Hey. Editor here, formerly Daed.

It means a lot to hear that some of what I was trying to build there genuinely mattered to people.

That said, I want to be careful about how much credit I accept for the good parts, because I also have to accept responsibility for the bad parts.

Haven was supposed to be an urban horror game. That was the original idea, at least as I understood it. I have always had a pretty enormous love of action, superheroes, and increasingly ridiculous supernatural bullshit, and I was absolutely one of the people responsible for dragging Haven away from that original vision. As a young man, I also possessed a lack of self-control that wasn’t limited to any one member of staff, either. All of us contributed to the game becoming something very different from what it was originally supposed to be.

Eventually, Haven went from urban horror to comic-book levels of supernatural shenanigans, alongside what can only fairly be described as pornographic levels of smut, and while the former is my fault solely, the latter probably belongs to all three of us.

And there were much worse problems than that.

There were toxic people and sex pests. There were abusers. There were things happening on that game that should never have been happening, and the staff, myself included, did not do enough to stop them. I can point to individual decisions I made, or things I tried to do, but ultimately I was part of the staff of that game for years. I stayed. I knew things were happening. Sometimes I acted, and sometimes I didn’t.

That makes me complicit in the bad shit that happened there.

I don’t really have a more comfortable way of putting it.

I did try to push back against some of it. Sometimes that meant confronting people, sometimes it meant intervening in stories, and sometimes it meant taking matters into my own hands in ways that I probably shouldn’t have. I PKed people whose behavior I found completely unacceptable. There are things I saw that disturbed me deeply enough that I still remember them vividly.

One incident in particular involved an underage sexual scene that affected me badly enough that I literally threw up all over my laptop and had to replace it. I subsequently PKed the person responsible, which led to this Reddit interaction.

But none of that makes me a hero. If anything, it makes the contradiction harder to reconcile. I could be horrified enough by what I was seeing to react that strongly and still remain part of the staff of that game for years afterward.

I sometimes tell myself that I didn’t have banning power, and that’s true. But it isn’t really an excuse. I didn’t have banning power because I wasn’t trusted with it. I had spent years subverting the intended theme of the game, and I absolutely played favorites. There were people I liked, people I disliked, and people whose presence I simply didn’t want to deal with. I don’t think giving me unilateral authority over who was allowed to remain on Haven would necessarily have produced a fairer community.

I have to own that too.

Blackfield, and its predecessor the Academy, were probably part of the beginning of the end for me personally. I saw things there that I found profoundly disturbing, but I stayed for years anyway. I don’t have a particularly satisfying explanation for that. At the time, I think I convinced myself that staying meant I could do more good than leaving. Looking back, I’m not nearly as certain that was true.

I don’t want to dismiss the good times from Haven, because I cared hugely about the game and about the people who played it. I think there really was something special about the ability to let players build their own corners of the world, run their own stories, and create things that staff never could have come up with ourselves. I am genuinely proud of some of what we accomplished there.

But I also don’t want to hide behind the good parts.

Haven’s failures are a big part of my history.

And that brings me to SuperMUD. The community that has been watching SuperMUD develop is, in a lot of ways, a community in healing. There are people who want a fresh start. There are people who have complicated feelings about Haven. There are people who enjoyed Haven immensely and people who were hurt by it. I don’t think we can pretend that history doesn’t exist, and I don’t think we should.

Anyway, that’s the last thing I’m probably going to say about Haven in a public setting.