Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust: In Retrospective

As of yesterday, the 15th of may, around 7pm, Spel² is no more. It was decided by the chief editor that the site was to be shut down with immediate effect. The reasons were many, but the final blow was the single fact that he's becoming a dad and just didn't have any time for a project that didn't bring any form of income. Add to that some of of writers had lost focus and ambitions, and many of us others was becoming overburdened with responsibilities towards the site. All in all, the level of ambition had dropped and discontent was starting to rise. While we still had some amibitions left and some, I'd dare to say, really good ideas and concepts for the future of Spel² it's not possible to pull such a thing through if all involved aren't involving themselves hundred percent or more.

It's with a heavy heart I am letting go of Spel². After all I have dedicated my life for about exactly a year to the site now. But it's not only that. I am probably the one person who had enough competence to pick up the torch after our chief editor Emil. And that knowledge has pained me quite some, because a part of me really didn't want it to end like this. But neither I can dedicate myself to that extent without getting paid. It of course sucks to admit that a lame reason as money has to ruin things, but that's reality. In theory I could have taken over. In reality, that is just a dream, nothing more. Also, even if I had, what would be the point? Since the atmosphere and morality was low among the others, it would just have been a futile attempt to prolong a painful death.

Looking back now, it is easy to see some critical points were we did wrong, or somewhat failed. Things that ultimately paved the way to this situation.

First and foremost I think it was a mistake focusing on keeping up such broad content, because ultimately we lacked the resources to keep that image up. The initial thought was to have many writers and freelancers helping us to cover up all areas. But as some who were in the project first dropped off for different reasons, it became harder and harder. And with freelancers you have the problem that they can't prioritise helping us if they can't get paid. We just couldn't rely on peoples good will. It doesn't hold up in the long run.

I know for sure we should have dropped the mobile part already in the beginning, and maybe we should have only divided the formats into three categories: PC, Console and Handheld, to limit the stress of trying to cover every damn format to prevent the site from looking inactive or unupdated. Also, the culture and retro-articles should have been merged into one category also, since after all the retro part was just a subcategory to the cultural articles anyway.

It doesn't matter now, but in the end this was one of the most fatal mistakes since it forced us to compromise and prioritise on quantity instead of quality. Quantity material ensured a steady flow of visitors, but without enough quality material to back it up we could never reach the goal and image we had originally set. For myself it meant being stuck doing reviews and previews and stuff noone else wanted to do, leaving little or no time to write the articles that I really wanted to focus on. And I think we all got caught in very similar positions thanks to that. And naturally, it lowered the level of ambition. Since we didn't get paid for it, neither could we fully focus on what really motivated us.

Another problem that indirectly affected the image, was the lacking community part of the site. Since I wasn't there when the site was originally designed I can't say for sure what the idea behind the user registration system, comment system and forum really was. I just know that when I joined it didn't seem quite thought through. So I took it upon myself to revise the concept, considering my cast experiences wih online communities and forums as an old administrator at the old Ebony Keep art forums among others. But in the end, although I gave loads of advice and had a clear vision of what needed to be done ro raise the usability of the system, only about a tenth of my ideas were realised, leaving us with a halfarsed compromise that totally lacked any clear use. As I see it, the user registration system should either have been dropped from the start, or put more effort into. The only point with having a community is to give the site visitors a home, where they can mingleand rant. But our forum was never a home to anything. It was an empty shall lacking all vital functions and with a design I never had any confidence in. We did open up the comment system, after I had nagged about it a while, but it was still too late for the community part. We should have dropped it, since we were just dragging a corpse.

Last but definitely not least, because either way we turn we always have our back behind us, there is the money issue. Although we made some sweet deals for site hosting and was slowly starting to build funds, there was really never any possibility that we would have made any sort of money within a year, that could support the work. So we did it all for free and we took everything from our own pockets, especially Emil himself, which definitely made the situation unbearable in the end.

But I don't wanna make it sound that all we did was a failure, because it certainly weren't. Sure we couldn't live up to our own initial expectations, but many times we did manage to raise the barrier and put out some really good stuff. We had an aim to challenge the swedish game journalism, and we did. Not always directly, but more often indirectly. I think we set up a new standard for review scores for games, and made quite a big deal of giving pure and honest reviews. We got a lot of appreciation from our readers for not exaggerating the scores we gave, and not to give halfarsed games better scores then they deserved. And all in all, Spel² was a sandbox where we could speak up about our ideas and everyones opinion counted equally. We could in theory write about everything we wanted to, as long as we wrote a good text. And I could although I strongly disagreed with someone on their article still be happy about it and love it, because I knew the article was written with passion and a drive to make a difference.

Sure, we never made the impact some of us might have hoped from the beginning, but I do think we made a dent. We launched almost at the same time as the ASOS-blog, and pushed for a more open and introspective view on the swedish gamespress. We might not have been leading it, but that isn't important. What's important is that we were a part of it and we did make a dent. We did make a difference. And to me, considering the short time we were live, that definitely counts for something. The body of Spel² might be dead, but the spirit of it will still live on inside all of us who were a part of it. I will surely miss what we hade, because I know nothing can ever be what Spel² was. It might sound like a lot of nostalgia and bullshitting, but I honestly believe so. We did have something special going on. There was never anything wrong with our ambitions, it's just that reality reared it's ugly head our way.

So this is the end of an era, but as such it is also the beginning of another. Myself I will take this time to sit back and relax a short while, and try to take this all in. But my aim at the moment is to push on and look for other opportunities. There is no way I am stopping now. We'll see what the future brings and if there is some site or publication out there that might appreciate my work.