In January 2024, just a few weeks after I decided to ditch Substack over its unwillingness to kick Nazis off its platform, I jotted down this half-formed thought in a scratch pad:
What if we banded together and created a gaming webring?
Pretend there's a bunch of inspirational stuff here. Togetherness is the path forward! Down with big tech! Up with open source! More thoughtful words!
At the time, I didn't have the bandwidth to turn this small pile of notes, which included another header — "Bringing back 88x31 buttons" — into reality. But I kept thinking about it throughout 2024. And 2025. And in 2026, I stopped thinking about it and started doing it. Meet Warp Point, a throwback to the days of directories and webrings, built solely for independent games writing.
Inspired by the more communal Web 1.0 era and one of the best sites on the internet, Ooh.directory, Warp Point is built around simple technologies like RSS with a simple premise: Helping writers connect with people who love to read about games, and with other people who love to write about them.
There are no algorithms. No AI summaries. No paid promo slots or accounts meant to keep you on the site. We want you to leave — by browsing through the list of independent bloggers and essayists and newsletter writers and archivists, finding one that interests you, and clicking on it. Hopefully you come back and do that again and again.
In the communal spirit of old gaming fansites affiliate lists, Warp Point also features a webring that our members can use to link to each other:
In the early 2000s I loved discovering new sites by clicking one little 88x31 pixel button after another, marveling at how big the internet seemed then. One fascinating, handcrafted site could alwaus lead me to another. Then there was a brief period where it felt like we didn't need these sorts of connections anymore because Google had solved discoverability on the internet. But years of Google pushing us towards a narrowing selection of high profile sites has proven that the opposite is true: the internet feels lonelier than ever unless we go out of our way to find each other.
Recently bloggers on hosts like Neocities have taken it upon themselves to bring back their own webrings to keep that Web 1.0 fire burning. That rocks. Our hope is that Warp Point can do the same for a broader cross section of indie gaming sites, from scrappy upstart media companies to essayists to trivia obsessives.
I say "our" because I can only take a little bit of the credit for Warp Point: Programmer and designer Matt Sayer has done most of the work to actually build the thing, and is as passionate about this whole endeavor as I am! Here's Matt:
- Matt
This announcement for Warp Point is just the start. We've been quietly recruiting a first wave of sign-ups as we got the site up and running, but starting today anyone can submit their site for inclusion, with a few limitations as explained on our Submit page. Every submission is manually reviewed, but the point of the directory isn't curation, other than making sure we're featuring writing by humans, for humans. (In the words of member site ScrollBoss: No LLM BS.)
If this all reads like a bit of a manifesto, that's because I've remained mad as hell about Google's poisoning of the internet since last December, when I wrote about the company's attempts to replace the beauty of the link with its AI search results. Excuse me for quoting myself, but this was the inflection point when I fully internalized that Big Tech is only going to keep making the internet worse:
Wes Fenlon
Only when I made a conscious effort for the first time in a decade to fill up an RSS reader with bloggers, critics, news sources, and even webcomics did I realize that I'd lost track of the original, primal joy of the internet:
Clicking a link and finding a whole new world unfurl before me, as fast as my dial-up modem or DSL connection could load it in.
I suppose I started taking this experience for granted at some point; once we all came to understand the internet as an infinite repository for knowledge, the obvious goal became accessing that knowledge more efficiently. It's not that I ever really stopped clicking on links. I just stopped putting in the work of looking for websites through directory listings, like the ones I used to love browsing on Yahoo.com for hours at a time (Home > Recreation > Games > Video Games > Emulation, anyone?).
I realize in hindsight that that was the really magical part, not knowing what I would get when I clicked. Finding a site wholly born from the passion and personality of someone I'd never met was as much the point as the information that site contained.
The only way to make a better internet is to build it ourselves. If Warp Point manages to bring back that experience of discovery, finding your new favorite site buried six links deep, for even a few writers and readers, we'll be happy. (Maybe next we should direct our energies into bringing back guestbooks?)
Indie writers: Please join Warp Point! And readers: Please spread the word. Post about it the directory on social media, share a link in your Discords, text someone you haven't talked to in 15 years. Tell them BLOGGING LIVES.