> I first found Rinkworks when I was 11 or 12, and am 25 now. I visited the site for the first time in all those years just earlier this week (and have been happily playing Murkon's Refuge). I just got a hankering in the middle of the night for the internet I remembered from ~2006.

Welcome back!

> One of the places that comes to mind where I see people putting in immense amounts of unpaid, sustained effort into a corner of the internet out of love and passion is in fanfiction. People write absolute epics, edit each others' work, maintain websites, donate money... just to contribute.
>
> I wonder if the attitude towards writing is changing. Do people express their love and passion for things in other ways than writing text? Is writing text seen more as labor than something that is just enjoyable for its own sake or for its ability to let you contribute to some conversation?

I doubt things ever change much at that fundamental level. People whose brains are wired to love writing will always be so, and there will always be people whose brains are wired in that way. They will write because that's who they are and can't be otherwise, barring the ebbs and flows imposed by people's individual evolving life circumstances.

The same could be said of people whose brains are wired more mathematically or visually or whatever.

Now, the forms and outlets that people write in might indeed change with the times. Collaborative fan fiction sites are popular now but might not always be so. Something we haven't thought of may come about and command a share of writerly attention.

I started writing short stories at age 11 and by the time I turned 18 had written 60-70 short stories and 1 1/4 novels. College disrupted my fiction writing hobby temporarily, revived for a few years, and then RinkWorks shut it down for a decade before getting back into it with my second novel. Or at least that's one way to look at it. In reality, I never stopped writing: I wrote Adventure Games Live games, and movie reviews, and forum posts, and humor columns, and comic strips. I wrote chat bots that wrote their own things. I wrote sketches that I performed live in RinkChat in the intermissions during game tournaments.

Any of these individual outlets might capture my attention for months, even years at a time, and it's true that the satisfaction I derive from each of those individual forms differs in level and nature. But it's ultimately just a continuum of me being me. I'm a writer.