In early 2000, the Myst fan community (and the Myst franchise’s popularity at large) reached a peak: realMyst was coming up later that year, Myst III: Exile early the following year, and to top it all, the first screenshots and teensy pieces of information on the ominous MUDPIE were showing up.

It was, consequently, a period of growth, with RivenGuild witnessing the largest influx of new members it had ever had, but also of change. Not everyone likes change. Some avoid it, and some even actively work against it. Changes don’t necessarily go into a direction everyone or even a majority can agree on. Changes also create uncertainties, and those uncertainties create fear.

Thus, those ‘new arrivals’ weren’t universally welcome. Perhaps it was then that accusations of elitism first came up: “the old” were suddenly in conflict with “the new”. You’d think that impossible or laughable; it’s a bunch of games and novels we’re talking about, and we all share that common interest. Nothing serious, nothing particularly disagreeable. And yet, one could start to feel a rift building up.

But it wasn’t until 2001 that this rift would grow substantially and cause damage, to the point where some left not to return for years, or never. In 2000, things were still relatively cool. There was a lot to look forward to, like I said, and even the rather unusual choice to have Presto, not Cyan, develop “Exile” wasn’t a big deterrent for most people, what with Cyan nodding so approvingly.

And so, people were generally rather chipper, anticipating the many new things that were to come. CyanChat was an active chatroom, RivenGuild was an active discussion board, and the RivenLyst, too, had much activity. Some regulars of all three of those decided to make the obvious next step: let’s meet in real life! Mysterium was born.

Perhaps I’m telling the story in a rather inaccurate way. I wasn’t fully there yet; I didn’t ‘really’ join the community until around fall, and there’s a lot I’ve had to retroactively piece together about what had transpired in this rather unique, sometimes bizarre fandom before my arrival. If you have something in particular to correct, of course, be my guest; the comments section exists for good reasons!

But in general, I should have it right. Among those individuals were Scraper, Salar, Lehsa, Mihshehl and a few others who I only forgot because it’s early in the morning, not because they amount to less. RAWA over at Cyan also stepped in, sorta-kinda giving the gathering an official blessing; yes, even to the point where it was to take place right there in Spokane! As we would find out in the future, it was to be that way every third year, which if you ask me is a wonderful thing to have. (We don’t know, of course, whether Mysterium 2009 will be there again; the pattern, I’m told, is actually more or less coincidental.)

There was a planning committee – consisting of the aforementioned people – , and when Mysterium finally did take place in the summer of 2000, the people would meet to have much fun, and they did. It was so successful that it was repeated in 2001, with Carlsbad, New Mexico as the new location, and 2002, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then in Spokane again in 2003 (see above), and so on and so on (Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Chicago, Illinois; Spokane again in 2006). The eighth Mysterium just took place a few weeks ago in Los Angeles, California.

A Mysterium in Spokane tends to attract over a hundred people, especially on Saturdays, because that’s when you get to take a closer peek at the headquarters. The other two out of three years, there’s probably more like 60-80 people. It’s nothing huge, it doesn’t compete with Comic-Con or E3, and it’s relatively uninteresting to most journalists, unless you happen to write for the local-local paper’s local section.

But, that doesn’t really matter: the committee never aspired to win any prizes in extraordinary marketing efforts, and I seriously doubt any of the attendees would really want for it to be that much larger, either. The small size is rather seen as a perk; it’s more like a barbecue birthday party with lots and lots of friends and friends’ friends of yours than it is like a professional convention. There’s no entrance fee, there’s no sponsoring, and there’s no companies in the background.

There’s an interesting point there.

Corporatism

A typical convention for a fandom – be it for a computer game series like Myst, a science-fiction TV series compound like Star Trek, or really any kind of complex fictional universe – has some level of corporate backing to it. It makes business sense for the developer, producer or publisher to actively show their interest in the fans. For one, the fans are almost guaranteed to buy future products in the franchise, even if they end up criticizing it. And, that criticism of theirs actually happens to be the most valuable compared to that of the majority of customers: they think the very most about all the little logical flaws in a particular storyline; they are arguably more dedicated to continuous quality than the creators themselves. A strong business case can therefore be made in favor of staying in close touch with fans, and a convention makes that easy, to (typically) mutual satisfaction.

Second, fans also care about satellite products: merchandise and other gear. That may not amount to much in terms of revenues, but it would nonetheless be foolish to ignore that opportunity.

