Myndzi aka Kris 
Age 32
Tetris Age 26
Tandy Tetris Era before most of us were born High scores Blockbox 40L 45.47
Driller 17.31
Survivor 3:00.16
TGM3 S4
KoS Perfect Clear Challenge 10 PCs in 100 pieces, 13:37
Tournaments organized HDTL
HDTL2
King of Kings (KoS)
King of Kings 2 (KoS)
Nullpomino weeklies
How did you first get into Tetris? My dad introduced me to it. He used to get me puzzles as presents frequently, so I figure he thought I'd like Tetris on Tandy. Between that and the version that came with the original Game Boy, I got hooked.
What is Tandy? It was Radio Shack’s PC line a long time ago (TRS-80). Tandy Tetris was the version of Tetris that ran on it. I don’t know if that’s its real name, I was like 6 or something, but it has a stub on the wiki at least. This is before I knew what I was working with
80 must have stood for 80KB of hard drive space. Probably not, I’m just joking maybe 80MB! TLDR: I’m old (in internet years) and I don’t care!
Holy.. yeah.. I’m.. you’re old D:I’m actually just 32, which isn’t typically “old age” y’know.
You’re like a decade older than me…. So LOL Haha I just wish I could’ve been a young adult back then and been able to participate in the beginnings of computing.
What other versions of Tetris did you play on besides Tetris on Tandy and Tetrinet? And which version do you like most so far? Gameboy Tetris, SNES Tetris, various crappy clones and then came The Revelation! That was the day I discovered Tetris Concept, the Tetris community, and modern Tetris games (Tetris Friends, Blockbox, etc.) Until that day, Tetrinet was my favorite Tetris game. Now it won’t come as a surprise to hear that my favorite game is King of Stackers. But if you’re talking “normal” games, then Nullpomino.
Now I don’t know a lot about King of Stackers (KoS), and I don’t think the majority of the community does either so what’s the platform like? Were you the one who coded it? DrPete created King of Stackers. I was just beginning to learn about web programming technologies at the time, and offered to help fix some bugs, so he gave me access. Eventually I was the only one doing any work on it, and he wound up giving the site over to me.
The basic idea was to have a turn-based version of Tetris. It's developed into a highly strategic game that you can play live or over time. I often have about 10 games going at once and take turns a few times a day. I figure anything more than that and they can just look at a thread or the site
I don’t want to be the guy that won’t shut up about it!
Would you say your KoS community is active?I'd call it cozy. There've been a couple batches of new players that didn't seem to originate from Harddrop, and recently things have been active enough that there's usually someone online. There appears to have been ~ 20 players active on the site within the last day.
The design of the site is a hindrance, I think, to adoption for many people. (I'm looking at you, Chopin!) People who talk to me know I've been poking away at it over the last year-ish, but I don't make any announcements because I honestly have no kind of timeline. I hope that once I make it more presentable, it will be more attractive to people and we can build a bit larger of a user base
What do you think differs between the Nullpomino and KoS communities? Why does KoS usually have someone online but Nullpomino doesn’t? Nullpomino has a larger barrier to entry, and KoS requires less active commitment. You can't log onto Nullpomino, place 7 pieces, and come back later. And there's no website that you can just type in to access it. KoS has a different kind of barrier to entry in the sense that there's not a large pool of inexperienced players, so new players will have a hard time finding matches against people that won't trounce them. (But Nullpomino has some of that AND all the getting it set up and configured stuff we've come to know and love)
How do you plan on attracting more people to KoS other than the design of the site?To be honest, I don't have any plans for attracting people to KoS. That leaves it mostly to word of mouth, occasional tournaments, or perhaps discussions threads (of which there are no active ones at the moment). When I'm satisfied with the state of the site itself, I'll probably put a little more effort into making people aware of its existence, but I don't ever really plan to evangelize it. Streaming is a possibility for getting the word out perhaps...
Yeah streaming seems to bring a lot of attention to games. Do you hold a lot of tournaments on KoS? I've held two total. The last one had cash prizes! They are necessarily long-running things though, so I need to be able to dedicate time and energy to them. There will definitely be a tournament to celebrate if I ever accomplish my goals with the site update.
A tournament on KoS seems like it’d take a long time to finish since you take turns instead of playing simultaneously live.I've typically given matches a week's worth of time to make sure they're active, and I call it a tie after two weeks as long as the minimum number of turns have been played. You can play live if you want to, it's just not a requirement. Most of the matches last tournament got finished that way.
What do you envision for the future of KoS?That's a topic I've discussed a few times with various people and have kind of been mulling over for a long time. I'd like to make it more socially active; make communication with other players a core part of the site itself. My current ideas along that line come to something that resembles an image board with fumens instead of pictures. I think that the ability to chat in or about games and fork off copies of game state and experiment or demonstrate things would be really interesting.
Other than that, better configuration options and more varied game modes, the ability to customize game settings to a similar extent as, say, Blockbox, but all of that depends on first completing my Tetris engine.
