OOC My Side of the Story

 What really happened?

I’m writing this now because it has been long enough for the pain of what happened to die down somewhat, and because it is recent enough that the events are fresh in my memory.  I know there are those who hate me now, and are absolutely convinced that the hard feelings surrounding the demise of the UIR are exclusively the fault of us (primarily me and Ziebzen).  This isn’t meant to exonerate me.  If you are the sort that believes whatever a GM spoon feeds you, then that is a problem in which I have no stake.  I’m writing this primarily for me, so that months from now if I ask myself “Why did I leave Insilico anyway?”  I’ll have something to refer to.  It’s not written as a proof or as a defense case.  I have nothing to defend.  I will speak exclusively from my own perspective.  The events are presented as I remember them.  The conclusions are mine alone.  I don’t seek to prove anything with this.

When Jodie reached out to me in the suggestion thread to try to resolve our differences “with a mind toward reintegrating you into the city”, I thought she was bluffing.  In retrospect, I was probably right.  She wanted to appear to be taking the high road, and felt safe in the knowledge that I was too emotionally exhausted to actually take her up on her offer.  But I still cared deeply for the city at that time.  Many of my friends still played there.  I had an immense burden of compassion for them.

This idea of a burden of compassion seems strange to me when I read it at face value.  But it was the culmination of several months of OOC backstory.  It was a psychological habit I’d fallen into.  In the height of the TWF conflict, when the plague hit and most of my friends found themselves playing diseased ice cubes in cryo tubes, my motivation to participate for purely IC reasons had long since completely collapsed.  I no longer cared about what happened with the TWF storyline.  It was an absurd Mary Sue adventure to which all of us were subjected but which none of us could affect in any meaningful way.  On a personal level, I just wanted to ride it out and get it over with.  But my friends were miserable.  They were locked away from their characters for weeks.  They were bored out of their minds and close to either quitting or permadeathing their characters and starting over.  We were losing people daily.  I was playing a Tokuma security officer.  So I was powerfully motivated, for purely OOC reasons, to try to resolve the TWF fiasco as quickly as possible so that the city wouldn’t lose players.  It was a losing battle.  Even working at our hardest nearly 24 hours a day (in my case) at the time, we could not advance or resolve the plot.  The GMs maddenly refused to give us a toehold on even making contact with the TWF, much less defeating them.  The situation deteriorated, to include several incidents where players were permadeathed without their consent by GMs, including Laura and later Ezekiel.

So I was still in this mindset of desperately wanting to rescue the other players and fight to keep the sim together when Jodie’s offer came to me.  Thus I still had the fire in my heart to work for the sim.  It was so powerful, that even though I’d been comprehensively dismissed, disassembled, ostracized, and marginalized by the GMs, I was actually still willing to come back and try to fix things.  And so I did.

I am not sure what was really going through Jodie’s mind in that first meeting.  We talked about the state of the sim, and the history we’d gone through.  We offered to talk it out and come to a point of resolution - of something approaching mutual forgiveness and trust.  I didn’t bring anything up I thought needed to be hashed out.  But Jodie did touch on Laura’s death.  She did admit that on a later reading of her chat logs, it appeared to her that she was distracted; not fully engaged, and suggested that she may not have really been aware of the gravity of the situation.  For her part, Jodie did point to the minimap, which at that moment had 1 active player on it, and said these words “You wanted to see if you could wipe out the sim.  Well I guess you can.”  I’d started playing in Toxia after I left Insilico in frustration a few weeks before.  I followed other Insilicans who had established themselves there, and the exodus would continue, until we numbered 6 or so active players in Toxia.  Jodie apparently believed I had pulled away everyone to other sims.  I didn’t give this idea any credence. There was an exodus, but it started in the height of the TWF storyline, and came to a climax during the absurd plague.  The sim was wiped out, but it was entirely the fault of the GMs.  These things happen when you lock everyone in cryo tubes for 3 weeks at a time.  But I didn’t say any of this.  This was a peace discussion, and I didn’t feel I needed to say it.  I offered to come back to IS and help rebuild the city.  Jodie accepted my offer.  I think there was, for both of us, a fragile trust.  It would not last.