But most importantly, having representatives of a company attend simply makes it seem like less of an ominous, distant necessary evil. A personal component comes into play: you don’t just know employees from the support e-mail replies they have sent you or the occasional press release, but from actually having eaten dinner with them. Not that this ever gets fans in touch with the “evil ones” making the actual decisions (especially those fans disapprove of), but it’s a start.

Still, it can make for an undeniably awkward atmosphere. How much that cuts into the intentions of a convention’s initiators depends on the extent of this ‘corporatism’: they could merely send representatives who appear like any other attendee, or they could sponsor the event, with giant banners all over the place, everyone getting a “free” t-shirt with their logo on it and, of course, some marketing presentation that you’re supposed to attend out of politeness.

The committee was very adamant from the get-go that this was not what they wanted. In the latter case, that seems a quintessential decision; in the former, however, it may be overstretching for some people. There’s also a double standard to this; nobody ever objected to Cyan handing out gear (including t-shirts, baseball caps and other kinds of merchandise that you would easily regard as advertisements if you weren’t a fan), but once Ubisoft came into the picture, it was suddenly quite a controversial topic.

Part of the reason is size. Cyan is a small company (even at its peak a few years later, it never employed more than several dozen people), with all the hobbyist clichés attached to it: it started out in a garage, its CEO feels more like a great guy you’d love to have as a close friend than “the big boss”, and so on. Ubisoft is a worldwide corporation with almost four thousand employees and 15 own in-house development studios, and if that alone doesn’t feel a little menacing to a poor little fan, consider the plethora of things they plain got wrong in dealing with Myst fans, especially in their earlier years. They are still to this day perceived as largely responsible for the death of RivenGuild and that of the original Uru Live, as well as many other scars and battles in a community that, you’d think (from the genre and mood of the games), should otherwise be quite peaceful. That they remedied many of those mistakes later on doesn’t necessarily matter to a lot of fans; the pain just “cut too deep”, to use a line of Atrus’s.

The experience with Ubisoft has been downright traumatic to some. While one could easily argue that the Myst franchise (and perhaps Cyan as a company) would have been dead years ago if it hadn’t been for Ubisoft’s financial ‘life support’ (especially with regard to End of Ages), that just isn’t what happened. Ubisoft did jump in, and not always in the most appreciated of ways. They can’t blame fans for consequentially drawing conclusions.

Nonetheless, it is a double standard, appropriate or not. When Cyan did their early demos of MUDPIE-era stuff at Mysteriums 2001 and 2002, or eventually of Uru in 2003, nobody objected. Yet, when Ubisoft said they were going to show off an early preview for Myst IV: Revelation in 2004, this launched a debate that first made representatives choose an external location (in the same town, so Mysterium attendees could choose to come or not), only for some to change their attitudes and let the do it in the same hotel anyway.

Much energy was wasted on that debate. It’s not that everyone’s point of view can’t be understood; it’s that we need a little bit of perspective here: there’s a new game coming out for Myst fans. That it’s not from Cyan, and that it’s not entirely canon, and that there’s blatant (but RAWA-approved) revisionism of “wait, the brothers are alive?!” altogether may not make everyone happy, but ultimately, I know from a fact that many absolutely loved the result, and didn’t feel in any way that it wasn’t true to Cyan’s style. Admittedly, I never finished it because some of the puzzles just aggravated me to the point where I didn’t even feel like pulling out a walkthrough any more, but I can appreciate that much stunning work and creativity were put into it, and I did not feel at all like it was “just another sequel” for Ubisoft to milk some money out of a proven concept (quite the opposite; it was, at the time, somewhat risky to put out, as adventure gaming had already been on a decline for years).

The hypocrisy, thus, is two-fold: one, that non-Cyan companies shouldn’t be treated differently, particularly when they, just like Cyan, only bring a handful of people to the convention, to show off a few things and participate in the activities (given the time) just like anyone else; two, that the there’s-a-new-game-coming presentations are actually among the greatest reasons for fans to attend a Mysterium to begin with, especially with the exclusivity (I still regret not having been able to witness the MUDPIE trailer back in 2001), so they should be welcomed, whether they come from Cyan, Presto, Ubisoft’s “Team Revelation” or someone different (remember, these sequels did have Cyan’s blessing, and quite unlike with the comic books, no Cyan employee retroactively denounced them in any form).

Be wary of corporatism, but don’t be generalizing and wholly intolerant of it.