Oh, and a better mobile experience. I don't plan to make an app because I don't want to get into any legal hassles with TTC or deal with app stores. HTML5 is perfectly capable of everything I need.
Do you consider yourself a competitive Tetris player?Not really. I'm barely even competitive on KoS these days
I may be even with the weakest Harddroppers in live play, unless I get to use allspins, so I figure I'm pretty much out of the running in any real competition.
Then what keeps you sticking around?I like the game -- The mental shenanigans are fun, particularly when you spot something really ridiculous. I know what parts I need to work on to get better at live play, but because of KoS, I don't really need to do that to enjoy the parts that I like about the game.
In KoS recently, I feel like I'm floundering. It's pretty rare for me to have no ideas about how to tackle a problem, particularly for a long period of time, but I've been feeling that way lately. My best guess is that I just don't try hard enough, so I've more or less made peace with not being at the top of the food chain
I'd rather kick back and enjoy Tetris than make it into work. I think the decline of the amount of effort I put into KoS corresponds directly with the amount of effort I put into my day job (programming). There's only so much problem solving a guy can take in a day, you know?
I know what you mean.. grown up problems
Let’s get down to Harddrop the community.. There are people who complained about your admin/mod days. What do you have to say to them? Do you think you were power hungry?haha I think I tried to apply a paradigm that doesn't work for HD. It might have, if it was that way from the beginning, but it had an established culture. If I consider it now, it does seem that HD is less trolly and more accessible than before all that, so I guess I can consider the effort a partial success. There's not really anything I can say to someone who thinks "exercising authority" is equivalent to "power hungry" Either way, I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't work out, but I learned a lot and hopefully didn't make too many bitter enemies
Another thing that seemed to come up a lot, was you said Blink gave you permission to take over the website but then he took it back from you. What happened?This is probably a good thing to clear up. Let me start from the beginning.
I first got involved with HD on the technical side of things; I had high access because I needed it to accomplish various technical things. I didn't act as a moderator because I didn't have the permissions I had for moderating purposes. The most I'd really do is delete spam threads.
I don't remember if I was ever officially appointed in a moderation role, but I do recall Blink asking me along the way if I'd be co-admin for the site. I told him that I would like to do that, but that to me, being an admin includes decision-making power. Nothing really came of that.
The start of my run as a moderator came about because Blink just got really busy and was inactive, and it was becoming clear that things needed doing. I had conversations with a number of members in private who were unhappy with the state of the site, and eventually decided to take action. Blink did "officially" give me his full support, but it wasn't discussed in a thread or something so I can see how it may not be widely known.
The end of it involved me stepping down voluntarily, and I don't really want to publish the reasons for it. It was completely amicable, but I did ban my account from the site as a means of 'breaking it off' -- that is, separating myself from moderation in a direct way until I was ready to be just a normal user again.
So in the end, Blink never gave me permission to "take over" in that the site has always been his and I've always respected that. He did give me permission to act as I saw fit. And he never "took it back" because there was nothing to take.
What were the members unhappy with?In my view at the time, most of the backlash came from people who were frustrated at not being able to just do as they pleased / always had done. The distinction was very abrupt and very deliberate, on purpose; I wanted there to be a clear demarcation that things were different.
In general, I don't feel that the angriest complaints had much basis in reality. I'm accused of being very ban-happy for example, but the fact of the matter is that the most anybody really got was probation for a day or an hour ban on the shoutbox. The purpose of that kind of thing was to make it clear to the members that yes, actually, action WOULD be taken if they stepped out of line. That was a point that needed driving home, because infinite warnings had become something that was taken for granted.
There was the exceptional circumstance with you, Shizi, and perfectclear(?). I tried really hard to be transparent about what I was doing and why, and I just couldn't make any of you happy. It was cluttering up the forums with flamewars, which I allowed to fester too long for the very reason that I wanted to let everybody say their piece. It didn't get any better, though, and I eventually made the decision to flat out remove the problem. I think that lasted for a week(?), and BWH spawned from that encounter as a place, originally, where people could talk all the shit they wanted about me without getting "punished for it".
In reality, no one was punished for talking shit about me; the confusion is that people were practicing poor forum/site behavior in the same posts that they complained about me, so they decided that the actions I took were because of the content of their post, not the manner of it, regardless of what I had to say about it.
...wow, I just completely misinterpreted your question. I thought you meant what were they unhappy (with me) about... heh.
Lol yeah I meant what were people unhappy with the website?As to that, it was mostly to do with excessive trolling and posts that made the site unfriendly to new members. The ones that really got under my skin were posts like responses to a newbie celebrating their sprint improvements and having their thread filled with posts like "I just sub-60'ed with my toes" or whatever.
The primary purpose of the effort was to just be nicer to people in general. People were afraid to post because they didn't feel part of the in-crowd, or they were afraid of being made fun of, etc. and that just isn't cool. For that same reason, the people who the changes helped weren't outspoken about it, which contributed significantly to the perception that I was power tripping since pretty much the only posts talking about it were people complaining.
