Life is terribly unfair.

It’s true. People have problems. Sometimes those problems are physical, sometimes those problems are developmental — Sometimes they’re emotional. Some people have a very difficult time relating to their families, other folks have a rough time communicating with others. Some people have a very hard time of making a living in their chosen field. Sometimes people feel that the life they have isn’t the one they wanted, or even the one for which they’ve been trained. A lot of people have spent their lives working very hard and finding their dreams just out of reach every time.

This is incredibly common. There are entire branches of science devoted to helping people with these kinds of problems. I am not qualified to diagnose or treat these problems.

All I know is that it can make some people very sad. It can make them deeply unhappy.

…and sometimes, these people take it out on us.

You don’t have to look very far to find the illusion of prestige in STARFLEET. It’s everywhere. We have pretend ranks from a pretend military that leads a pretend armada to the edges of our galaxy and beyond. We’re modeled on ideas from a TV show in a genre that some people call competence porn.

If you’re having a very hard time with your family, if you’re in a bad relationship, if you work a terrible job for almost no money, if you’ve been out of work for what seems like an eternity? I bet STARFLEET looks completely amazing.

Finally. They’ve found a place where people will recognize their ability. A place where people will respect them. A place where they can get away from the world and just be themselves. And if people don’t respect them, they’ll make it so. They’ll chase awards and commendations. They’ll do whatever it takes to get promoted, which usually isn’t that much.

They will tell people that they’ve been serving in STARFLEET when all they’ve really been doing all this time is paying for a membership.

This actually happens.

We’ve seen it. We could cite a lot of examples. We know that this is happening.

Realistically, many of us have found success in our personal and professional lives. Most of us that have found a measure of success realize that while we’ve worked very hard, we were also incredibly lucky.

The easiest thing to do when we see attention-seeking behavior is to just dismiss it and look away. But we can’t. We were taught better than that by Star Trek. We need to embrace the people and embrace the problem.

We need to understand that the illusion of prestige can be problematic. I’m not saying that we need to systematically remove all the pieces that contribute to it, but we really need to dial it back.

When we move away from Star Trek, we become inexorably drawn into being a club that is simply about itself. This is when the illusion of prestige is at its most potent, at its most dangerous level. It’s when debate becomes argument. It’s when argument becomes a fight.

It’s when factions become family.

And that’s not healthy. We need to be more aware of when it’s happening, and we need to be aware of what it does to people — especially people that are hurting. When they come to us because they’re angry or upset, we can’t let it be because we’re their commanding officer or their regional coordinator or the Commander, STARFLEET. We need it to be because we’re friends, and friends talk to each other.

There’s certainly a lot to be said for wanting to make STARFLEET a lot more about Star Trek instead of putting so much focus on the organization itself. Taking the illusion of prestige down a couple notches would be one of several very good reasons to do so.

“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.” — Fred Rogers

A quote from a conversation I had this morning with a STARFLEET member in the UK.

“Our problem is that we have feast or famine with Trek. Aside from the JJ films it’s been a lean decade for Star Trek fandom. What do you fill that time with?“

You mean aside from the three films that have been so popular that they’ve made over 1.2 billion dollars and were consistently better-received by audiences than previous Star Trek movies by a significant factor? Well, alright then.

It’s been quite a lean decade, that’s true.

It feels like we didn’t even get six Starfleet Corps of Engineers books, the three-book Destiny series, all eight Typhon Pact novels, all five books of The Fall, the three-book Prey series, five books of the Department of Temporal Investigations. Five more Lost Era books. Seven Vanguard books. Four Seekers books. Three Cold Equations books. Oh, and the anthologies, like all three Mirror Universe anthologies. And the three Myriad Universes anthologies. Or the four Starfleet Academy books for the Young Adult crowd.

Or even books like ‘How To Speak Klingon,’ featuring a very handsome audio engineer.

Or the comic books that IDW has been putting out like Star Trek, Starfleet Academy and New Visions. And the crossover titles that bring the Star Trek universe together with Green Lantern, Planet of the Apes and Doctor Who. And cool trade paperback versions of each.

Board games that we almost didn’t see in the past decade include Star Trek: Expeditions, Star Trek: Fleet Captains, Star Trek Catan, Star Trek: Attack Wing or Star Trek: Ascendancy. And video games like Star Trek: DAC, Star Trek and the incredibly popular Star Trek Online. Also mobile games like Star Trek: Timelines, Star Trek: Trexels, Star Trek: Rivals, Convoy Raider 2013, Romulan 2014 and Starfleet 2014.

See?

This is why I’m crazy.

A STARFLEET member should know about these things. A STARFLEET member in the UK should absolutely know about the incredible Rachael Stott, the artist who drew that awesome dress-uniform Spock sketch above — She’s from London, draws Star Trek comics and is so good that she’s gotten hand-painted fan letters from Peter Capaldi.

If you’re a STARFLEET member and you’re not aware of the stuff I’ve mentioned here, STARFLEET has failed you. I’m not saying you have to know everything that’s coming out or that has come out, but you should probably know more. If you think the last decade has been ‘lean,’ I honestly don’t even know where to begin. The statement is abject nonsense.

