes are why sites close so quickly these days. It’s fine at first. Seems fun. You set up a site thinking an idea would be fun. You create the world, come up with some rules, create some ideas. You invite people in. They have qs. You happily answer. They have apps. You give them a look to make sure they fit your world. Maybe you have a gander at creating a site plot for others to engage in. You come up with some events. It’s all cool.

But slowly, over time, you find that instead of role-playing, you’ve become a 24/7 help desk, putting on a customer service face, trying to settle disputes and questions, dealing with assholes who don’t care about your well-being or boundaries, who get mad at you if you’re not progressing the site plot like you’re being paid to handhold their experience, and it’s like ‘fuck, why am I even running this world when I don’t get to write in it?’

It needs to change. We should not be holding site authors to these standards, and we should not be demanding extreme professionalism and customer service care from an amateur, hobbyist activity. And we should stop calling people who run them staff. Period. Call them authors. Architects. Volunteers. Whatever you fancy. (I quite like architect.) But they are not employees at a player’s beck and call, and they should not be referred to that way. When we open a site, we invite others into that world. Players are not entitled to that access. That invitation should be treated with more respect. And so should site authors.

This has been my grumpy ted talk. Thank you for coming.