Back in late September of last year, there was about two weeks where the hospitality industry I worked in faced a massive coffee shortage. There was just simply no way to get the craft espresso pods for those espresso machines that take all of the art and artifice out of making coffee, and restaurants all over switched to generic brand or instant coffee over night. Customers and guests were pissed – everyone I worked with lived a string of bad reviews. Afterwards, coffee returned to rotation and nicer comments started trickling in.

Day in, day out, on my feet in the restaurant industry, I got acquainted with this peculiar thing that happens when a restaurant or coffee shop runs out of something: it gets treated by ornery guests, used to the routine of ambling into any business and getting exactly what they want, as a personal failure on the part of employees. Looks. Sneering. The true privilege for the American middle class is the way the world congeals around it to shut out any consequences for what it looks like out there.

Small things in the city that can trip up the commuter schedule, the unfortunate soul who’s splitting time between work from home and work at the office. Middle managers and executives who have to face bus strikes, coffee shortages. Woe is them if they have to see a homeless person or contend with their over priced sandwich shop going out of business; the truck that’s supposed to deliver their Book Box or Craft Wine Curation Service is late or cannot be delivered. The rage of the middle class is mostly impotent, delivered on yelp, bare and bereft of any upward or forward momentum.

The City sleeps now, wherever they are, and I bet it didn’t used to. Businesses close doors early due to short staffing. Delivery routes get longer and more infrequent. Not enough kids in the nice part of town to keep the high school open; woe is the wasp family that has to send their kid to a place they might bump shoulders with one that’s poorer.

We’re all getting higher, we’re all working longer. Our bosses are mostly concerned with returns.

People are losing jobs and being displaced by technology meant to afford the middle management class, pushed and brokered by the most dirty of all words. Shareholders. Don’t believe me? Buzzfeed just let go 12% of their staff and plans on replacing it with AI. Staff to the employer has to become People again – meaning not Buzzfeed’s problem (unless they’re an even more important social class: readership metrics)

How bad is it? How bad are videogames? The publishing industry always trickles down; alternative press and social political writing gets cut immediately. LAUNCHER: the gaming and social gaming criticism rag by The Washington Post got terminated in January. The streets are empty, the businesses are closing, and we haven’t even started talking about The City yet.

Out in the warehouse district there’s always a warehouse district now, the Purple Gang moves in the night. They’re still hustling and they always will be, nothing can stop them. The Aces, too. There are fewer and fewer superheroes out there on the street to do anything about it, and now the only thing that will eventually put a stop to their nefarious plots is the slow rot of entropy – it’ll come eventually for the servers that The Purple Gang are stored on, if someone doesn’t decide the game just isn’t pulling in enough subscribers any more.

Champions Online was released in 2009 in a world that feels starkly different then the one I live in now. The Massively Multiplayer Online game seemed like it had enough built-in-conceits that every game company in the world was trying to get on the ground floor at one time. Hey, who remembers Everquest Next?

News and its perpetual cycle hasn’t changed in digital spaces. Always marketed as the forever spot, a social place at the press of a button. Craft your identity and display it however an avatar can show it. No matter how many metaverses they try to sell you, always remember Everquest is still churning along in the background. At least, until management throws the switch.

Maybe, the best thing to do right now could go read Launcher before it gets scrubbed down to an archive.org directory and an underlined word in a dozen or more journalist and journalist hopefuls muckrack profiles. That’s the end point of our new digital-commerce based flavors of accumulattion. Everything will become history, and the decision won’t be the choice of anyone who should have a say in the matter.

The City I forget what it’s called, it’s a place with about 307 hours logged into it on steam since 2009. I’m any number of masked vigilantes – I dole out justice at the tip of a sword. I get drunk in bars and playfully harass anthro roleplayers to cause a little chaos. We fight, we drink, we love and live and once it’s gone it’s gone for good. There will be no stepping back to look at an empty storefront with nostalgia, or sitting at a new bar in the place the old one was. As much as we love nostalgia, we leave no room for it unless it can be repacked in plastic.

There’s a little club tucked into the main social area – a dance floor on one side and a lounge on the other. You’ll catch the fixtures of any online-roleplaying social area there. Players standing motionlessly together. A crowd gathered around a digital bar taking in libations over common conversation. Little cliques forming, little set-ups of interpersonal drama.

The streets of the city aren’t choked with superheroes, but the club is. Everyone’s maxed out and feeling fine about it – you’ll see a low level alt of another player here and there but for the most part everyone knows everyone. That’s the scene, right? What’s it take for a superhero about town to break in?

The streets are still empty out there, and they’re getting emptier by the day. The central question of the game has long been solved by hands that aren’t the players – Cryptic runs Champions as like a subscription based treadmill. Pay 30$ for a package of powers, lock half of the cosmetics behind dollar bills and let the people still around hang out on empty streets and in dwindling bars.

Champions was my drug of choice long enough ago that the makeup changes every time I come back. Weirdos and straight-superheroes have long migrated elsewhere. Retired Supervillains, anthromorphs from forgotten timelines. Lube secreting latex women and seven foot tall futanari dragons.

It’s never anyone you expect to run into, and that’s what makes it fun still. Even though the gangs and super criminals keep doing what they’ve always done like clock work. The game is over, it really is, but underneath the glass, the broken parts got switched out for something new. Those parts have a shelf life, too.

Hidden under treasure trove of 1,000 character backgrounds are the little bits behind every character that makes them tick. A muck rack for superheroes.

LAUNCHER is gone and I know people are hurting about it. Not just the ones who lost their jobs, but when a place like LAUNCHER goes under the beet-red faced of angry staff will turn calm through times of letting go. They’re losing coworkers, friends, weird little work place communities that pop up in the mad dash to push out words for the front page.

