There are differences, but the community is strong. *IMG* (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Thursday, December 17, 2015, 20:11 (3359 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Why was the Halo community considerably more open, fun, and creative than the Destiny community?

While I have lamented the lack of art and crafts here at DBO, there is certainly no lack of it elsewhere. I think the avenues of communicating art and fun inspired by games, movies, etc. have simply changed as a whole, whatever fandom, within the last decade. HBO is no longer a central aspect of Halo fandom and heralds less fan creations, similarly.

Destiny and Halo's creativity have both migrated from the forums and chatrooms of yesteryear towards social media. Whereas people needed Claude to bring attention to their work on the HBO frontpage 10 years ago, they can now use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to do it themselves. I mean, these days there's sketches I've tweeted that I never got around to posting here. That's no disrespect to DBO or HBO, that's just an effect of how I use the internet differently these days. Heck, my favorite aspect of Destiny's community right now is actually Hedgem0ny's Twitter. It's kind of a perfect example of what I'm talking about: he's a grizzled B.Oer who no longer comes around the forums but instead devotes his feed to Destiny fanart. This was a highlight from just yesterday.

There's thousands more where that came from!

And its not just visual art that have found new channels. The 'fun' part of the community, for me, now unintentionally happens more on Twitter and Facebook than here. For every multi-paragraph rambling essay (that afterwards I cant remember why I wrote it) that I post here there is 20 messages on social media asking Beorn what made him cry laughing while we were Sparrow racing. It's different, but it's not less.

Regarding the openness, I find the game itself to be built for bringing people together and I've encountered far less competitiveness and rudeness in Destiny than in Halo, where I have horror stories of being trash talked into yesterday by an eight-year-old who apparently had romantic interests in my mom. DBO's FTB alone is a great example of the openness of the community. :)

There are definitely differences in the community, and I think the lack of in-game stories have hurt story discussion especially, but all my real interactions (aka not reading random comments from jackasses on Reddit) with the Destiny community has been positive and creative and fun, especially for a game that just came out last year. I get to meet a lot enthusiastic players at cons who stumble upon the fanart in my portfolio, and I see real-life Hunters walking by my table. It's awesome.

And I hope the community only continues to grow. I'd love to make and post more Destiny art here, and figure out contests or something to help bring or generate more here in the future.