But the recent debate, as it turns out, is not about corporatism at all. That’s just a lame bone thrown at us to distract us from the real problem.

Commi-who?

I first attended Mysterium in 2003. My second and thus far final attendance was the year after. In both cases, I connected the trip to other, mostly unrelated things; for someone travelling all the way from Germany, not doing so would be financially irresponsible.

One thing I noticed right from the start was how hard it was for an interested fan to find out more about Mysterium. Its history, how it was organized, who the committee are, what kinds of functions they serve and don’t serve, and so on. You can easily witness this even today: take a look at the website’s FAQ and try and figure out any of the above questions. The questions that are answered are all useful to know, no doubt, but this should be your first clue that there is one giant cloud of opacity hovering over the committee, and, in fact, just about everything surrounding the organization of Mysterium.

Not that there should be that much to it; you pick a city each year, find a suitable hotel, and invite people. It’s the committee themselves who claim that there’s a complex process to it, and that they do have much work to do every time. If that is the case, why not tell us all what the work is?

It is made by the fans, for the fans.

The committee consists of fans. Sure, RAWA’s in it, and he’s kind of more like a representative of Cyan (or liaison, as Scraper calls it), but if he didn’t work for Cyan, he’d without doubt be the Myst’s number one fan anyway.

The convention attracts fans. Sure, it also sometimes attracts some people from a company or two (see previous section). Sometimes (such as in 2004), a handful of people even join in when they’ve never heard of Myst before, just to have fun together with a group that strikes them as interesting, intriguing, if not perhaps a little quixotic and weird, in the most positive of ways.

But at its heart, the above statement from the first FAQ question, “What is Mysterium?”, couldn’t be more true. Or perhaps it ought to say:

It is meant to be made by the fans, for the fans.

Now, I didn’t start Mysterium; I never even got particularly involved with Mysterium, and as I’ve alluded to above, there are people who have attended Mysterium three times as often as I have. And those who started it are in their right to do with it what they want. (Actually, that isn’t entirely true either, since the Mysterium trademark and the currently non-functional mysterium.net domain, for a series of bizarre reasons, lie with Cyan, not anyone currently or previously on the committee, but then, Cyan is unlikely to / would be extremely dense to litigate against its own fans. But let’s just assume, for the moment, that the committee as we knew it did in fact own the full rights to Mysterium.)

But from my point of view, and everyone I’ve talked to thus far (and I don’t have that much tunnel vision, or do I?) has strongly agreed, one thing the above statement of the committee’s implies is transparency. And when you cannot even easily find out who the committee is, and when the only means of contact whatsoever is found in the form of an e-mail address on the Donations page (rather than, say, a page named “Contact”), and when that address doesn’t actually contain a name but merely starts with “mysterium AT”, then I cannot blame you if you feel a little bit at unease.

I don’t know about you, but my natural instincts kind of make me expect a lovely little page named “Who We Are” or something, with a bunch of names (!), photos (!!) and means of contact (!!!). Okay, so maybe they’re somehow simultaneously open enough to lead a committee for a convention where dozens of people gather together (and, one would assume, meet them as well) yet at the same time too shy or wary of their privacy to show their photos (”Internet paranoia” doesn’t count either; what, then, are they doing in an online fandom?); I’ll let that slide, even though it makes zero sense to me.

Ran joined that committee at some point (in 2005? 2006? you’d never know because, as you might by now guess, nothing on the website tells you of such things), which actually made me happy because I expected a little less perceived apathy from their end from that point on. By now, he has left again, and so has arguably the most active person (at least as perceived fro the outside), the aforementioned Scraper. Personal issues, she cites; nobody can blame her for having different priorities, and sometimes life just bites you in the back like that.

Toronto, Los Angeles, do they care?

2004 marked the first Mysterium outside its home country. That sounds a lot more dramatic than it really is because, well, the US is a huge country by most standards, sharing third-largest spot with China. But the second reason it’s so misleading is that Toronto isn’t that far away from the border to begin with: a trip from Buffalo is less than a two hour drive. Finally, a US American at the time typically did not even need a passport (gosh forbid!) to enter Canada, so even in that respect, it wasn’t really like your typical trip to a different country. I was there, and as far as I could tell, the overwhelming majority of attendees were from the US, just like the years before.

For (some of?) the committee members, however, it was a little too distant, or perhaps thought of as too culturally different. They did go for the obvious solution of letting a local handle some of the minutiae, but, I’m told by her (Erithan), not without reluctance (if not downright apathy) on their part, and general difficulties in working together.

