Ten Seasons of Clarity
My Medium drafts are always a bit of a mess.
Where previously that may have been content ideas ripped more or less ceremoniously from a Bleacher Report or similar, the Clarity days tended instead to feature long-winded commentary on the organizational side of it. An excuse to do the yapping that my brain insists I must, on occasion.
The current count is at 16 drafts, comprising multiple thousands of words on all matter of administrative bullshittery, from format development considerations, to commentary on conflict in the space and the self-assigned obligation of resolving it, ambitious manifestos outlining how one might come to better understand the space and carve out their own place in it, analyses of common pitfalls for the fledgling amateur tournament organizer.
These 16 drafts might touch on a number of different topics, but ultimately share one crucial similarity: they’re unlikely to see the light of day.
Number 16 is a naive attempt at clearing out said list of drafts, collating all topics in one final, structured, exhaustive blog. Number 16, as with so many things, is most succinctly explained by an XKCD:
I’m a bit past the point of going for the structure thing. Anyone who might care to read any of those drafts can get the exact same thing by pinging me on Discord with a take, and I don’t have the energy to commit to the planning involved with creating something more…thought out. I’m immensely content just spewing out paragraphs without much thought, thank you.
Excuse the lengthy prelude. Welcome to draft number 17, 16’s carefree little brother. Let’s talk about Clarity League.
…is what Madsen in March thought he was going to do.
He then proceeded to do what he promised: talk about Clarity; except he did so starting with a matter that is more sensitive than the usual quasi analytical administrative babble, and come April, he felt it out of place to then transition that into talking about, checks two sections down, the pros and cons of consciously opting for an iterative approach to making changes in an amateur Dota league. No siree, no more competing standards. I’m just going to talk about what I want to talk about. Should you be a bit unhinged and want to read some of aforementioned babbling, I’ll leave you with links to unfinished drafts of (at this point fairly old) diatribes on choosing a format for Clarity and what I see as being the future developments the league might strive towards, with again the reminder that this is old and unfinished.
Back to the topic at hand.
There’s a bit of an elephant in the living room of your boy’s mind palace. He’s chill. Loves peanuts, hates mice, great memory, the usual. Really just a parody of himself at this point. But, by golly, it’s immensely difficult to reach past him and grab the dusty tome on the shelf that reads “An Exhaustive Summary of Madsen’s Thoughts On Coin Budget Allocation”, even if visitors might endure his presence while I babble on with the Sparknotes version of said tome in hand.
So, I suppose, it might be time to introduce you to him. We call him Binky, but his full legal name is:
“Did Clarity accomplish what it set out to do? Did it even set out to do what we said it did?”
An inclusive, friendly and safe environment. Is it that? I don’t know. It’s a question that bothers me, on and off. I’ll lead with the conclusion: it’s very far from perfect…but I’m unconvinced perfect exists, so I struggle not to settle for “it’s about the best you might expect”.
There is not a second, not a single instance of doubt in my mind that Clarity has pushed the space forward, and instituted standards in it that are now taken for granted, in a way that they very much were not half a decade ago. This is evidenced most clearly in much of those standards and ideas being assumed by competing spaces (often by people simultaneously deriding Clarity, go figure), meaning the positive impacts have been wider spread than just Clarity’s own development.
There is thus no doubt in my mind that part of Clarity becoming the big dog, as it were, is owed to that. I think part of the longstanding “How’d the status quo shift?” question is answered in large part by smaller groups individually choosing it, and all of that snowballing into something bigger. I think part of that is the idea that it’s staunchly anti-bigotry, and has always had staff that understood, first-hand at that, why it matters that a video game community will put that stance at the forefront, despite the seemingly reasonable assumption that your sexuality or gender or race or creed or britishness doesn’t matter in that context in the first place. If you’re represented, and your concerns are taken seriously, it’s easier to simply exist. It’s easier to play the game, and have some amount of peace of mind that you won’t hear something vile from the mouths of teammates you might hope to eventually become friends with (and that if you do, you won’t hear it a second time).
That, I think, is enough to sway most reasonable people into getting it. And it tends to be! But I have a tangent to go on.
Dota is fucking cool. It’s my favorite game of all time, it’s, in my opinion, the best game of all time — largely as a function of providing you with the highest highs of any game. What this tangent is about, though, is that those highs extend past the game itself. I’ve been in this space for about a decade now, and in it I’ve met so many people who aren’t just my gaming buddies, they’re friends friends. Like, my list of best friends in the world includes people I’ve met in the space. We’ve met up, and had a blast, and we’ve manufactured excuses to do it again, and had a blast, and we’re always in the process of manufacturing the next excuse to all show up in some random city — and eat and drink and sing and smoke and sightsee and oh for fucks sake okay I’ll play some fucking Mafia god fucking damn it give me a shot first.
All of that is to say: I adore it. I adore my friends, and the connections we’ve been able to craft, and that we can talk to each other about our real lives, and that I can knock on one of a dozen doors in the dead of the night across a dozen countries and have a place to sleep. And it comes from Dota.
And I want that for other people. I want someone who’s trans, who’s gay, who’s black, who’s whatever, to be able to have that same experience — or rather, to be unafraid of allowing themselves to try.
That’s a wrap to the tangent.
We’ve got our queers and all, they love us, we love them. What about it? Back to Binky.
I think it might’ve been waterfalls (as it often tends to be) who seeded some doubt in my mind about what it is we were doing and how we were doing it.
Okay, sure, people might not get abused for who they are as a person. That’s pretty cash money, indisputably. But was the intent to stop there?
