Faunasphere

» see faunasphere.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Faunasphere was a quiet game about a loud problem. you raised animal avatars, called fauna, and spent your time cleaning pollution out of a small online world and tending your own patch of it. Big Fish Games, better known for casual downloadable puzzle games, launched it free in the browser in august 2009 and added a facebook version in february 2010.

this is not my world and never was. in 2009 I was a computer engineer in ankara in my mid-twenties, and the gaming I still cared about was old private-server ultima online, not a gentle eco-pet game running in a facebook tab. Faunasphere had a real and devoted crowd, a lot of them older players and a lot of them women, the kind of audience the games press mostly ignored. I only read about it later, after it was already gone.

The problem was never the players. it was the math. Faunasphere needed a lot of custom work to keep running and never had the population to pay for it. Big Fish gave a month of notice, which is more than most shutdowns manage, and on march 15 2011 at eleven minutes past one in the afternoon eastern time the world threw a network disconnect error and stayed down.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

You did not fight anything in Faunasphere. you cleaned. pollution spread across the map and you pushed it back, one square at a time, breeding fauna with different traits to handle different messes. it was closer to gardening than to combat, a slow cooperative chore that people did together for months. that is a hard thing to explain to anyone who wanted a game to be exciting, and an easy thing to miss for anyone reading a revenue report.

~ what got buried with it ~

the shutdown became a small piece of academic history. researchers Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy studied Faunasphere's closing and the way its players grieved it, and later wrote a book about what happens when a world ends and the people who lived in it have nowhere to go. that is more attention than most casual games ever get, and it came because the players cared enough to make the ending mean something. Faunasphere sits with [[neopets]] and [[club-penguin]] in the long list of browser worlds that mattered most to the people the industry counted least.

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