I am a fan of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I can’t help it. I always enjoyed its political and diplomatic plot combined with Kirk and McCoy beating up aliens in a weird prison with Iman. What can I say? It worked for me. But one thing I always loved about it was the end of the movie when the crew of the Enterprise are facing decommission. Suddenly the weight of every adventure ever taken with these characters bears down. Spock curses. Chekov asks for a heading. Kirk says, “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.” Man, what a great line! I loved it. I repeated it whenever someone asked for directions. It’s just great.
Fast forward to my mid-thirties. I’ve got kids. I’ve got a wife who loves live theater. We go to see a stage production of Peter Pan. Now you must understand that Peter Pan never interested me as a kid. I had never seen the animated movie. I had never read the book. I knew the story beats, but that was all. This stage production for all intents and purposes was my first brush with Peter Pan. At one point, when asked how to get to Neverland, Peter says, “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
“Oh wow!” I thought. “Peter Pan just quoted James T. Kirk.”
The truth of the matter slowly poured over my mind in waves.
Peter Pan existed before Star Trek.
Kirk was quoting Peter Pan.
My life is a lie.
I left that theater somewhat saddened that one of my favorite lines in moviedom was in fact not the brainchild of a talented scriptwriter, placed into the mouth of my favorite arrogant starship captain. No, it was a starship captain quoting a piece of literature that every person watching should reasonably be expected to know. But now I had something arguably greater. I had the subtext for what Kirk was saying, for what all of Star Trek VI was saying. How do you get to Neverland? Second star to the right and straight on till morning. Where was the NCC 1701-A going? To Neverland, a place where no body has to grow up. It made Star Trek VI more poignant.
That brings me to RavenFist. In this blog post, I’m going to tell you how we are getting to Neverland.
I feel like we’re close to entering a post social media world. There is every possibility that we will look back on this blog post in five years and laugh. In that world we’ll be paying for our groceries with bitcoin and logging into Facebook at TSA checkpoints instead of handing over our passports. Presidential races will not be won by votes, but rather by number of Twitter followers. Written communication will be forgotten. People will instead communicate through Instagram and Emojis. When that time comes you can text me 👉🤐👎. Rough translation: You were wrong. I’ll accept that.
But if I’m right, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. will no longer be expected icons on a business web page. Independent Dev Studios will be able to have conversations with the people who play their games in more personal and more meaningful terms. I suspect (nay, hope) that this will decrease the amount of vitriol in the world, which is a worthy goal. The three of us who make up RavenFist have seen some ugly exchanges between devs and players. Exchanges that we were not involved in, just close enough to feel the heat. We don’t want to have those kinds of conversations with all of you out there. If you don’t like something we’re doing, we’re open to that criticism if it is respectful and constructive. Likewise, we want to hear the good things we’re doing.
More than that, we want to be engaged in the conversation. So, let me stop bloviating and let’s get on with our communication plan:
· RavenFist’s website is the hub to everything we do and say.
· RavenFist’s YouTube Channel will be a repository of thought and games.
· RavenFist’s podcast will be a sister podcast to the blog.
This blog will be the centerpiece of our communication. Currently you have a form submission to send us feedback. We encourage it. In fact, I usually just sit and stare at the inbox the form is linked too, desperately hoping that someone will reach out to us. Someone … please … reach out to us … I’m getting hungry.
Eventually we might change this and open a comment section on the blog. [Edit: Screw it, we opened the comments section.]
The YouTube Channel will be home to videos that will run the gamut of video game commentary, title exploration, footage of prototypes we’re developing, and eventually gameplay footage of Rebuild and the games we make after Rebuild. We want this to be about RavenFist and not about RavenFist. The current climate for video gaming is the best that we’ve ever seen with intelligent commentary and conversation happening across the internet. We want a seat at that table.
Finally, the podcast. Does the world need another podcast? I’ll answer that question this way: I have yet to live out my dream of being a radio talk show host. Just wait until you hear me say the phrase “Caller, go ahead.” I’m a natural. In all seriousness, podcasts are fun and if you’re the type of person who digs podcasts with people talking about video games, then ours should be interesting. If not, that’s OK too. At this time we will not be doing a regularly scheduled podcast, instead when there is a blog post that is about a topic that could be enhanced with a podcast, then it will be. Or if a topic lends itself more to a podcast, then we will record one. An example of this is our upcoming podcast about video game music. We can incorporate clips about the music we’re discussing. Won’t that be nice?
You won’t find us on Facebook. You won’t find us on Twitter. We have no plans for an Instagram. Website. YouTube. Podcast. These avenues feel right to us and they excite us, so we think everyone will benefit by us sticking to that list.
We will also make a promise to you. Any content that we produce will be positive content. This is not to say that we are toothless individuals without opinions or separate thoughts. We just believe that there’s enough bad stuff in the world and we don’t want to add to that. We want to celebrate things, not tear them down. We hope that any audience who finds us will respect that and feel uplifted by it.
So, please, join us. Just take the second star to the right and straight on till morning.
Sincerely,
RavenFist Studios