Because, yknow. It’s still Dota. People still get heated. You can still get abused for your play or whatever, and that’s still pretty shitty, and it’s not unreasonable that it might fuck with someone’s mental — and, lest there be confusion, that doesn’t have to be, like, a big deal. It might just make them feel bad temporarily. It’s also kind of difficult to separate all of this from the fact that it’s also kinda rough to lose at video games. But even past the enclosure of a game of Dota, what’s it like to join Clarity? It’s a question that has quite genuinely been on my mind since day 0, but the lens through which I’d review it has shifted dramatically.
Where before my pondering on the matter tended to ultimately be pragmatic in nature, it skews perhaps a bit emotional nowadays.
By pragmatic I mean things like struggling to look at the experience through the eyes of a first timer. Much of the setup — the layout and visibility of information, the processes a participant need understand and their ability to intuitively develop that understanding — was highly internalised. I’d looked at it and fiddled with it for so long, it became impossible to take a step back and imagine looking at it from outside the box. It got bad enough that I started messaging random newcomers: “Hey, sorry, this is weird, but are there things you find confusing about Clarity?”. It was difficult on occasion, because it’s hard to know what it is you don’t know. I perfectly understood what a captain and a division and a team and a draft was, but first timers to the space likely needed to learn to separate meanings they’d associated with those terms from what we use them for in Clarity. At some point changing much of this terminology became a thought, but that was bound to simply institute more confusion.
Anyway. What I find myself thinking about instead, having now the luxury of not worrying about the numbers and keeping the ship afloat, is the experience of just being a new individual in an established community. We don’t exactly roll out the welcome mat; should someone new have the courage to drop a courteous hello in the chat they’ll get a couple responses back, and their questions will be answered at usually impressive pace. Should they lack courage or questions, though, they’re a number. They’re someone the staff might reach out to for questions about their signup, should there be some, and then for the activity checks, but that’s about it. We’re hardly proactive on the hospitality front, in terms of integrating people.
And that’s, kinda, perfectly fine. There’s nothing really that can or even should be done to change that, and people do integrate, by falling into the exact same practice that stands at the root of this state of affairs: they might play a season and become friends with their teammates, or play inhouse and get to know people, or engage with the fairly common back and forths that the daily point of contention in general chat creates. They slowly assimilate into the smaller social circles that exist on the periphery of Clarity as a central hub. All of this, to me, is perfectly reasonable and normal. But it’s also the exact same thing that breeds the oft cited, off-putting cliqueyness of Clarity; this, too, I personally deem inherent and innate to the setup, but it’s also one of the matters where I’ve gotten pushback. I’m not particularly used to pushback. I enjoy this status of being trusted to know what it is I’m talking about; it’s something I’d estimate is deserved some 70% of the time, by virtue of knowing what I’m talking about 70% of the time, and by virtue of being an absolute world class bullshitter who can expertly navigate optics and narratives to say something that sounds correct enough that others might concede the point in the remaining 30% of situations.
Being unable to concoct a solution is thus a source of much dread. To stumble upon an administrative matter that simply has no viable solution, no perfect answer, or just no answer that is close enough to perfect to accept, will dig at me.
And that’s sort of where I’m at with Binky.
We don’t have a thousand Crispy Bacons to populate a community with. But, okay, if everyone isn’t always warm and friendly and welcoming and cheerful, does that mean the idea of the community being safe, inclusive, and friendly fall through?
Naturally not.
Frankly, I tend to be surprised at the ways in which that has become fairly deeply rooted in the community at large. Where I was previously afraid that it was a veneer, a facade, manufactured and kept up purely by the staff, I take an odd kind of solace in seeing the same people who might create the somewhat…hostile environment when actual Dota play is in question, take exception to someone taking it past that, and spewing awful shit in voice channels. I can tell you for a fact that didn’t use to happen. It tended to be a matter of internalizing the “not my business” mantra. I digress.
Is there a solution to this only-debatably-a-problem?
Naturally not.
But does all of this mean that the next person who joins might be put off by one imperfect thing or another , and miss out on what it is Clarity wants to let them experience (y’know, like being pressured into playing a boring ass game of Mafia and buckling because it’s still quality time with friends)?
Maybe. And that digs at me, because I’m not quite smart enough to see how to affect that.
What I do, however, feel confident about, is that I’m absolutely, positively secure in my ability to take pride in being part of creating Clarity. I adore the peace of mind I enjoy, knowing that I could ghost and still be confident that when I return, I could still enjoy some pride in what it is at that point, even if it’s not perfect, and won’t ever be.
I’m not sure I’ll really ever shed some of the unease I talk about, and, being honest, I’m petrified that much of what I said here — the lines of thought and conclusions thereof — may really in truth just amount to being dismissive of those concerns and actual issues. I’ve caught myself in the past projecting the knowledge that there is many an individual whose gripes with Clarity stem from largely unfounded personal vendettas and persecution complexes onto people who are simply sharing their negative experiences without said malice attached. Luckily, the league has managed to shed the widespread association people internalized of equating Clarity with Madsen and vice versa — and I’m happy to continue contributing to that by staying the fuck away from staff roles. Marci and eisi are doing just fine. Plus I really couldn’t bother keeping watch on the current porn spam anyway. Hey admins, pussy in bio lmao fucking losers
Hm. Ending on that maybe undercuts my initial idea of closing out with a thank you to the community and all of the people who have spent hundreds of cumulative hours working on this shit.
Oh well.
Bye!
Wait fuck I didn’t get to explaining why it’s eleven actually, you see when we were launching Cla-
