Sometimes I have ideas which start out as “I could post this to Masto”, but then I consider if the sentiment is transient — which is fine for a scrolling feed that self-destructs in 6 months, as my posts to Gamepad do — or if I want it to have staying power because the info is useful (to me, maybe to you) or the sentiment evergreen, like this post is.

Right about now, many people are drawing the curtains, turning off the lights, maybe bathing for the last time in a long time, and are firing up Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the latest entry in the venerable Dragon Age saga. Some people still love BioWare as they have always created games with deep, rich story lines and complex intractable characters. Some people love the Dragon Age setting with it’s angry high-fantasy mileage. Regardless of why people like it, the positive responses have been almost insane in their fervor, and while it might seem hyperbolic, people wait for Dragon Age games (or maybe even just classic BioWare games) with the same intensity as people lining up for Taylor Swift tickets. Yes, I made that connection in writing. No I will not retract the inference.

I am not one of those people, but this is not one of Those Posts. I will not question why people like it. I will not offer my thoughts on the series, although I have probably dropped enough context to let you know that I am not playing it; the why in this case doesn’t matter either. But as I watched people on Teh Socials get all giddy about the new game even during the absurdly long shader caching sequence, I saw them all as a unified block of people sharing the same interests for the same reasons, in psychic lock-step with one another over this singular experience. They are a community even when or if they aren’t aware of one another.

So where is my community? I have friends who live near me, and they are my community. I have friends online with whom I share interests in broad strokes, and we’ve found one another by accidents of digital proximity. I know of places online where people congregate who like the exact same things I do, but that is a tenuous thread at best. None of these communities and I have the same synchronized love of A Thing on the same level as the one shared by Dragon Age players.

Then I realized it went further than that. It’s not just Dragon Age fans, but WoW fans, FFXIV fans (one of whom is my daughter, so I get hit with it all the time), indie game fans, open source software fans, sports fans, of course, celebrity fans, rocket fans…really, anything-you-can-think-of fans. These people have a deep, deep love of a subject, a person, or a product, and I think that overrides some/many/most/all other considerations when bumping into others with a similar level of obsession with the objects of their affections.

I feel that I have yet to find that kind of community, and if I haven’t yet found it, I wonder if I ever will. Instead, I have focused on varied interests; a little bit of everything across the board thanks to my shifting project priorities. In a way, that makes me feel like I do when I host a party, or at my wedding reception: moving around the room, chatting but not talking, always with somewhere else I feel I should be so everyone and everything is attended to. It’s not a bad feeling, mind you, but it’s not a settled feeling either, and it’s never more clear than when I see a whole lot of folks getting excited over their own shared interests.