The Life and Times of Club Penguin Armies

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

—

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

—

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

—

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that never did I plan to undertake this task. Ironically enough, despite the countless times that I threatened various and sundry characters of Club Penguin Armies with the way that I would paint them upon the closure of the community (including the very line, “if in 12 months, I sit down to write the obituary for CP Armies…”), I wrote such things knowing they were empty threats for the sake of rhetoric. It isn’t that I never thought warfare would end — I did, however, hope to shirk this task off to someone else, because I simply did not believe I was capable. Having been quoted in B2’s closing comments to warfare, however, I do not feel it appropriate that I continue my silence.

When I retired from Club Penguin Armies almost two and a half years ago, finding something appropriate with which to close my retirement post gave me a perhaps undue amount of stress, but gave me it nonetheless. As I went on to note in the post, it was an epic task — someone like myself, who achieved so much of what I did here through writing and writing alone, had to find the words to bring my career closure. Tonight, I seek not to bring closure to my career, but to bring some closure to Club Penguin Armies, a community that, having surpassed its ten year anniversary only recently, will end more spontaneously than it took shape.

One of the most prominent heroes of Greek myth is Odysseus, the Ithacan king who, after sacking King Priam’s Troy, struggles for ten years before he is reunited with his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus. In that time, Odysseus undergoes a series of labors that no mortal should be able to accomplish, witnesses the death of the entire crew with whom he departed from Troy, and is presumed dead by the rich men of Ithaca as they attempt to court his wife and claim the kingship. Odysseus conquers all, however, and returns to his rightful place at the conclusion of Homer’s work.

One story arc which Homer’s Odyssey begins but does not flesh out, however, is what happens to Odysseus at the end of his life. In the novel, when he travels into Hades and finds the prophet Tiresias, he is informed that he will die a peaceful death in Ithaca after another long journey, surrounded by his people. Though we, as readers, are never able to see Odysseus in his older years, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson imagined the older king in his poem, Ulysses (Odysseus comes into Roman myth as Ulysses). That poem you read above (I hope).

In the poem, Tennyson points out a curious but obvious facet of Tiresias’s prediction: the idea of dying in peace runs in stark contrast to the way that Odysseus has lived his life up until this point. The older king laments that his laws seem futile, his existence seems futile, as he dreams of the exploits and adventure and war that he and his men once knew. This life of conquest is the thing for which Odysseus lived and breathed, and now an aged man, he is distraught by the fleeting nature of his success.

I choose to give you a crash-course in Greek myth only because I find Tennyson’s poem to be shockingly fitting to the situation that the Club Penguin Army community is undergoing. One might even argue that bringing this community to a close would have been easier if the slow decline that had been evidenced over the past few years had continued to flesh out. Instead, we are given a final date, and told to prepare. I must admit that when I heard of this reality, I worried for the army community, and worried how willing its members would be to accept the end.

For many, the conclusion of this experiment will not be hard to accept. Those people did not have their lives changed by this addendum to an online game, did not meet people with whom they hope to one day unite, did not become enraptured with this game of war and politics that we created entirely for ourselves. We must accept that, when reflecting upon the experience that was Club Penguin Armies, not everyone will believe this to have been such an integral part of their childhood. That is a fair, and warranted, human reaction to a human creation.

However, I do not sit in that camp. I believe what happened here was truly special, and I believe it has far-reaching consequences in its effects on our lives and the lessons that it teaches us. Many things will cease to exist over the next few days: event posts, practice battles, wars, tournaments, contests, awards, political battles, tactics sessions, snowball warfare, the emoji-offs, the Top Ten Armies, Legends Inductions, editorials, multi-logging, inaugurations of new leaders and CEOs. The nature of all of those things is fleeting, completely and totally fleeting. No one here will have their life profoundly stamped by the fact that another CPA Central CEO will not be inaugurated (least of all me, I’ll be the first to admit that). And if that was all that we could cite as the evidence of what we have built, if the eleven-year city was leveled to rubble tomorrow, I would not extol the experiment that was Club Penguin Armies. However, as anyone who has read any piece of my writing knows, I do not believe that to be the case.

Nor, evidently, does the aged king of Tennyson’s imagination. The experience of what we have done can be taken with us: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.” It goes unnoticed in the utilitarian facets of armies’ everyday operation, but something important is happening here. For my own self, I know that the people I met here caused me to understand a broader range of exactly how the human experience manifests, and to challenge my views and place them into a more global context. In addition to that, they gave me a crash-course in the things I was good at. As I look toward college in the next few years, much of what I now consider studying can be tied, directly, to the experiences I had in Club Penguin Armies as a leader, politician, journalist, commentator and writer.

Club Penguin Armies changed my life because they gave me something to believe in, gave me a cause to support. And so often can we miss how necessary that is to the formation of an informed conscience and unique personhood. I joined this community when I was eight years old, held CPAC CEO from the age of twelve to fourteen, and continued to manage major community-wide conflicts even after my retirement. In all of  those exploits, the impartial gods of Club Penguin Armies gave me one challenge: want it? Take it.

I propose that one of the reasons we have changed so many lives is because of the very nature of this teenager-based community. It is the same reason that many teen-run clubs or activities succeed, while those with the overreaching influence of uninformed adults fail. So many adults are willing to make exceptions for those younger than them, while teens are not. Teenagers hold one another to standards of unmitigated success, demanding no less than something near immortality. We surmounted challenge after challenge, seeking to top one another and stake our name in the history books, and no one was here to tell us we just weren’t good enough yet, just didn’t know enough yet, just needed more experience. What we didn’t know,  we learned. And the effects have been profound.

Tomorrow my life will be little different than it was today. I have not thought about Club Penguin Armies with much interest for some three years now. However, I propose to you that we don’t say things such as this with much certainty because we never know when we are and are not “thinking about Club Penguin Armies.” That’s true in both immediate, utilitarian — for instance, every time I write a paper I am using the skills of rhetoric and persuasion that this community helped me to hone — and in a way that is more difficult to grasp.

Isn’t that the unfortunate nature of human existence? Much of what matters the most is the hardest to grasp. The solution, however, may not be to try and sift out the ways in which this community has changed what will become our adult lives; it may, instead, be to accept that we have been changed and live with full knowledge of that change. That human experience, shaped by the independent lives we led here, will be both profoundly good and profoundly disappointing — that is to say, we will be washed down by the gulfs, but will also see the Happy Isles.  And, though B2 chose to note the piece of my doctrine on fear of the unknown, I must admit that I’m a little, perhaps a lot, less scared now. And I’m a little less scared because I came here and built something, did something, that no one my age should be capable of doing, and did it with people across the world whose existence would be unbeknownst to me otherwise.

And so, my mariners, as we head off now and embark upon our own ships and our own paths that will bring us far away from the overcrowded Retirement Island that we all now call home, let the record be etched here for anyone who wishes to know: from 2006 to 2017, thousands of teenagers united in a community that only we could understand. We fought wars, and researched phenomena, and debated and laughed and relished in this escape from the everyday. In the process, we built something truly special, the lessons of which will remain with us for our entire lives. I know that I’ve asked many things of you over the years, but if you’ll only do one of them for me, promise me this: fall in love, achieve success, tell your story, seek the places and the people who make you feel whole, and do it all a little more recklessly because of this experience which you and I have shared. For my single self, I would not trade it for the world. True, tonight Club Penguin Armies will cease to exist. But as Tennyson writes, something more may, infact will, be done. And though we will cease to do these grand things together, we will do all with the knowledge that at one time we all shared something inexplicable, but electrifying. Not unbecoming men that strove with gods, huh?

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