@jeffheimbuch – First, I appreciate your input on Tension even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. I suspect that the reason why you don’t like it is the reason why we love it: Tension is non-traditional storytelling. There is a huge amount of relationships, details, and points to go through if you’d like to get caught up completely with what’s been happening since February but how deep you’d like to go is less important than the main points. For example, Atticus is a name that’s been spoken a few times throughout the experience but knowing who he is is less important than knowing about the BoS (Brothers of Seraph) and their antagonistic relationship with the OOA, the 4 Gatekeepers we’ve met so far and how they’ve met their end. Those are the important points and if someone does not have the time to go digging for all of the details that we eat up, the story can still be followed by following their plotlines.
The Powers That Be behind Tension are, for the most part, partaking in monodirectional communication. They speak to you but you do not speak to them. For someone viewing this as a performance, that’s likely incredibly frustrating but to us it’s necessitated the formation of the forums and the community. This simultaneously allows The Powers That Be to maintain an air of mystery and impenetrability that makes the Tension organizations seem so alluringly clandestine and strengthens the community by nature of the fact that if you need help following Tension you don’t ask Them, you ask us. We have developed our own structure that has people solely dedicated to the cause of explaining and catching people up.
You are right and do bring up some valid criticisms but the reason why we love Tension is because it’s this beautiful knot of tangled details and stories that can only be unraveled by helping each other and filling in the pieces that others have missed.
This approach trades away some people’s ability to approach Tension on their own, independent of the community, but in doing so gains a community that is actually a very large drawing point for many of those who remain. I suspect that many of us love it for that tradeoff and may be angry at your article because it reads in a way that suggests you were trying to approach it on your own which is not the way the game is played.
With all of that said, I again would like to state that I appreciate your response and your willingness to engage in a dialog with us
Melissa. Reason: changed "may" to "topic"