I’m independently being told the same story now, three years later, with Mysterium in Los Angeles: this time, it was vaaht who stepped up (again, someone from town), but she, too, claims not to have expected such indifference and lack of cooperation. And this time, none of the committee members actually attended. It’s as if there was nothing “Mysterium” about this Mysterium, except for the name, and the fact that everyone, as usual, had an awful lot of fun. (Which, mind you, is the very most important of all.) But they could have had fun with a different name, and apparently also without any sort of involvement of the committee.

It would be silly to assume that committee members are deliberately trying to jeopardize the success of a particular gathering, regardless of whether they intend to attend or not. Sometimes it’s too costly due to the distance, sometimes they’re too exhausted or busy with other things. We’re all human, and there’s no reason not to understand that everyone has their own stuff to deal with. Mysterium isn’t a business or even a non-profit, and the committee aren’t staff that’s paid in any form whatsoever, aside from being able to see their own achievements, or perhaps getting the occasional form of praise from a fan or group thereof. No, there’s no sabotage going on, nor any other kind of malice.

But, piecing things together, it’s looking like the only two active committee members this year were Scraper and Ran. Mihshehl had posted to the Lyst about her resignation some time last year, RAWA is obviously well-overworked at Cyan (and has, I understand, generally stayed out of specifics that didn’t directly concern Cyan anyway, mostly merely acting as a proxy), Salar hadn’t been heard much from in a long time, and when you do see Lehsa, she sure talks about a lot of things, but typically not exactly anything Mysterium-related. If there was anything else, nobody would have known, since the website doesn’t provide any obvious means to check.

Reaction

While the gathering itself went great, vaaht’s experiences apparently left her with an aftertaste, pondering how things were going to be in the future. Much discussion ensued, involving a core group of Alahmnat, CAGrayWolf, The World and vaaht, but also others (including yours truly). When Scraper posted her resignation, and Ran did as well not long after, the aforementioned group of four posted a brief message to various outlets, such as here on MYSTcommunity. On The Lyst (a continuation of RivenLyst, frequented by most committee members), it caused quite a stir.

The announcement made a major false assumption: that, with Scraper and Ran gone, with Mihshehl gone since last year, and with most others apparently not active any more in a while, the committee was effectively disbanded. With no way of contacting them (the only given e-mail address appears to actually be Scraper’s), and no way of knowing who is currently in the committee, if anyone, this assumption was hard to disprove and was – admittedly a bit too easily, but still understandably – taken for granted.

Mihshehl was not amused. Her responses range from merely questioning to downward accusatory; from innocent to angry. Witness the difference between:

I assume you have contacted “the other Committee” Members?

And, in another message just 22 minutes later:

Save your “Thanks” to past committee members. [..] If you just went on with out them, mowing everyone down, then your “word of
thanks” is akin to a slap in the face.

On her own website, she first posted an attack apparently aimed (mostly) at vaaht, then went on to post someone’s e-mail to her, responding to individual sentences one-by-one, with several inaccuracies; for instance, she falsely assumes not only that http://www.mysterium.net/ is reachable (I haven’t been able to go there in weeks, but it pretty much just redirects to http://home.wi.rr.com/scraper/Mysterium/ anyway), but also that it contains pieces of information as the committee’s members, a contact form, etc., which it demonstrably does not.

Before you protest: if there’s something I’m accusing Mihshehl of, it’s merely that she had a short temper in this situation. But she was far from the only one. I’m also not posting her messages as something for people to laugh at, or to make her in particular look bad. Mihshehl can be a wonderful and dedicated person; we were, at one point, friends to the point where I stayed at her house overnight once.

No, the point is that mistakes were made on both “sides”, and could have been avoided by taking a little more time reading every message twice instead of lashing out immediately like a bulldog.

But, here goes the real problem:

Sides

A human being is an individual. More so in this century than perhaps a hundred years ago, and certainly much more so than in the medieval ages. But to an extent, it’s always been that way. This enables us to have unique opinions, and make unique decisions that are truly our own (or, perhaps, those that fate gave us). The flip side of the coin is the vast potential for conflict. Disagree on something, and you may never find yourself getting along with a person again. We’re so dedicated about some of our causes that any kind of dissent doesn’t just irritates us; it temporarily turns us into destructive, unlikable monsters.

