Q: Can you give us a brief history on how your union came to be?
A:The HeadCrab Union was originally created by GameSpot Moderator Gambone as a user created board (UCB) back in 2003 in support of the yet to be released Half-Life 2. Yes, "Union" was in our name before the union system even existed, which leads me to believe that GameSpot's use of the name union was inpired by the HCU, though I can't confirm this. After the release of Half-Life 2, GameSpot introduced the union system, and The HeadCrab Union transferred over. Shortly after, the founder Gambone stepped down and allowed me to take over the leadership role. I expanded the HCU to cover all VALVe games and Steam news, affiliated with other Half-Life websites around the internet and began to develop quality features. Soon we had a regular stream of news articles and exclusive features like interviews, fan fiction, game guides, a mod info center, etc... An example of the content we put out would be our exclusive interview with the creators of Black Mesa: Source, the yet to be released recreation of Half-Life 1 in the Source engine, or our game guide for Half-Life 2: Episode One. As time went on, I advanced the union in so many more ways. I created a navigation system built out of images that consisted of hundreds of pages of content and information. This navigation system showed off our custom built game pages, features, downloads, videos, etc...
All this led the HCU to become the first union to be officially endorsed by GameSpot itself and featured on the front page of the site. In 2006 we won four union awards, including Best Union and Best Leader. In 2007 we won three more union awards. We were also the #1 union out of thousands, rising up to level 21 around the time when the union leveling system finally broke.
In 2006, the union navigation system I created was getting so complicated that it was becoming too difficult to manually update. We made the decision to leave GameSpot and create a website of our own. Before we could start making plans though, Greg Kasavin, the Site Director of GameSpot at the time contacted me and asked me not to move the HCU off of GameSpot, and to instead give them the chance to improve the union system before we officially made the decision to leave. He asked me to instead provide him with a list of union enhancements we'd like to have if we were to stay on GameSpot. I agreed to this and for two weeks I developed what is now known as the Unions: Version 2 Project. This project gained mass support all across GameSpot and the union community. It was advertised by hundreds of forum members in their signatures and the thread now has over 130 pages with over 2,600 posts.
Unfortunately though, it was not to be. Greg Kasavin resigned shortly after and moved on to another company. The promises GameSpot made to us were broken. Over the next year, the union system slowly broke down after many bugs popped up without anyone to fix them. First the level system broke and then the telegram system went, at least for larger unions. GameSpot slowly started to hide unions away into a corner by removing advertising for them. The HCU and the rest of GameSpot's unions slowly started to lose viewers and activity. The more technical errors that popped up, the worse the activity dropped. At the end of 2007, Gerstmanngate happened, causing long time members to flee GameSpot in droves. Activity suddenly dropped to horrible levels. Something needed to be done and quickly, so I had a forum created off-site and we moved The HeadCrab Union there. It survived for a couple months before life got in the way and I was laid off from my job. This caused me to have to quit the union leadership role in the middle of the transition period. I guess you can imagine what happened here. The union basically ended with me stepping down. The HCU on GameSpot was already abandoned and the off-site website eventually shut down some time in the beginning of 2008. That was the end of The HeadCrab Union, once great, but eventually reduced to nothing all because I put too much faith into GameSpot's promises.
After a three year absence from GameSpot, I got tired of seeing the empty shell of our old union just sitting there unused, so I recently returned in order to reactivate it. Though because I no longer have the time to run a complex news and media website, especially with unions being in the same condition they were three years ago, the HCU will no longer be competing with major news and media companies. This means no game pages, no navigation system, no features, interviews or game guides. There will be some news posted on the front page and the forum will remain open for the HCU's community to use. I've basically stripped the union down to the essentials, news and community. That's our history so far.
Q: Did you expect the union to be a success?
A: The union was already a success when I first joined it. At the time it was only a UCB, but it was very active. I had high hopes for the union system when it was first introduced. I thought of all the possibilities that lay open to us. I had larger goals than most leaders on GameSpot. I wanted to create a quality news and media hub for VALVe's games as well as a large active community. I treated it as if it were a professional website. For example, I would notice some other unions posting articles about their union level and I felt like screaming at them. In my book, the front page is never to be used for such spam, only quality content, properly written and laid out news articles, interviews, features, etc... This was the dedication that it took to get the HCU to rise to the #1 spot and keep it there. Unions still being the way they are now, I would never waste my time with such dedication again. The union system in its current state is not worth the effort to go all out like I did. Besides lacking the necessary tools to manage a large media organization, it's so broken and so under-advertised that the system literally works against you. It's just not worth it in my opinion to do anything more with the union system than to manage news and a community. If you want to expand as I did, you'll need your own website.
Q: What is unique about your union?
A: For some strange reason, it was one of the only VALVe dedicated unions ever created on GameSpot. I really don't understand this, because VALVe is one of the best game developers in existence. Everything they come out with is top quality. Besides that though, I would say our community was unique. It was a very tight knit group of people. The members cared so much about the union that during my three year absence, I'd occasionally stop by the forum to find a new post by an old member talking about the old days and the nostalgia they got from visiting the union. They would mention how they spent their childhood at the HCU. It just brings up great memories, so I really think that what made the HCU so unique was its excellent community. I just wish there was some way to get it back to the way it was. I believe my 5,000 person member list is now outdated. Any telegram I now send out generates very little if any response. I believe most of them moved on from GameSpot long ago. If we were to see our glory days again, I imagine it would need to consist of a brand new set of members.
Q: Do you do anything special to attract new members? Or do they just come naturally?
