Alt.games.creatures
alt.games.creatures (or AGC, a.g.c) is a newsgroup devoted to the Creatures series of games.
Although a.g.c is a part of the Creatures Community and its history, it nevertheless has a very definite subculture of its own.
History
Some discussion of Creatures took place on comp.ai.games prior to its release in late 1996, and traffic increased significantly afterwards. After a while this became irritating to the regulars of that group, who regarded it as being outisde of the group's charter - the specified topic of conversation was of the AI in games, not game-related posts such as how to recover from a lost egg disk:
- "And remember, if you have an egg disk problem, maybe you should talk to Millennium. Just a suggestion. No pressure."
alt.games.creatures was created by Douglas Setser on or around 24 March 1997, having been proposed by many people. The actual name was suggested by Christer Ericson on 30 November 1996. The most popular alternate suggestion was rec.games.[computer.]creatures, but as this would have been in the "Big 8" (rather than the alt.* hierarchy) it was easier to make the former.
In a heavy dose of irony, alt.games.creatures was deluged with what many considered to be off-topic posts from Petz players when this game was released. The first attempt to solve this was badly implemented, leading to the creation of alt.petz - this was rectified by RedWordSmith, who proposed alt.games.petz in Janurary 1999.
Forking Attempts
As is common on newsgroups, there is often discussion on whether creating a new group to discuss a specific subset of the topic or to exclude some posts would be appropriate. In general the community has been strongly against such attempts - there is even a FAQ about it.
In Feburary 1999 Dillon attempted to create a moderated subgroup, alt.games.creatures.moderated. It was not created succesfully as a moderated group and attracted no significant traffic, although it still exists on several servers. Other unsuccessful attempts/suggestions to fork a.g.c include:
- alt.games.creatures.trade (Sep 27 1997) - a suggestion that trading creatures and COBs might be better accomplished on a subgroup
- alt.games.creatures.two (August 12 1998) - a Creatures 2-specific newsgroup request by Dayon
- alt.games.creatures.tech (Mid-September - October 1998) - initially proposed as alt.tech.games.creatures by Doc Shan this was greeted with surprise by most regulars, who had never heard mention of it on the main roup
- alt.games.creatures.fans (August 11 1999) - another attempt (this time by Dave Dennis) to exclude a.g.c regulars:
- "There is an existing newsgroup which gets 10-20 posts a day, everyday. The problem with this group is that there are a few regulars who like to show that they know best and put other visitors down."
According to Ping, anyone posting to one of these groups will turn into a zombie.
The only Creatures newsgroup to be created and have a significant level of uptake on Usenet was alt.binaries.games.creatures, which was proposed on 17 June 1998 by Bibble and created on 1 July by Jason Westman.