Jodie took the advice that came up as a result of the suggestion box thread, and created a new section of the city in North.  It had been requested to set up a place with no police presence, where underground characters could gather and play in safety.  The thinking was that the city needed an underground.  Indeed, considering the setting is cyberpunk, the absence of an active underground community was always intensely conspicuous to me.  How do you have cyberpunk without any punks?  The question always baffled me.  I was eventually to find out the answer.  Jodie did a magnificent job.  She created the space, even gave us a spaceport, and put an information box at the front clearly stating that the area was somewhere corporate cops dare not go.  I put a hell of a lot of effort in writing a series of blogs to establish and set the tone of the new area, which Jodie called “The Shades”, and my IS career in crime began.  I set about building a faction to go with the new space.

The early going was rough.  There were players that were in my nascent underground faction before I left, but most of them had either themselves left, or had become so generally disillusioned that they just weren’t online very much.  In time I would get a couple of people together, but the underground really got moving as a faction when Ziebzen joined us.

I have to stop a moment and talk about Ziebzen.  Because my experience in getting to know her, and comparing the real person to the propaganda I’d been fed by the GMs about her was a watershed in my understanding of the true nature of IS.  Until we RPed together and I got a sense of the person, I really had no idea how much spin control goes on in the OOC Insilico universe in Skype hives and the like.  Ziebzen was the leader of Gemini Cybernetics for much of the time I was in Insilico.  My direct dealings with her showed her to be elegant and, to be honest, kind.  But to hear her described by the GMs, she was incompetent, self absorbed, and was in the process of running Gemini into the ground.  There was an attitude that Gemini needed to be rescued from her.

My direct experience revealed a woman who is amazingly creative and has a beautiful soul.  She has an approach to leadership - she inspires, then demonstrates graceful forbearance when it comes to actually taking control.  She is far more modest and humble than she deserves to be.  As a result, she engenders incredible and beautiful loyalty in the people in her faction.  It became quickly apparent that everyone in Gemini loved her.  And I found it very easy to see why.  I made a decision early on in the UIR’s history - even though I was ostensibly the OOC faction leader, Ziebzen would be respected as at the very least, an IC co-leader.  As the faction grew, Ziebzen became more and more a central figure.  I couldn’t have been happier.  She was a natural at leadership and inspiration.

This is when the first elements of doubt began to creep into my understanding of IS.  I knew that from her perch high atop the IS social structure, Jodie would have been in a position to know how wonderful Ziebzen really was.  Someone who really cared about the sim would have seen the need to turn Ziebzen loose, to let her creativity thrive and take form, and to celebrate her participation in the sim.  Instead, Ziebzen was seemingly maligned at every opportunity.  I found this baffling.

The UIR faction turned out completely different than I anticipated.  It was wildly successful.  At our height, we were the most numerous faction in the city proper.  The only other faction in or league was VASC.  Everyone seemed to want to join us.  The faction grew.  It was then that I started to see the problem.  The Shades were an island of activity and hope in what was otherwise a desert.  Jodie was largely MIA as Gemini’s faction leader, and her people suffered for the loss.  They said that if she were only on more often, RPed with them from time to time, that they would be happy.

So I made it a point to talk to Jodie.  “They need you”  I said.  She reacted bitterly.  Toward her own loyal following!  The people who were sticking with the regime - slogging it out as characters in her faction, despite the enormous temptation to follow the leader they loved to another group.  After weeks of seeing what a truly capable faction leader was like, I found this reaction to be a jarring juxtaposition.  The aura of what I’d imagined IS to be cracked just a bit further.

In the weeks that followed, I started to hear noise in the grapevine that the UIR was in the GM’s crosshairs for annihilation.  When this became known to me, everything clicked into place.   We were a problem not because we were subversives or conspirators, but because we were successful.  We embarrassed Jodie, and probably Fifth as well, with the success of the UIR faction.  This could not be countenanced.  So we were to be destroyed.  Just like Laura was destroyed.  GM fiat.

It was about this time that we learned what would motivate Jodie to action.  When Ziebzen and Phee came to interact with one another, given their history and knowledge of Gemini and Tokuma operations, respectively, we were in a position to make some rather amazing IC discoveries.  Most notably, between what we both knew, it was possible to know that the Skye character was in fact the 105 AI, who had formerly been director of Tokuma Heavy Industries.  When Ziebz blogged some of our RP in discovering and reacting to this information, Jodie suddenly appeared out of nowhere to post comments in the thread.  She was interested and engaged.  And so we learned what it took to get Jodie engaged.  The city?  Nope.  Her faction?  Nope.  But bring up her character, and oh there she is!

We were sort of waiting it out.  To date, the UIR had taken no RP action as a group in the city.  We’d launched no attacks, made no raids.  We hadn’t even announced ourselves as a presence in the city.  From an RP context, the average NPC on the street would have no idea we even existed.  It was about this time that the first attempt was made to destroy us.

