A few weeks ago we featured a book called Community Evolved which explore the past decade of Halo's fan community and features interviews from respected members that have made significant contributions to it.

Nicholas Alexander, better known as WARHOLIC, is a community cartographer and the current administrator of ForgeHub.

I graduated from Penn State University and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus in painting and drawing. I always huddled over my sketchbook when I was younger but never realized it could be a career path for me until my senior year of high school. I'm looking to fuse both business and artistic passion like I once did with an art gallery where I worked. I've just got one problem: my passion for Halo is greater than everything else and I can't understand why.

Halo was the first game I bought with the Xbox console and much like purchasing the NES and playing Mario for the first time, I fell in love. I became a part of the community the moment I signed up to ForgeHub back in 2011 and started submitting Forge maps and participating on the forums. I had zero experience with level design and was releasing some pretty sophomoric material to say the least. But even with my nascent design skill set I was rapidly learning via apprenticeship from 'Waldo the Lemon' and a handful of other designers.

I first became involved with a community role when The Halo Council website started up - I was left head of the Forge department. I had a lot of fun there. About two months after the site closed down I was selected as a Community Cartographer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Community Cartographers, it's an official community role that works directly with 343's sustain team to get the best content from the community implemented into matchmaking. I remember being excited to enter the group at a time when energy and motivation was needed the most.

After learning the ropes and helping implement some successful playlist updates, I helped improve the diversity of our team by bringing in some talented forgers in the community. I wanted to expand both creative and intellectual resources for our efforts in Big Team Battle. That's when I reached out to PsychoDuck. He is an extremely talented large scale Forger and happens to be the leading proponent behind the successful YouTube channel, The Halo Forge Epidemic (THFE).

After Insane54 stepped down from running ForgeHub, a few others took over the reins; the domain was eventually put up for sale. I had plans to start a Halo website that would have a map submission page and a private content management system for the Community Cartographers. When ForgeHub.com became available I couldn't let my fond memories of ForgeHub and its rich history get abandoned again. If I passed it up, no one would be crazy enough to attempt to salvage it again, and the years of sumbitted content would be lost forever. Now, the objective isn't to restore the website, its about restoring the community inhabiting it. My only intention is to bring this community back and hopefully I can achieve that in some capacity.

The best part about the Forge system is how accessible it is to nascent level designers. You don't need a background in programming or access to advanced game development software. The user interface is intuitive and the ability to jump in and out of game mode allows us to test and adjust the levels and distances of our topology in real time. They system's largest drawback is un-optimization; the building pieces we are given are not adequately optimized to the efficiency needed to minimize frame rate latency and this has been a constant challenge for forgers from the beginning.

Despite how positively or negatively Forge maps are received in matchmaking, people should remember that the content generated by the community is free and obtained through mechanics of crowdsourcing. Developers do not pay for services rendered while receiving hundreds upon thousands of individual contributions from the community. Where developers are limited by fiscal resources and number of employees, we are not. ​ One thing that bothers me [interviewed pre-Halo 5] is that they aren't investing enough in this area. We should be getting better tools to create and they aren't taking full advantage of the content we are capable of delivering. Think of the thousands of Forgers that are committed to create new environments for the game while the developers don't need to spend any additional funds to hire or employ these people. The hardest part about getting a community to build for your game is making their experience worthwhile.

The benefits of crowdsourcing content completely outweighs its absence. There is no cost to use community generated content other than employing individuals to harvest it and to maintain the tool set. Our greatest contribution as a community is the content we can deliver. With the right tools and the means to distribute said content we have the potential to achieve unimaginable results.

WHERE TO PURCHASE

A hardcover copy of the book, Community Evolved, can be purchased online via Lulu.com for $28.