I drew the cartoon above from a photograph that turned twenty years old last month. That’s Erika on the left, and next to Erika is Stephen’s bride Erin, and then I’m on the right, and next to me is Stephen himself, surprising me with a smooch the morning after his wedding.
Stephen and I first met on a forum, five years before that photo was taken. It’s a forum that doesn’t exist anymore, but I won it, and I can tell you how.
A brief digression here, to be read in a voice of faint pain: I know that at its origin, the word “forum” is a noun of the second declension (neuter) with the nominative plural of “fora.” Nonetheless, in English usage, we must accept that the word for more than one web forum is “forums.” May my Latin teachers forgive me.
Perhaps you are surprised to read that I was able to win a forum. Most people don’t view them as games, but I think that view is a useful one. Like other computer games, forums have rules which can be skirted; they host multiplayer contention in a digital medium; and people ragequit them a lot.
The first documented use of the term “ragequit” only dates back to 2005, but I saw the phenomenon in action long before then. People stormed “out” of large official TV show forums, tiny comic strip communities, play-by-post RPGs and clearinghouses for game designers or convention volunteers.
I’m not even talking about the kind of site where toxicity or trolling were the primary aim. This is just about places where you could more or less assume people were posting in good faith, if also with some degree of the ironic remove that has always been popular online. These populations shared a certain degree of nerdiness, and the privilege of internet access when it was less common. But in their demographics the ragequitters were diverse.
So it wasn’t just one kind of forum, and it wasn’t just one kind of person. I was not the only one to notice this. Often the replies to a ragequit post expressed sentiments like “oh, another one of these?” or “there it is, your quarterly exit tantrum.”
I didn’t get any pleasure out of such threads. Forums were places I went for social exchange about my niche interests, not for bursts of grievance. But over time I started wondering why the same feelings seemed to arise in disjunct circles, and in people who didn’t seem to know they were following a pattern.
Sometimes, a behavior that recurs in many instances of a game is viral: the result of one idea spreading quickly, like Magic’s “Black Summer.” But the forum behavior I saw was different. It was emergent, happening spontaneously, yet also consistent and recurrent. That tells us something about the rules of the game and the things they bring out in people. It’s more like the eternal problem of people trying to play a tabletop RPG together without being on the same page.
Some game designs support competitive asymmetry well, with your choices affecting each other’s strategies as you pursue different hidden goals. I love this kind of play; there’s a reason I will always volunteer to be a Cylon Leader if I can. But it only works if you all agree to play the same game from the outset.
Remember Stephen, from the doodle at the start of this post? The place where he and I first met all those years ago was the fan forum for the cult webcomic Checkerboard Nightmare.1 My goal in joining the forum was simple: become best friends forever with its creator, Kristofer Straub.
I thought Kris was the coolest man on the internet. This was an opinion not unique to me, and as a college student with strong parasocial tendencies, I projected the same hunger for validation onto everyone else on the site. I thought we were all playing the same game. And to be fair, I think many of us were.
But of course Kris, bless him, was stuck playing the game too. He tolerated our attention-seeking behavior with patience and also thinly veiled exhaustion. He was a young man himself, just a talented writer with a day job and a site where he hosted his hobby. I don’t know what his goal was in starting the forum, but “get Kris Straub’s attention” probably wasn’t it.
In retrospect, it’s very funny that Kris burned our most irritating running gag in effigy when he closed the forum and wound Checkerboard Nightmare down.
Don’t worry about it.2
Moderation is hard and often invisible labor, independent of forum size. It burns people out and often leads to neglect or abdication, and an unmoderated forum will collapse or self-immolate. This problem is fundamental to their game design.
Game mechanics compose one dimension of the constructed environment of digital spaces. Interface design is a different dimension, at a tangent. Both affect the ways we treat each other. The standard model of web forum is one where you can read a post, start to reply, and only discover that the discussion has moved on after you’ve finished writing. You’re a human, and your daily supply of emotional energy is limited. Struggling with an outcome like that can rob you of the wherewithal you need to grant a stranger grace.3
People who play and create in communities are freely sharing minutes and years of their lives. The structures underlying those communities are chosen by people like you and me. We have a responsibility to avoid making people feel that the thoughts and time they share have been wasted.
