RAWA is our new community manager

[J'Kla]

That means I was right they put the names in a hat and drew out the first one they could and it could be RAWA was the only name in the hat so I guess I am back to the pointy stick.

[Jamey]

Who can you guys trust at Cyan anyway?

Right now, pretty much no one, since nobody says anything there...

Did Chogon pick him?
Did Cyan vote on it?
Did RAWA himself volunteer?

Easy to answer: they had no other person to do it...

I think the amount of ignorant assumptions being made here is astounding.

You don't even know if Cyan did consider other people for the job, or if there were other people available. Picking someone randomly is a terrible business decision and it's something I KNOW Cyan would not do.

So nobody says anything at Cyan anymore huh? Chogon just made a post a few days ago! By the way, did any of you see RAWA post today?

Thanks for the welcome!

It's nice to see many familiar names still sticking with us. I see some names I don't recognize, so I'll attempt to introduce myself a bit.

My name is Richard A. Watson, though many know me simply as "RAWA" for reasons that have been lost in the mists (no pun intended) of time. [Ok, they haven't been lost, but they really aren't the least bit interesting or related to Cyan, so let's just pretend that they have, shall we?]

I started working at Cyan in September 1992 and worked on the original Myst for Macintosh. I was the one playing Prince of Persia in the "Making of Myst" movie that came with the game. When I started, it was to be Rand's programming assistant, as he had done all of Cyan's programming alone to that point. He and I worked in a small addition on the back of his double-wide mobile home, often interrupted by one of his three daughters who were homeschooled at the time. Most of the other employees worked from their own homes back then, too.

I have worn many, many hats at Cyan over the years - pretty much whatever Cyan needed me to do. Entering registration card data for the Manhole and Osmo and Spelunx, answering the tech support phone calls for the Manhole, Osmo and Spelunx, then I moved up to lead (i.e. only) programmer on The Manhole Masterpiece Edition (until Mark did the port to the PC), an update to Cosmic Osmo, and the colorization of Spelunx.

Then Riven design began, and I added a Game Design hat to my growing collection. I also appointed myself Continuity Guy, though I didn't have any real power, and D'ni Language Guy, the combination of which gradually evolved into my role as "D'ni Historian", which still didn't have much power, but had a much cooler title.

I've even been something of a "community manager" before, though it didn't have any title at all, then. I answered almost all of Cyan's snail mail and eventually email as that became more and more common during Riven production, which eventually led to spending a great deal of time contributing to the RivenLyst mailing list and hanging out in Cyan Chat during lunches and after work along with Mark DeForest.

Oh, Rudolfson asked about the little four pixel high “RAWA” in Riven. That was another of those unofficial hats I put on myself. It started in Myst. The little plaque for the wind icon in Selenitic was changed slightly as it originally looked too much like a water fountain icon, so the curls on the end were curled more. In one view, the plaque still had the fountain look. I'd never really used Photoshop before, but I added the extra curls to match the other views and hid a little, four pixel high “RAWA” to the screen I had touched up. [So, I guess I had already appointed myself as “Contintuity Guy” back in Myst.] Unfortunately, I didn't quite understand the process – that Broderbund (our publisher who did the port to the PC) was re-dithering their own versions of the assets from the 24-bit pictures for the PC version, so my edits to our 8-bit pictures only showed up in the Macintosh version.

When Riven came along, I did the same thing. Several shots with multiple states had tiny differences between them – the weeds or rocks would shift slightly on the ground, for instance. Now while assembling Riven in the development stack, I could go directly from one state to the other while staying on the same screen, so I was the best one to spot those minor differences. The players would likely never notice, as they'd have to leave the area to manipulate something in order to change the states in question, but I didn't like those differences anyway. Rather than telling an artist about it, I just touched them up so that they matched and hid my little “RAWA”s on the stills in question.

One of those RAWAs is used in activating the Riven Easter Eggs, but there are several others...

Where was I? Oh, yeah, there have been many other hats over the years, but this “little” introduction is already quite long enough.

