ilmenskie miners

i am trying to parse out why we are so heartbroken with the end of glitch.

if you're following my story at all you know that i play a lot of games.

the thing about glitch is that it is a rich environment.

do you remember the first time you went into middle earth? or narnia? or hogwarts? or went through the phantom tollbooth?

i remember the first time milo left through the tollbooth and i felt as if i had lost that country. the message of the book is that you can find that country everywhere but still- you're never going back, not really, not as intensely as that first time when you inhabit the land.

and glitch was a  land that was rich and complex and had stories brewing in it that were created by the developers: artists, musicians, and a real team of writers, but it was also a story and a lanscape that was being created on the fly by the characters in it.

in most computer games a finite set of things happen, and you only are able to watch.

in glitch we were citizens of a world and characters in many stories, each of us living a story on the same landscape, but singular for each one of us.

my story was that i loved the lands. i loved the streets and my homes (i have had three) and i loved gathering and harvesting and crafting and going about my little business and seeing all the other little people and knowing that they represented real people out there, living their little glitch lives.

a long time ago before the Great Housing Reset i was dreaming of saving up enough currants to buy a beautiful little house in groddle meadow, and at the time the best way for me to make money was to go down into the mines.

so i wrote this song, and as part of our farewell to our world, a group of miners came with me yesterday to make this short video.