If you listen to the news, every town is burning buildings and rioting gangs. Listen to the news and get told every town is burning buildings and rioting gangs. Listen to the hearts and the minds of people that live there, know how everything is really just getting cut apart and sold up river so an army of yuppies have places to take instagram photos in. Choked freeways in a work from home economy that could make sense.

Listen, now I’ve gotta pull you close. Every time some big website gets shuttered, the staff cut and clothed and sent out into the rain, it makes all of the little websites wonder what the point of doing it is. If we could see each other, there would be a lot of nervous glancing around the room to see who’s gonna be the first one to leave. I see a lot of journalists just saying fuck it – i’m gonna go do PR for somebody because if there’s no market for – in their own words, scrutinizing power and empowering readers.

Being self employed, not knowing where the future’s gonna take me, at least if a client sent me an email like that I could go and tell them to right get fucked, the only sane response when we step over people to pick up dollars on a daily basis. I know emails like that really well, the same press-release candor that comes when we find out the servers to a long thought dead game is finally going under. When digital software is getting cleaned up off of a storefront. I want to laugh that a magazine called LAUNCHER gets cleaned off the internet the same way a game from Steam or The Epic Games Store or fuck me the Wii Shop will just disappear into the ether. All that work and time meant to vanish.

The City well, it’s got a lot of names right? It’s here and now, its with us and around us. Out in the dying wastes of forgotten MMO’s that catch cobweb dollars out of a few players pocket books, it’s still there. You can go roll a new character in Champions Online today but I can’t tell you if it’s going to look anything like it does now. Eventually, those servers will shut down and if we’re lucky a private server might pop out of the ether, a quiet little glimpse into how things could have kept going as long as someone needed to sit at that bar and wear a cape and cowl.

The mechanics and raids, they don’t always work the same way they’re supposed to. Things are quietly, ever so quietly, breaking down in the world of Champions. Things fall out of access in the character creator, the logic and seams that hold the world together stop working one shoulder pad at a time.

I came back to it hungry, glaring, tired. I know how my own failures work in my head, and winter was a rough one. I felt alone, and I still do – I seized up some time in November and started having delusions of grandeur about getting people to roleplay. You know what? I did though, we had a fun little murder mystery while the world outside of that bar kept rotting away, but the slippery fantasy of games can sometimes be a all encompassing.

Needing a place to go and hide myself under layers and layers of identity when I was having a crisis of one in my personal life, a place where I know all of the rules. It’s never the same though.

I played The Jerk a batman-parody that gave me enough intertia to bother every roleplayer I saw. I played Wolfshirt a time traveling detective who was trying to solve his own question of “Why am I.” I played a catgirl from a more authoritarian timeline who looked at the police and jackboots and said “Not here.”

It is a little funny to me that the comic book archetype characters never got horny DM’s, the hot, rippling muscled superhero types. Everybody wants to touch a catgirls ears though, even if indulging didn’t crack the question of how to get on the inside. I still did it. There’s this funny thing about Champions now where everyone has a penthouse hideout and wants to fuck you in it in between rounds at the bar. It’s the same penthouse every time.

Almost every character has a bio about having a job as part of the fiction, but mostly all of the superheroes hang out, fuck, and drink while the lights go off in the city. There will be no more new content for Champions Online that isn’t the same holiday events the game has been running. If there was ever the illusion players had a say in things, the trick has been revealed. Community makes the story, but often not more than with the parts that are left behind. So what if the people left behind want to just drink and fuck and play pretend? Someone’s going to come around and pull the plug on that, too, another memory of a fake place where I get the feeling from dipping my toes in real shit happens in a lot.

It’s not just that city, it’s every city. Everything becomes a little bigger and a little more empty. Look into futures that smell like the second great strip mall rennaisance, taste like halogen lights. After all: these new planned urban centers that are meant as places we need to go to after playing Champions Online on the other side of fields of single family homes. Cut down the trees if you can, worry about property values now.

When a place like LAUNCHER gets the rug pull, when the staff have to go looking for jobs elsewhere or moving up in the country, it’s like one more thing has been twisted into a lack of itself that no rebuilding can create. Writers I know are staring at the black hole left over and planning their future careers accordingly.

It is very easy to hear news of the outside world and want to hole up, twitter feeds and website shutdowns and the constant drive to make more to fill up how empty everything is out there in the real world. The trucks aren’t showing up on time, the businesses that we used to haunt the halls of late at night shut their doors and lock them earlier in the day.

DEEP HELL started almost eight years ago. Survived by few things in my personal life besides an account tethered to an online game where I still see greyed out names of the people who didn’t stick around. It hurts every time, but I respect not having time for games or an industry that tries to kill you or tear your heart out every chance the people writing checks get.

Don’t count the nothing feeling. Don’t think about the pitch black that happens when we no longer remember the faces or names as well. Cry and scream and punch the desk of whoever sent that email and ask them why the hell nobody gets anything in this industry. I wish we could.

Back to the office and be told there are no jobs left accept it, be happy about it. Go to work and find out there’s no more coffee, your new landlord has always a bank right?. A resounding chorus; Where are the movies telling me what to think about the last two years?. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

I wont fault anyone walking out the door to find greener pastures.

Even though the player count gets lower every time I pop back in to check, there’s still a seat at the bar occupied by someone. They will keep showing up and figuring out what the rules of the game, of the industry mean for and to them, taking whatever idea isn’t nailed down and playing with it and making it their own. At the end of the day, I hope the ones that stick around with me will look me in the eye and say “at least we got to be superheroes.”