When people attend Mysterium, there doesn’t have to be anything they actually agree on. Most will like Myst, but perhaps some only like Uru. Many will like to talk to other people, but others will prefer to be alone and have only come because of some presentation due to take place. Some will like Cyan; others may prefer Presto’s work, or Team Revelation’s. You’d think they’re all alike, but they’re not, and if they were, that would be rather boring anyway. Slight disagreements are the very basis of a conversation; you can’t learn from each other if you all have the same point of view.

I don’t know about other committee members, but what Mihshehl – and I’m sorry to once again drag her out in particular, but she was by far the most vocal on this whole matter – saw in the announcement the four posted was a struggle for ego. That’s funny, because from ‘our’ perspective (mine, and that of others I’ve asked), ego is precisely the problem that we see, from our perspective, in the current (or previous) committee.

That’s not criticism; it’s human nature. Most of the committee members have been in there so long that, without any wrongdoing whatsoever on there part and without noticing in any way, a sense of entitlement has grown in them. They’ve always done it; why wouldn’t they do it again?

One reason why is location. The committee and vaaht tell two quite different stories on each party’s involvement in making this year’s Mysterium happen the way it did; if her version is to be believed, the process leaves a whole lot to be desired. A portion (perhaps half) of the committee should simply change based on location each year; if you can’t contribute to the general work and aren’t familiar with the destination’s specifics either, you shouldn’t be on the committee. But even the other portion of the committee, the one responsible for the location-agnostic aspects, needs some sort of accountability.

One cannot help but get the impression right now that, as a potential attendee, you’re the committee’s subordinate: you either swallow down your own opinion and accept things the way the committee intended them to be, or you stay out of it. Here’s a particularly drastic example, from a Lyst e-mail Scraper wrote last night:

When I sent my resignation publicly, it was as a courtesy to the community I have served for the last eight years.

To read about her resignation put a human face to the committee and thus was appreciated. But to me, it is downright insulting that she thinks of this as a courtesy. As far as I am concerned, the committee owes the Mysterium attendees a significant amount of openness; it does not come optional.

Again, I wouldn’t pick apart such a particular quote if it weren’t so indicative and telling of what appears to be the overall attitude of at least the more vocal committee (ex-)members. Either Mysterium has to change, with more transparency and more accountability, or another convention will likely arise by next year. As Mysterigon, Mystralia and other more spontaneous meet-ups have proven, the brand name matters little. It’s the people that matter, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

Post scriptum

If you’re reading a giant attack onto the committee into the above, or even personal vendettas against anyone in particular, I am sorry to say that you haven’t understood a thing. There are criticisms, and some of them are very direct and intense, but I fully recognize that the committee only consists of human beings, for all their flaws, their stresses, and their other problems to deal with. If only they were a little more honest to the very people they would like to come join them in their cause for annual gatherings, they’d receive a lot less flak. If only they were to tell us more about what it is they’re working on, what the hold-ups are, why they don’t talk about ‘this’ and don’t keep us up to date on ‘that’; if so, then the debate likely would never have been started.

But as it is, the responses are too little, too late, and if the committee members – whether remaining or not – couldn’t see it coming that, one day, people would actually work towards a manifesto for the committee to follow, then they were blind.

The intentions of the committee aren’t and never have been malicious. The intentions of Alahmnat, CAGrayWolf, The World and vaaht, however, aren’t either. Both “sides” – and, again, there shouldn’t be any sides to begin with – want one thing: to allow Mysterium to be a success. Not too few people, not too many; not too little recognition, and not too much. There’s a right balance to hit, and that’s not always easy, but when committee individuals fail to achieve it, they need to be upright and step aside, letting someone else do the job instead.

What’s hopefully going to happen is exactly what A/C/T/v intended right from the start: that we come up with a better-defined set of guidelines that the committee adheres to, for everyone (including the committee itself, in terms of reputation) to benefit from. “Committee” doesn’t just spell similarly to “commitment” by chance, and it would be nice to know for interested fans to see what exactly this group of people is supposed to be committed to (aside from the generic “dedicating you the best possible Mysterium experience”, that is). Only then can we build upon things, and allow the more secondary thoughts, such as (vastly) improving the Mysterium website, allowing it to become more of an information hub on Myst fan gatherings in general, and possibly even an aid to plan those.

There is an awful lot of potential in this community, and I’m always saddened when I see it go to waste over petty personal arguments. Hopefully, this one will end just a little bit less sour than it had started.