A: I used to do a lot of advertisement. During our UCB days, in order to become a member of the union, you had to advertise it by using one of the HCU's many forum signatures. That's why the UCB's activity level was so high when I first joined it. When the union system was released, we did away with the signature requirement and made it optional, though I would usually send a welcome message to all new members informing them of the signatures and asking them politely to advertise for us. Since the HCU was the #1 union on GameSpot, our union logo would show up on all our affiliated game pages. For example, if you look at the Half-Life 2 game page, our union logo is located at the bottom right of the page for all to see. I personally never used the union recruitment board. I believe it didn't do its intended purpose. Besides affiliating with other GameSpot unions and being advertised by them, I affiliated with larger Half-Life websites so that we would become more known throughout the community. I remember paying for some advertisements on some great websites. Sometimes I would go through the list of people tracking a certain game and send them all PM's asking them to join us. We had a desktop shortcut so people would always see a link to the HCU. I would even add our logo and web address to the videos I uploaded so that random GameSpotters would see it and check us out. There's probably a lot more examples, but basically any chance I got, I would advertise.
Q: Have you considered moving your union off-site? If you have, how did that go?
A: Yes, as I said in my answer about the HCU's history, we were forced to move off-site because Gerstmanngate caused most of our long-time members to move off of GameSpot. That, coupled with the already low union activity caused us to leave GameSpot. The off-site HCU started off as a message board. We were having a full website designed and coded up, but unfortunately life got in the way and I was laid off from my job, causing me to resign in the middle of our transition. The website that was being built was never finished and the temporary message board that had been setup eventually went off-line. If this had never happened, The HeadCrab Union would probably have been even larger than it was on GameSpot. As you can see from this concept art I created, I had big plans for the union. It was going to be the central hub for all things VALVe Software. Maybe there's a chance it could still happen some time later on down the road.
Q: Have there been any times where you just wanted to give up?
A: Yes, I gave up several times. As I explained in the HCU's history, union management got too complicated for me because of the lack of union tools. I resigned several times only to come back again because I could see that things weren't being taken care of by the replacement leader. I couldn't stand to see news that had been out for a week and the HCU hadn't updated yet, so I would take over each time to ensure things were getting done. Also, when I was pushing for union redesign sometimes I just wanted to give up, feeling GameSpot was ignoring me, but my drive to see the HCU succeed led me to continue to crittique the union system.
Q: Do you have any members with whom you owe part of the success to?
A: Yes, I believed in the word "Union" and focused the HCU around the concept. I had the final word in the administration department, but I made sure to include my members in everything that happened within the union, all the major decisions. For example, our interview questions for game developers were all submitted by our members. We did a game guide for Half-Life 2: Episode One that consisted of text, images and video. The game guide was a group effort, each chapter of the game being written by a different HCU member. I actually did nothing for that project except to put it together and post it. I loved getting the feedback of my members so I could make the place better and more valuable to them. Even though content was very important in the HCU, it was still secondary to the community. The activity we had far surpassed many unions at the time. Each and every HCU member deserves credit for making the union the success it became.
Q: What was the hardest choice you had to make about your union?
A: I would say letting it go was the hardest choice I had to make. The first time I resigned was pretty emotional for me. My dedication to the union was interfering in my daily life, so after much contemplation I decided to give it up completely. Like I said though, it didn't last long. Seeing the union not updating on time like it should have encouraged me to come back time and time again. The worst thing though was when I was forced to resign because of my job situation, because there was nothing I could do but watch the union collapse on itself after all the hard work I put into it over the years to make it a top quality website.
Q: Have you ever made a mistake that you regret?
A: Yes, there is one thing I have major regrets about. As I mentioned before, we used to require people to use our HCU forum signatures in order to join us. After the union system was released and the HCU's popularity rose, we were officially endorsed by GameSpot. When they endorsed us, they also created a large advertisement on their front page for us, something I don't think they did for any union ever again. This advertisement brought in a massive amount of newcomers. Thousands of people tried to join the union. I was only still an officer at the time and I was still following the old rules. All these people applied to become members and I rejected 99% of them because they didn't have our forum signatures installed. Of course I PM'ed every one of them telling them this, but to this day I can't believe I did such a stupid thing. Shortly after we made the signatures optional, but by then it was too late and the advertisement was pulled from GameSpot's front page. If I hadn't done that, the HCU would probably have more than 7,000 members right now and the union activity would have absolutely exploded.
Q: When you think about the union system, how do you feel about it?
A: I feel it could have been so much more. It's just wasted potential. The ideas I proposed in my Unions: Version 2 Enhancement Thread, though maybe a little outdated now, would have set the union system on fire. It would have given leaders so many more options and possibilities, the power to easily create an online news and media hub like what I was trying to accomplish with the HCU. It would have been much less work to manage a mammoth union like the HCU with all its content using the brand new features that would have come along with a redesign. Union leaders wouldn't have had to do everything manually like I ended up doing.
I still feel though that unions could be revived. Just check out the feedback tab on the left hand side of GameSpot's front page. Union redesign has been voted up to third place with over 700 votes, yet there is still no response from GameSpot. So there is still massive interest in the union system. It's up to GameSpot though whether they'll fulfill the desires of their own community. We've made it clear that we want union redesign, but the GameSpot staff still has yet to take that desire seriously. If adding value to their community isn't enough motivation for them to do it, I suggest they find a way to make a profit from the union system. I've suggested ways to do this on the last couple pages of the Unions: Version 2 thread, so I suggest the staff check them out. One thing is certain, the desire is there, but it's really up to the staff to figure out how to implement a union system that benefits them as well as the community.
- Sentinelrv
- Leader of the Headcrab Union
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