What is Warp Point?

Warp Point is both a directory and old school webring collecting independent and personal gaming blogs and newsletters.

Its goal is to rebuild the homegrown personal networks that fansites fostered in the early days of the internet through affiliates and webrings. Today it's rare for most of us to seek out new websites. Instead we let recommendation engines like Google Discover—algorithms that promote what's already popular—feed us endless articles, with little reason to remember, much less form an attachment, to whichever site we read something on. But there's not much actual discovery involved with the way most of us experience the internet today. We take what we're fed.

Directories and affiliates once offered—and still can offer—a different experience. The experience of clicking on a link not knowing exactly what you'll find on the other end. The experience of not just assuming the internet is infinite, but looking closely enough to see how many isolated planets are out there waiting to be found. As the social media monoliths of the 2010s continue to crumble, suppress outbound links, and ultimately add more noise to our lives, the indieweb movement is striving to build something different: an internet where we redraw the constellations that connect us.

Inspired by ooh.directory, Warp Point is focused on revitalizing the connections between independent video game websites through both this directory site and a companion webring that any member of the directory can optionally add to their own pages. It's free, you're not going to get spammed, and there are no algorithms promoting one site over another.

Warp Point's aspiration is to help more readers discover great writing about video games, and to help authors who feel like they're sending their heartfelt work off into the void feel a sense of camaraderie. In the spirit of building a better, more independent web less beholden to corporate interests, it's currently not accepting submissions from Substack. This is not an indictment of any writer who chooses to use the platform because it's affordable, but hopefully a small nudge towards being a part of a small but earnest attempt to make the internet a little more human.

Webrings came to be when "networks of users decided to self-organize their pages through lightly-organized 'rings' that would lead users to pages on a similar topic," writes Ernie Smith on his great website Tedium. "Having a link somewhere on your site that ensured users that your page was a way station in a series of pages on a similar theme."

As Ernie quotes from a New York Times article written in 1999: "If using a search engine can be like drinking from a fire hose, internet surfing using a web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are batty about a favorite hobby."

The Warp Point webring is a modern Javascript embed that mostly works like the rings of old. Instead of a static link to the next 'station' down the line, the widget will display button links to three random, approved gaming sites from the directory, different each time the page gets refreshed. Proudly show off your Warp Point membership and help your readers find more sites they'll love.

Head to the Add Widget page to copy the small bit of code to add to your site.