A couple of years ago I had this client — great guy, worked with him a few times. He’s a former tabletop RPG player and was really interested in bringing some of the ideas he loved from that into a new arena in the form of some cool online tools. We looked at the market at the time and determined that the service was pretty much tailor-made for roleplayers and that they were the most natural early adopters.
Once we got actual tabletop gamers from the “leading edge” of the hobby, he discovered they were so insufferable he changed his business model to stop attracting them. They were bad for business. They weren’t the gamers he remembered having fun with. They were assholes.
How were they assholes? My client used a bunch of methods to tag RPG players and monitor them moving through the system. This is what he found out about them:
- Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.
- They related to content in a cynical fashion.
- They dissuaded other users from getting involved with the content.
- They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).
- They complained all the goddamn time.
Because it was easy to track user origins, we knew this was more true for gamers, than general users. So the counterargument that everybody on the internet is like this doesn’t work. They aren’t.
This story of mine — a true story, though I’ve kept names out of it — is not unique. It’s why even though there are millions of lapsed gamers, transmedia developers shy away from developing them as an audience. Over on Twitter Gareth-Michael Skarka talked about how transmedia takes lessons from RPGs, but isn’t interested in the RPG audience. Yeah, that’s pretty much true. There are millions of lapsed gamers, but in my experience they’re largely considered no benefit to or a pox on growth.
I’ve met plenty of great gamers, and I don’t think the bad traits listed above belong to the majority — just the ones who have a strong online presence, who the CMO and co. are going to look at after the nerd in the project makes an argument for his peeps.
Meanwhile, the tabletop’s anti-intelligentsia are roaming Outer Fucking Space complaining that they don’t get enough respect, service and other super-good stuff that nobody with a good long term business plan should be especially eager to provide. They are right to think that as a bloc, gamers (not just them, but the whole group of people who are familiar with tabletop RPGs) could have significant power in the market, but don’t understand that they are undermining this power.
One of the first things you learn in any marketing program is that you not only don’t have to cater to everybody, but that you shouldn’t. There are customers out there who can faithfully buy from you and still run your company into the ground. Effective marketing includes making these people go away with a minimum of fuss. Smart folks avoid the temptation to poach from toxic segments. For example, if you want 10,000 subscribers/buyers by a given date it might be easy to grab early adopters from a certain segment to hit this target, but if that segment drives other people away, you’ll miss future growth targets.
This applies to tabletop RPG companies as much as it does to ventures that might pull gamers from the tabletop to somewhere else. WotC’s D&D Encounters may look a bit desperate but it’s smart enough to provide alternatives to the established D&D community. Lapsed gamers can take a fresh look at D&D without getting involved in the war between edition adherents, meeting character-build zombies, or dealing with other public killjoys. The killjoys . . . well there’s a point where you realize that rational decision making doesn’t come into it.
When the visible side of a fanbase doesn’t react with nuance, who wants to deal with that? It means that group will be difficult to work with, conservative and socially intractable. There might be great people beneath the surface, but not everybody has the time or money or interest to do that. You’re not going to get a second chance when there are much nicer people out there to please.
How could gamers be nicer people? Do the opposite of what you did in bullet points up at the beginning of this piece:
- Be friendly, casual and socially full-featured. Shut up about storming the castle every once and a while (and don’t just replace that with combative garbage about some other field.)
- Demonstrate that you appreciate the content instead of developing some fucked up hateful relationship with it. If you don’t like it by all means, move on.
- Respect neophyte insights that jerkwad gamers think are naive or problematic.
- Make peace with the fact that people want money for things and have models for doing so. If you don’t like the model, stay the hell away from the product.
- Create/mod in response to preferences that you will own instead of some inevitable truth you’ll crap on something for defying.
I would really like the tabletop RPG community to be at the center of roleplaying in all media, sharing their insights, but it’s not going to happen unless that center attracts.
I’ve often thought the biggest problem with RPGs is people who play them.
I see so many people asking for advice on problems or complaining about features of games when their really problem is they’re gaming with jerks. Systems that give the DM or players ‘too much power’ are a big one – if you’re not gaming with jerks, it really doesn’t matter.
Not that I don’t know a ton of awesome gamers – I do. I just only game with those people. I sometimes get crap for not giving certain people enough chances, but I also have 100% jerk-free games.
Nicely said. It would seem there’s a lot of jerky gamers who stalk the online world looking for victims to maul. I’m cross posting this to my group, btw, because we barely surived a recent (and somewhat long term) encounter.
Interesting how much of myself I see in that list of jerkwad tendencies.
PS – tis annoying, isn’t it?
Excellent piece and too true. I have met and heard about way too many gamers that fit your profile. They have been around since the earliest days of D&D.
I should add that 99.99% of them are male gamers, so maybe the female RPGer is a better target audience.
“I should add that 99.99% of them are male gamers, so maybe the female RPGer is a better target audience.”
All three of them, you mean?
