Many of you have likely never heard of a little, obscure game called Space Station 13. It is a top-down perspective, multiplayer experience (up to 50 or more players), with crude sprite graphics. Not much to look at, not at first. You'll find once you dig deeper into this game it is quite complex indeed, and that the graphics are far more charming than they are given credit.
You start off as a denizen of the titular Space Station 13, and you are presented with a number of job choices, from Janitor to Captain of the station. Each job is richly deep and provides many activities. For instance as a Geneticist you are the only one with access to the cloning machine, the best hope for anyone killed on the station to have a second or even third chance at life. That's not all though, you also get to mess with the DNA of crew members, make them into monkeys or lizard people, give them super powers, and so forth. This is the kind of variety that makes the game brilliant. No job is without its many options, A scientist may make bombs by experimenting with chemicals and temperatures, or go make viruses in the Pathology lab, which may or may not escape and infect everyone.
The game is not without its rules though, you may not want to run around hitting people in the head with fire extinguishers and shoving them down the garbage disposals. Things like this will surely garner the wrath of the Admins. You may only cause grievous injury or death to other players under certain circumstances, because as some rounds can last upwards of an hour before the escape shuttle is called, kicking around as a ghost unable to do anything but talk with the other ghosts and watch the living, can become tedious. This is why there are different game modes that are randomly selected each round. Sometimes you may begin the game with a special message letting you know that you are a traitor and must kill a certain crew member or steal a specific object. As a traitor you may kill or maim anyone you please to get your job done, or just for plain fun. I know I certainly enjoy going to chemistry and putting Polytrinic acid into the Janitor's stolen space cleaner bottle. Nothing melts off someone's face faster than a little sprtiz from that cocktail.
Sounds like a blast right? Well there is one thing that keeps this game back from the brink of greatness, and that is the admins. Everyone has heard the term that "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", ad nauseum. In fact, you can go to any forum on the internet and see a man shaking his fist at the admins, calling them power tripping jerks. Unfortunately, this really is the case with Space Station 13. The game's roots are planted firmly in the Goon community from Somethingawful.com. You may have heard of the forums there, and that you can be banned at the drop of a hat. Somethingawful even has a place where you can go to look at who has been banned, the reason, and read the offending post. It's a "public lynching" style that can be quite enjoyable to the more cynical side in all of us.
Well the bad news is that this style has been carried over to Space Station 13, which has a firm rule constantly championed by the admins "Do not hijack another player's game experience". This means no throwing acid/gas grenades into the medbay, or using a bomb to blow up security, killing handfuls of other players for no reason, for your own amusement. Unfortunately the Admins themselves do not adhere to their own rules. Many times I would be excited to start a round discovering I was the traitor with a special mission, only to have the "Adminbus" as most players have come to call it, hijack the round. This ranges from sending dozens of meteors into the station, playing blaring sound clips, giving everyone crippling diseases, or just blowing up large chunks of the station. Don't get me wrong, some of this can be tongue in cheek, and a few admins know how to have fun without being too abrasive. Giving everyone a clown car and making the walls into crushers comes to mind as an amusing event. For the most part though, they will ruin your play experience with things like a .jpg image planted right in the middle of your screen, obscuring all view.
This breeds a terrible environment, as most players will not speak out their displeasure for fear of being banned. The "Ban Appeal" forum, where you are publicly on display to ask for allowance to play the game again, often to responses from admins such as "fuck off you're gone forever", is your only recourse. This is not a place of warnings, or "3 strike" rules. Permabans are arbitrary, depending on the mood of the admin at the time or frankly, how big of a jerk they are. You may be PERMANENTLY banned for the following things: Mentioning anime, saying popular/overused internet expressions, having an unfunny name, accidentally due to admin error, taking an important job (Captain,A.I.) and fucking it up, Admin contacts you and you don't notice it in a sea of text, Asking the Admins to stop exploding random people, playing the game. The Unban appeals forum is littered with justified and grossly unjustified bannings.
I'm not saying the game doesn't have its share of troublemaking players, but the admin system is just a mess. And the shame of it all is that the game itself is so addictive and brilliantly fun, that the only thing holding it back from true fame are the powers behind it. We can only hope that some day, cooler heads prevail, and someone realizes that a more streamlined authority system would make a better play experience for everyone. Until then, selfish power mongering rules the day, and breeds a sycophantic user base, too afraid to speak out and alienating to new players.
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