Even all the stuff listed above isn’t everything! There are all kinds of new Star Trek shirts and clothing and Eaglemoss models and Mega Blox kits and new RPG beta-tests and listing every Star Trek thing that’s come out in the past decade would probably take an entire day to write up, and I type very quickly.

Okay, so that makes me crazy. But what’s worse?

Man, look at what this ignorance has wrought. We’ve got Star Trek hooks into fiction readers, comic book fans, tabletop gamers, video game fans, mobile gaming fans, role-playing game fans… and if we’re not informed about this stuff we can’t engage on these topics.

The idea that a Star Trek fan club can’t thrive in this environment is totally crazy. It can. They do! SFI isn’t thriving. Why are STARFLEET members buying these ridiculous excuses? A lean decade? Good lord.

—

NOTE: Yes, I’ve done a lot of work for CBS on Star Trek but it’s not like they give me information about this stuff. I wish they would! I’d be happy to tell more people about it, but licensing is a strange beast with a lot of arms (and twice as many heads). The only stuff they talk to me about is stuff that I can’t talk about. I have almost zero advantage over anyone else on gathering this information. I ain’t special.

…a phrase that makes my blood freeze every time.

Ah, the good old days. Back in the 90s when STARFLEET was really big and there were two STAR TREK shows on the air and the internet wasn’t really around just yet in a meaningful way. What usually follows is a description of the good old days, and while it’s nostalgic and fun, it’s important to put that into historical context. Since it’s hard to do so regarding STARFLEET (mainly because a lot of people don’t remember the walking nightmare that STARFLEET had become in the late 90s), I’ll approach it from another angle.

But for right now, think about a Star Trek fan in 1993. Think about what they need, what they want to talk about and how they’re likely to express it when it comes to their fandom. Keep thinking about that fan while I take you to an entirely different realm. A realm of heroism and wizardry, of fantasy and magic.

That’s right, another geek-friendly property that involves a bunch of friends getting together and having a good time. As it was and ever shall be. Or was. And is.

Welcome to 1993! I’m in an abandoned classroom in Solebury, PA. My friends are there — Stephen Francesconi (who got me into STARFLEET in the first place), Colin Brown and Brian Schaeffer. We stayed after school because Stephen mentioned that he wanted to run a D&D campaign. I’d never played before, but it certainly sounded like my kind of thing.

We played Dungeons and Dragons, but that’s actually not really fair to say. We were playing what was called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition. The Player’s Handbook looked like this.

We were all in the same room, sitting in chairs. We had pushed a couple of desks together to create a play-surface, and we used the copy machine at the library to make character sheets.

It wasn’t the only thing we used the copier for, either. I was an incredibly poor kid. There’s no way I would have been able to afford a Dungeons and Dragons book. I copied what I could out of books that belonged to my friends. They also had a surplus of dice, and let me use them. Whew! If it weren’t for the charity of my friends, I really wouldn’t have been able to learn to play D&D. I remain very grateful.

I understand the desire to remember way-back-when, too. Life was easier, I didn’t have bills to pay and I still had great knees. But most importantly, I miss Brian Shaeffer. He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. He passed away in 2010 after a long fight with cancer.

Let’s fast-forward about 24 years, to a couple of weeks ago.

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Neysha is in Louisiana. Mike is in Missouri. Dagny is in Los Angeles. Our Dungeon Master John is in New York. There’s still a character sheet on the table, but it’s a file open on my iPad. While there are still a tremendous number of dice at my place, there are none on my desk. We just roll dice using an application called Roll20. We can hear each other, we can see each other. It’s pretty great.

What the hell happened? You’re doing the same thing, and it’s the same thing, but it’s very different now.

That’s true. Even the game is different, technically. It’s the 5th Edition, but everyone just calls it ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Obviously, technology has changed a lot. But it’s not enough to say that, because that isn’t the whole story.

Maybe it’s because I was dirt-poor, but it’s important to mention this. Dungeons and Dragons is effectively free. You can buy the books if you want, but you don’t have to. The Basic Rules are available for everyone — players and potential Dungeon Masters alike — absolutely free of charge 24 hours a day.

There are two important pieces here.

First, technology has made a tremendous difference in the way the game is played. That is to be expected.

The other part is this — The people that make Dungeons and Dragons have taken a look at how people play their game, and how it compares to how it used to be. They’ve been pro-active and responsive. They made a lot of very public and terrible mistakes along the way. Anyone in the hobby will be happy to tell you all about that. But they’re trying, and they’ve been incredibly successful.

I’m still thinking about that fan from 1993.

Good! Me, too. You’ve been thinking about how they do things and how they think about things. Obviously, there are a lot of awesome things going on for that fan in 1993. Things are awesome. But if you were to take a fan of the same age from 2017 and put them in the same place how would it look to them?

Very, very strange.

It would probably look like a freakin’ cult.

They would probably run far, far away.

And they have.

A lot of people that were playing Dungeons and Dragons are still playing. Likewise, a lot of Star Trek fans are still Star Trek fans. But does STARFLEET meet the needs of modern Star Trek fans? Technology makes a difference, but D&D changed to meet the needs of modern D&D fans. Can STARFLEET do the same?