for several years, I attempted to administer a wiki for a small virtual pet site. the hopes for the wiki were twofold:
- one, that it would be a helpful mechanical resource, an easy place for people to look up which items give out which stats and so forth.
- two, that it would be an archive for story content that was no longer available. this was especially relevant to the events, which had writing that would be no longer accessible after they ended - but I hoped, too, that if the site went the way of so many live-service games and vanished from the web, that we would be able to preserve some trace of what once lived.
the effort burnt me out, terribly. the main cause was that I was not in charge of the hosting - it was managed by another player who became increasingly busy with life. that meant whenever the wiki went down (which it did, increasingly often) I would have to reach out to them and hope for a response to come sooner than later. to be the visible face of the wiki while helpless to do anything to fix its actual issues took a lot out of me. I found myself avoiding both the wiki and the game itself more and more, as I came to associate both with helplessness and failure. even after the catastrophic, data-wiping crash that finally forced us to pick up and move to different hosting (something we should have done long ago), I was too disheartened to give the new wiki the care it deserved - or to even play the game I used to love so much.
relatively recently, I joined the official Fallen London/Failbetter Games Discord. after both enjoying the community a great deal and seeing multiple people struggling with an event, I offered to redo that event's guide on the wiki. they graciously accepted despite my newness, so I signed up, took a few days to shuffle around some paragraphs, ran the result by people a few times for feedback... and published a restructured Whitsun guide! yes, redoing the Egg Holiday guide was my first contribution to the FL wiki, and I'm very pleased about that HAHA
it was honestly an incredibly renewing experience, and I hope I can someday ride that momentum back to my old game and its wiki. fandom archival work, whether it's recording mechanics or story beats, is something beautiful, perhaps even sacred to me - a labor of love, first and foremost. something mattered so much to me that I was inspired to map as much as I could of it for others. I know that it is only an echo next to the original game - but I will have assurance that when it ends, as all things must, my work will alongside the fanfic and fanart and lingering communities provide a record of its existence. that people will still be able to read the lines that made me laugh or wonder, even if they can no longer tread those paths themselves.
*sigil forme of this Correspondence tba
(fallen london stamps by