I don’t have as much patience for games as I used to. In particular, I stop playing the ones that bring out a person in me I wouldn’t want to hang out with. I don’t go to many forums anymore either. That’s in part because of the way they tended to affect me, and in part because the ones I used to frequent are gone. When a forum goes away it is rarely replaced by another forum.
I don’t think any video game should try to keep its players coming back forever. I don’t think that any given forum needs to last indefinitely, either. But I still think that if people keep ragequitting the game you’ve made, then its system has produced a lot more perceived losses than victories.
In 2026, if you are pursuing a niche interest, you’re most likely to find others who share it on Reddit or Discord. A list of problems with those platforms is out of the scope of this essay. But I don’t feel like I’m winning when I interact with them, and I think their prominence is a loss for the independent web.
When we talk about making the internet better, we tend to view it in light of not just independence but individuality: your site, my site, their site, each sovereign territories linked by hypertext but separate from one another. That’s been true since the earliest days of the revival.
To be clear, I love personal blogs, which is why I have at least five of them (yes, newsletters count). And sure, federated social media serve a connective purpose too. But Mastodon is another of those games I never feel I’m winning. The infinite-scroll repost timeline, like the group chat, moves too quickly to accrete stable points of reference.
That last link (to Juha-Matti Santala’s very good blog) is worth opening to read later, by the way. Especially if you are the kind of person who is already 1200 words deep into an essay about web forums. Santala writes about his desire for communication that is more inclusive, more considered, and less ephemeral. That resonated with me. I don’t exactly miss forums, but I do miss having space for slow discussions that give people the chance to learn and bond.
I’m reaching for an analogy to coral reefs, or forests, and how environments that calm turbulence and shelter ecosystems need time and stability to grow.4 But I try not to mix metaphors, so let’s go back to the one about game design.
The highest-profile video games and web sites have, I think, become more accessible and yet more hostile to people in the last quarter century. You and I both know what drives the hostility, because we know what dark patterns do to people, and what kind of person insists on them. But that means we can also choose to subtract those patterns. It seems to me that doing so makes it a lot easier for players to feel like winners.
I told you that I won the Checkerboard Nightmare forum, and the truth is that I did eventually become friends with Kris. That has everything to do with his generosity of spirit and not at all with my puerile behavior online.
When Stephen joined that forum, I saw him as competition: he was so funny and charming that he seemed to evoke positive responses from everyone. I resented his easy likability. I was trying to win a game of status, and the harder I tried the worse I did.
In the end I gave up that game, and let Stephen win me over like he did everyone else. When he started making MS Paint doodles that made people laugh (see above), I got him to post them on a site I hosted, and soon he had his own popular webcomic. A few years later, we took a train across the country together. Then I got to bond with Erin too, and attend their beautiful wedding.
Stephen and I became creative partners in some very silly work that still makes me proud. Years after they got married, he and Erin were part of my own wedding. Now we live a half-mile walk from each other, and sometimes I get to take their kid to the zoo. Stephen and his family, and I and mine, became kin to one another.
By default, forums are built with crummy foundations and shaped to steer people into frustrating corners. I still managed to discover people who became dear to me on several of them.5 I don’t live near most of those people, but as wonderful as proximity is, longevity makes relationships richer too.
The way to win a web forum—to win any game—is to make a friend you can love for the rest of your life.
Websites these days don’t make that easy. But we know more about how people tend to respond to game and interaction designs than we did decades ago. What does it look like when we make choices so that people who interact on common ground become friends not despite, but because?
I’m still thinking about that question. Let me know if you have an answer yourself. This is Brendan from Kaijuville. Let’s not step on each other today.
- I did not realize that Kris predicted the Oscars slap incident 17 years in advance until I was writing this post. I called it a cult comic for other reasons. ↩︎
- Hot! ↩︎
- For another example, people on forums tended to get frustrated with newcomers who would add new comments to old threads, thereby bumping them to the top spot. This came to be called “necromancy” or “necroposting,” but the problem wasn’t really that discussions were being revived: it was that any random yahoo could choose what everybody else saw first! It was a frustrating asymmetry, and enough frustration will make people quit. But places like Reddit and Youtube, for all their faults, addressed it years ago with simple algorithms. It’s not hard to tune rules for less annoying play. ↩︎
- A longer exploration of the need for friction to slow down digital interaction is also outside the scope of this essay. ↩︎
- You know, this kind. ↩︎
