DATELINE: Rust Alpha video-game test, via Steam, TCP/IP & UDP/IP

i’ve been involved as a player in the public alpha of rust an emerging video game involving elements inspired by games like minecraft, dayz, stalker, and countless others.  its basic story involves a post-radioactive disaster horrorscape in which few have survived, and survival has become thirsty work.

i doubt it could be a coincidence that the game’s title is one character removed from the word trust, a philosophical concept and human emotion &or action around which rust‘s inherently-multiplayer gaming experience revolves ubiquitously. it is difficult for a player to survive in this game’s world by effects of environment, scarcity of food, risk of injury or attack by animal etcetera. but the ultimate danger comes from other players; should two players choose to interact peacefully in the same space, both are assured that the other can at any moment kill them instantaneously regardless of armor or weaponry.. life is fragile here, just as in the real world, and all it takes to extinguish a life is the intent and action thereupon.

there is a serious, crippling problem throughout the rust serverscape with cheating. unfortunately, these script kiddies are referred to as hackers by the collective players of rust, which exacerbates the problem and works to enable the low-lives, 9-year-olds & degenerates who would cheat & cause grief under the delusion of being any sort of special; in reality they are simply douchebags of the highest calibre — in another motd, we at the grapevine will want to address the problem of proper jargon ignorance and widespread misappropriation of little-understood terms — but that is not this particular motd.

still, our budding community suffers from the problem of cheaters, and we’re today beginning a series of measures to combat this problem on a small scale: that of our home rust server; but we intend to be the first ripple in a wave of change that will result in a systematic cleansing monsoon, a tidal wave and storm composed not of dihydrogenmonoxide but of the blood of those incompetent cheaters who would dare call — or worse yet dare think — themselves to be hackers.

here are some initial steps we are taking:

• create a steam-based group for server regulars to join, where they can see announcements, discussions, etcetera
• encourage a sense of community among players such that they will take pride in our server as their home and wish to defend it from harm
• name the server, group & community perfectly in such a way as to represent that for which we stand as a group of rust players & more

we believe these actions will result in positive effect for all people involved. note: script kiddies are not people.

to me, the most interesting part of this christening process is the selection of a name.  in order to come up with something, i had to spend a few weeks with the task in my mind, letting patterns and data i noticed while playing the game wash over me. we had to decide what we stand for, what we stand against, and how to express that within the aesthetic confines of the rust experience, while also transcending the game and seeing that our in-game values extend toward and are geometrically similar to our values in the real world.

rust takes place in a wasteland where we must help each other to survive. and we can also kill each other if we want. and at the moment, script kiddies are a nuisance, but real hackers, such as myself and the other two individuals working on this server, have the real power. not simply because we know how things work and are competent users of technology. but for more existential reasons that run deeper: it is our desire to form a community in which this lovely game can be played with its rules and restrictions in tact – in contrast, the cheaters desire.. well, they don’t have a collective desire, because they don’t have a collective, and by definition they never will. this is where we become more powerful than them.

so there we have it. the above paragraph describes our situation with regards to rust. it is probably obvious that i’ve written it such that our position in rust is perfectly analogous with our larger position on the internet as well as with our even larger position on the planet earth.

i believe we’ve landed on a good name for our community but i will not allow it to become fodder for grapevine gossip before we’ve even launched any tangible evidence of our community’s existence; of course, i will augment this motd as soon as there is something to which to link, along with a detailed description of how and why i landed on the name & manifesto that i do in fact already have in mind!