I do agree with you that HD was pretty unfriendly to newer members. However I also recognize that HD is a gaming forum, even though there were unfriendly members, compared to other gaming forums I'd say we were relatively.. nicer. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that to you and a few other people before haha. Yeah. I don't subscribe to the belief that gaming is synonymous with trolling/being an asshole. Some people came up in that kind of environment, got used to it, and are comfortable with it. That's good, it's to their advantage on the internet to have thick skin. But that doesn't mean we can't be better than that. So like, I understand what you mean, I just didn't want HD to be that kind of place.
Haha understandable. I think I don’t want it to be like that either, but I’ve grown kind of a thicker skin so it doesn’t bother me as much. But two wrongs don’t make a right so I understand you there.For that same reason I was very unaware of just *how* bad some of the stuff had gotten until it was pointed out to me by certain members. That stuff just rolls off me, and I ignore it, so it needed some outside perspective to call it to my attention.
Would you say the steps you took towards making HD a nicer place were a little extreme? I understand that you wanted to make everything clear, but to expect people to change immediately.. were you expecting the community to accept the new rules no questions asked?I talked about it a little before, but SomethingAwful was my model. They are very successful at moderating, and they were extremely high volume. The members knew that if they got too close to the line they might lose a toe, and in general everybody knew where the line was. The important thing was that mods made decisions and acted. That's what Hard Drop had been lacking, and I believe that's why people may have seen my actions as extreme. Coming from a perspective that nothing warrants action to a perspective that suddenly things got srs bizness is a bit of a shock, I suppose.
I didn't expect people to share my opinion, but I did expect them to obey. I was as open to change as I could be within the bounds of what I wanted to accomplish. Questions and discussion are encouraged if the conversation can be kept civil.
The other thing is that people didn't like the idea of being at the mercy of one single person. I understand that, and I understand the dangers inherent in that position. I felt that I could be fair enough to take it on, but I didn't really do anything to earn the trust that would need to be invested in my ability to make fair decisions.
So you told me that you and a few other people were thinking of posting a ban petition to get me banned, did you think the ban petition would've worked? And why did you want to ban me?I doubt it would’ve worked, but there’s always a chance!
You don’t think you would’ve looked like an asshat for posting that? LolIt wasn’t going to be public. It was a private petition to Blink. As for why, you have a tendency to be a contentious poster. We’ve talked about it before though, as far as I’m concerned you’ve got a reset slate. There’s not really any politic way to say it, haha. When you don’t like somebody, you REALLY don’t like them, and you make sure everybody knows it and raise a ruckus. But I don't think HD should be a place where "only friends of steph" are allowed to post without getting flamed to oblivion. I don't expect Blink to reign you in, so it's something of a relief that you're making the effort on your own
If you could change what you’d done before as a “co-admin” what would it be?I wouldn't do it at all. I knew from the outset that it was fruitless, but I thought it was worth attempting anyway. In the end I learned that my initial assessment was correct, so really it was just a lot of pain and stress that I didn't need to go through.
Also, I'd probably look into how to communicate better (with the people who aren't of the same mindset as myself).
How do you feel about Caffeine shutting down TC and people taking it over and using the same logo/name?I’ve already spoken about that at length in another thread. Anyway the short answer is I think a community’s identity belongs to the community.
So do you think the move was reasonable?No, I think Caffeine was the unreasonable one, but I think I understand the reasons behind why he’s upset about it now and can sympathize. However, I still think the [TetrisConcept] community’s identity belongs to the aggregate of the members and isn’t within the power of any one person to rescind.
Fair enough – now are you a loyal HD member or a TC member?I have like 2 posts on TC. My opinion is uniquely unbiased in that way; I have no attachment to TC at all. I do hang out with the guys on IRC, in a channel that doesn't really have any affiliation with TC. I don’t acknowledge the existence of sides, so I can’t be on one or the other.
If there was to be a war for ONE wiki between HD and TC and it could only be one, which one would it be?That's really an impossible question because it doesn't represent any legitimately possible scenario
I refuse to claim some affiliation in this false dichotomy! If for some reason this impossible situation came about, I would not involve myself in it and just accept whatever fell out.
LAME! ...but if it was even more impossibly ONLY UP TO ME, I would say TC, for the sole reason that it has the more technically dedicated userbase.
TRAITOR!! lol jk if you can't tell by the rest of what i said, that's a favoritism that amounts to about 0.0001%
¯\(o_°)/¯
Lastly do you have any shoutouts?KoS beasts: Chopin, larrytetris, piper
Dev crew: belzebub, esialb, misakamm, simonlc
IRC: Aaron, Agamemnon, Caithness, DeHackEd, DrPete, KevinDDR, Kitaru, muf, pineapple, Rosti
CTWC: Adam, Robin, Sisu, Vince, *.*
Misc: BARNCHAK, berry, Blink, Blitz, caffeine, harganslee, Katatoniopeth, ohitsstef, Parkzer, Paul676, SirJeivus
Where you at: lmartins, Zircean
[Interview] Myndzi
Nov 19 2013, 11:03 PM