It was a Friday night, I think.  There were a large number of UIR players in the Shades. We were talking, hanging out, then seeming waves of newbies showed up at the gates to the Shades, wanted in, and became hostile when refused.  We got into a running gun battle with several of them.  It became difficult to separate the real RPers from the trolls with guns.  At one point, someone named “Pey”, a VASC player, was shooting at us while not wearing a meter, and dressed in a D’naa costume.  I contacted Stark to ask if we were really being attacked by the D’naa, but he instead replied cryptically “Don’t get me involved.”

The antics continued, including Pey walking right past us, this time meter on and dressed in her VASC uniform,  while we were challenging another group of newbies.  I contacted her in IM, explained that there are about 20 NPCs with guns who wouldn’t let someone dressed like a soldier just walk in, to which she replied that she just walks wherever she likes.  OK, whatever, I said - you don’t respect the setting, I don’t RP.  And then proceeded to ignore her.  She then sent an IM explaining that she was placing charges.  I told her that they would be ignored as griefing because she didn’t respect the setting.  A little while later, Jodie appeared on the nearby hydroponics terrace.  We were slugging it out with the newbies, who kept getting back up again after being killed, when several ridiculously huge bombs started going off.  We thought they were something one of the newbs was doing - perhaps the giant velociraptor, so we just rolled with it and had fun with it - treated the whole situation as random OOC street combat.  About that time, Jodie sends me an IM to ask why my meter isn’t dropping.  That seemed to be a very interesting question to suddenly ask out of the blue.  But I stepped out of the combat and did some tests.  It turned out that my meter had been locked up.  It wouldn’t register any damage, and didn’t respond to any commands.  We would find out everyone in the blast radius of the bombs was affected in exactly the same way.  Jodie then went on to say that Pey had been paid to kill us all, which suggested that Jodie held the absurdity to be valid IC, and that we should all be dead.  This lined up with the reason why she suddenly IMed me in the middle of combat.  We discussed some of Pey’s actions, and Jodie gave me a complete bullshit excuse why Pey wasn’t a puddle of blood on the floor.  This told me they were working very closely together.

Then I put 2 and 2 together.  Everyone’s meters were absolutely fucked up.  We had to rez new ones from the original boxes to get working meters again.  Why would a bug like this suddenly crop up out of nowhere?  Because Pey had been given specially scripted explosives from Jodie (the developer and maintainer of the Insilico K9 meter) that were probably designed to knock our meters to 0 instantaneously.  Apparently they had not been fully tested.  Jodie’s role in the scene, as a GM, apparently did not betray the slightest interest in flying machine gun armed velociraptors.  She was watching my avatar, ready to squeal in triumph when she saw it lie prostrate on the floor.  When she didn’t see it, she spoke up.

A flood of disgust raced into my mind.  Her faction was falling apart.  The city was falling apart.  She couldn’t be bothered to RP her own character as a leader or engage her own people.  But she could find the time to arrange for the Shades to be bombed with custom scripted bombs and make a personal appearance to ensure their effect.  It was at that moment that I realized that Insilico does not have GMs.  It has super-players.  Jodie didn’t give a shit about anything but her own character.  So I gathered my faction.  We went down the elevator to the spacedock. and from there, TPed to the Utopia airship.

The scene was voided amidst an outcry from some of the affected players, but for me, the damage was done.  We had pretty much abandoned the city by the time Jodie allegedly ragequit and Fifth and Inara decided to conduct our annihilation in a more official manner.

So now you know what happened to Phee.  I came away from this with the following conclusions about the city:

1 - as previously noted, as a matter of practicality, the GMs are in fact players, not GMs.  I don’t know about Betz, but then again, I never had to deal with a ruling from Betz.  The GMs who seem to hand down rulings behave like players.

2 - The GMs cannot seem to accept any player run faction.  They can’t seem to handle any faction with things going on they don’t control.  This was demonstrated with Gemini, and then was later demonstrated with UIR.

3 - IS cannot sustain underground factions because such factions are inherently and necessarily opposed to the social order.  Any deviation from this order - large, powerful corporate factions headed by GMs, is met with swift and absolute persecution.

I hope I’ve burst some bubbles here.  The entire Insilico cycle of abuse is dependent on the integrity of lies.  If I shined some light on some of those lies, I promise you that it is less painful than what I was subjected to to find out the truth firsthand.  Pissed off?  You should be.  Insilico is not what it says on the tin.