And now, seventeen years later, we've come full circle. I've been working out of my double wide mobile home for the last year or so, much of that time spent working on reformatting those same Myst assets for the iPhone, often interrupted by one of my five sons, four of which are homeschooled, the fifth just six months old. Oh, and earlier this year, since the iPhone version went back to the original 24-bit assets, I touched up that same Selenitic shot of the wind plaque and added my four pixel high “RAWA” to it once again.

There's probably some deeper meaning there, if only I were smart enough to find it.



RAWA

This is all coming from the man who was said to be hard to draw out. I told everyone here to have some patience. It probably took him a while to plan this introduction, which is why it took a day or two to get back to us.

Oh, and I noticed RAWA was quite involved in terms of communication with us on the MOUL forums when it came to making our own fan created ages and rules of age writing, hint hint hint

So...if any of us here want him to come out and talk to us, might I reccomend discussing Age Creation/Fan-Created ages on the MOUL forums?

[Tsar Hoikas]

RAWA has already surpassed my rock-bottom expectations. I'll set them slightly higher now: He will make no more posts after this brief introductory period.

So...if any of us here want him to come out and talk to us, might I reccomend discussing Age Creation/Fan-Created ages on the MOUL forums?

Only if you want your post to be deleted.

[D'nial]

There has been much talk about RAWA's appointment to community manager being good; that Cyan has made a responsible choice and that finding fault with Cyan is unwarranted rudeness.

There has been much talk about RAWA's appointment to community manager being bad; that Cyan has disappointed in the past and that it is unreasonable to expect progress from them now.

There has been very little talk about RAWA's appointment to community manager being dubious. But that's what it is. We don't know how this will turn out.

This appointment could be good. It could also be bad. It might even be neutral. We should prepare for all of those events, rather than rationalise why one of them couldn't possibly happen. That will save us from a lot of flame wars and a lot of "told you so" posts further down the road, when we actually do find out what's going on.

[J'Kla]

This looks like RAWA has submitted an extract from his resume, a little more than expected but I suppose it's all we can expect from a "Hello guys this is me" so I am going to re-work and re-submit my original questions in the light of this new openness in the vague hope to be surprised.

I will have to tarnish any opinion with a degree of disrespect given RAWA's previous record but I am prepared to take responses at face value.

[ddb174]

So...if any of us here want him to come out and talk to us, might I reccomend discussing Age Creation/Fan-Created ages on the MOUL forums? :D

Only if you want your post to be deleted.

This is something everyone should realise about mystonline.com. It is one of the worst moderated forums I've ever seen. Some people say it is almost entirely veralun. That may be, but in any event, Cyan tolerates it, and even encourages it with their forum policies, even though they've been told about it many times. So that doesn't say much for them either.

[Jamey]

So...if any of us here want him to come out and talk to us, might I reccomend discussing Age Creation/Fan-Created ages on the MOUL forums?

Only if you want your post to be deleted.

This is something everyone should realise about mystonline.com. It is one of the worst moderated forums I've ever seen. Some people say it is almost entirely veralun. That may be, but in any event, Cyan tolerates it, and even encourages it with their forum policies, even though they've been told about it many times. So that doesn't say much for them either.

You guys do know what I'm talking about right? Fan Created Ages.

They are perfectly fine with talking about Age creation and fan-created ages. Heck, They even have 2 forum sections on it:

Fan Created Ages - General - General, spoiler-free discussion of fan created ages and artwork
Fan Created Ages - Spoiler, Hints and Tips - For all discussions of fan created ages from a nudge to an outright walkthrough

There is a huge difference between talking about Fan Created Ages, and things Cyan does not fully support such as Drizzle and the Offline KI. Those are the ones that usually get all the attention and get locked or deleted, I have yet to see a topic that was locked or deleted that was talking about a fan created age like Maw, The Writer's Niche, Fens, etc. Cyan fully supports Fan Created Ages, they put time to create forum sections dedicated to them, and RAWA made the rules for Official Story/Age Creation as well.

[Tsar Hoikas]

Try talking about actually creating one there

DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!

[ddb174]

And I've had a number of things unrelated to any on this deleted. Including posting some official information that used to be on that very same site, and something deleted because the mod said I had already said that enough, so I should quit spamming :S

[Dhelayan]

yea,i agree, really the only place where you can talk about those things is here actually