Hi.
This has been a hard thread to read and try to figure out what I should be saying in it, but I do feel like I need to be saying something. I tended to play Haven in six month to year-long stints, getting a character in, established, meeting some kind of goal, and then bouncing for a bit until I could come back and do so. I can’t say I didn’t have a character in Blackfield; I can say I did not enjoy it and got that character out ASAP.
The real question that keeps coming around is people wondering what compels people to play a game like Haven, and all I can really offer there is my own experience. I joined Haven in roughly 3.0, which I want to say was around 2014 or 2015. This was one of the lowest points in my life. I was sleeping on a couch, had recently gotten out of the most toxic relationship of my life by far, had no work, no prospects, and my mental health was in the gutter. The answer was therapy, but I couldn’t afford therapy. But out of all the hurt and pain I was experiencing that time was a real sense of wanting to change myself, and that meant engaging in more negative parts of who I was.
I had met my ex playing Achaea, and I tried to pick up and radically change my old Achaean character, but it was too many memories to go back there. I had met one new friend (spoilers: this was bad), and started looking at other games to play with them, and found this game on … I want to say Top MU sites. It was a horror game, and I liked horror themes, and so I poked in, looked around at some of what was there, saw the theme that corruption is power, and decided that I wanted to give it a try.
Let my friend know, and we made characters that same day. And thus began one of the most intense roleplaying experiences of my life. I lost myself into Haven, because what Haven became was, functionally, shadow work. I heard rumors that there was an even seedier underbelly than what I was seeing, but it wasn’t really on the surface, and honestly, coming out of world of warcraft RP, people play some very, very, very messed up things. I just decided that wasn’t probably actually a thing and mostly ignored the players taking part in it.
Later iterations of the game made that harder to ignore, but so it goes. By then, I was invested.
I was not always the best player. I engaged in what could generously be called light griefing, including keeping characters locked in rooms largely inaccessible from the grid, punishing people who i perceived as misbehaving with making it so their character couldn’t speak for RL days on end, and IC harassment campaigns. Other people hit back just as hard, and I had my own little Grima Wormtongue in my ear in the form of my friend - Azazello - telling me that these actions were right and proper and nothing like the things HE had been made to go through on previous games, and that people who complained about it were just weak.
I also endured my share of griefing, including someone who actively threatened the characters of anyone he knew were OOC friends with me ICly if they even stepped out of their grid homes anywhere he could get to them, just because he didn’t like me. People in this thread were part of that, they’ve acknowledged it to me, the reason I bring it up is because I was both the victim and the beneficiary of a lot of staff favoritism.
I got hooked into metaplot, I played an unhealthy amount, it was toxic as hell and it’s pretty impossible to deny it. I’m only hinting at things. There are more stories.
And all of this was basically in version three and early days of version four. That’s when the griefing hit a point where I basically had to take a break.
I want to talk about what kept me going back in those early days, though, and why I bounced off of WoD games at the time – similar settings, similar vibes, but they just didn’t have what I was looking for. I wanted a game where I felt in constant danger and adrenaline, where we could be nasty, vicious little creatures, where we could be cruel and punishing. It opened up a steam valve I hadn’t realized I had glued shut my entire life, and it let me get a chance to really review the nastier parts of myself, figure out which ones I liked, which ones I didn’t, shape the ones I could into something better and discard the ones I couldn’t, and what was just going to be in my nature that I would have to learn to live with and learn to work around. Shadow work, just done in a much more informal way. I liked that I was in a community of people just as messed up as I was, even if I had major issues with a lot of them, and that I could test wild things and see how people reacted to them.
The speed and quantity of RP was completely unlike the MUSH scene. The quality was a significant step above the MUD. There were game elements that gave me a solid sense of character progression, and storytelling tools that really let me branch out, and all these things were fun. They weren’t why I kept playing.
Eventually, I realized the rumors that were creeping into my ears about who Azazello was were true, and after about a year, I withdrew from him pretty heavily. I took my break, I tried other games, I took a step back and watched what people wanted out of RP, and I came back in with a character with which I tried to do my part to reshape the culture of Haven into something a little less toxic; I think, to a degree, it worked, but only temporarily. The sharp edges I still had on me from Haven got honed away on other games, but the ability to slip into a character immediately like she is a second skin is still there.
The game is fucked up. I actively told people to never play it even when I was there in full force. A lot of people describe it like a drug habit, and that’s not an inaccurate way to talk about it, but it was also a lot of other things. I made friends from Haven I literally spend 15+ hours a week hanging out with, talking to, chatting with, a decade later. We have all, by and large, moved on and grown as people. I stared into the abyss of who I was and came out the other side with a much firmer grip of what I believe and value and who I want to be. I learned that things which I saw as immutable are anything but that, and things that I saw as inevitable weren’t actually that big of a thing.
I learned to be okay with not being okay.
Haven was a crucible of an experience where I got to tell some really good stories, refine my writing chops, put myself through an emotional wringer, do terrible shit, and come out the other side.
But, honestly, I should have just gone to therapy.