I think not. (Not if you want to make any money, that is.) And while your number is clearly made-up, it bears noting that the generally held statistic about RPGers in toto — that between 80 and 90 percent of them are male — does hold true, so it’s almost nonsensical to say that X percentage of “profile gamers” are male. Even if your made-up number is true (and you have no way of knowing that), it wouldn’t be very valuable, as an insight.
Malcolm’s observations, however, are spot-on, but even so, it’s hard to draw any useful conclusions from them. What’s to be done, if the average RPGer is both male and of this mindset? Between Malcolm and GMS, maybe we’ll have a solution soon.
And while your number is clearly made-up, it bears noting that the generally held statistic about RPGers in toto — that between 80 and 90 percent of them are male — does hold true,
Well, you have to get more specific about what an ‘RPGer’ is to start hewing out statistics. People who spend money on dice more than once a decade? People who read rulebooks cover-to-cover? Attendance at weekly gaming sessions? Just showing up to play? What?
I also think that if you ignore the D&D segment’s male/female ratio, you arrive at a more balanced set of figures. I’m not saying “eliminate people who play D&D from the sample” or anything, but I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming number of D&D players are male, but the number of players of other RPGs that are male (compared to female) is not as large.
There’s a certain amount of observer effect here — people who are happy with their groups are not nearly as likely to mention that on-line as people who are having problems. So you hear a lot of complaints, with an occasional response of “Huh? What?”.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. People love telling gaming stories, and are at least as likely to tell, “This one time my group did this awesome thing” as they are to tell “This one time this jerk in my group did this jerk thing” stories.
Yeah, but they talk about their games, not their groups so much. In fact, if they’re talking about how great their games are, it’s pretty likely that they’re group is OK.
It’s like user interfaces, if someone starts talking about it, they are either a designer or your doing it wrong! Instead they should talk about the software functions, or what they did with it.
Here’s the thing, no one wants to listen to other people’s gaming stories. It seems so cool to the teller, but the listener can care less.
However, people love hearing stories about jerks.
Does an article like this help? It sounds to me like just more hating. And it really doesn’t reflect my general interaction with the hobby over the last couple years. You want positivity in the hobby? Then bring it.
Holy miss-the-point, Batman…
Telling the truth about how the community is perceived from the outside, and why we’re ACTIVELY AVOIDED even in those areas where we should be having more influence isn’t “more hating.”
Only in the RPG community would “I know you are, but what am I” be considered an appropriate response to this information….
I would categorize using profanity to describe RPG players as hating. If that’s not hating, then what is?
Anger? I’d say that if something is just hating it wouldn’t include constructive criticism. You (and I) won’t be considered twat-ish if we don’t cynicly subvert and trivialise games, as well as all the other stuff mentioned above. That goes somewhere, suggests alternatives. Maybe the assumptions in the advice are wrong, but it still contains an attempt to be helpful.
If you hate us so much, maybe you should go look for another industry to make some money in. You know, one where the consumers simply lap up products without question or involvement. Maybe the record industry?
And I call bullshit on Malcolm’s “client”. You just made that up to prove a point based only on your own personal frustration and no real statistical evidence.
The fact of the matter is that this is a small industry and there isn’t a lot of money to be made here. If you want to make money telling stories, try and make it in television, movies or videogames. We’re in it for the art and the fun, not the profit.
Yeah, because people who make television, movies or videogames aren’t interested in art and fun, they just like money, and by comparison, people who make RPGs aren’t into money, because they don’t have to worry about supporting their families or being able to pay their employees.
Typically, companies that ARE worried about whether they make money are also companies that are capable of producing art and fun year after year. (Or complete crap, as the case may be, of course. But that’s a kind of an unrelated thing.)
I used to work in a gaming and comic book store and I can assure you that the writer of this article raises only valid points. We’d have a tabletop day and a single 40k player ran off customers and other players with his awful attitude.
It’s OK to want to be in this industry because you love what you’re doing but it’s painful to discover that the people you’re trying to connect with are often socially awkward or outright sociopaths.
Thanks for posting this.
These discussions do help because the best way to start dealing with a problem is to admit that there is a problem.
Hey I lurv gamers. I find the majority of those I’ve met to be pleasant people to be around. Not to mention they’ve been making my house/car payment and paying my bills for twenty years.
Game on!
oopa. that was mean to be a general reply. Wasn’t directed to any reply in particular.
Oh, the majority are cool. Very cool. But you must recognize that you need to make an effort to make contact with them. Because even though it’s in your interest to talk about how awesome your fans are all the time (in fact, it’s good marketing to repudiate everything I say — just ask Erik Mona!), the honest truth is that your loudest fans are probably scaring away your most awesome fans, and you need to find ways to reach out to them.
Long ago back in Highschool I took a job working in a bookstore. It turned out they carried RPG’s, But I didn’t really know until I worked there as they were behind the counter. At first I thought Satanic Panic, but no..no such reason.
The reason was the buyers were normal, middle ages professionals (about 2/3rds male, 1/3rd female) who wore dress shirts and slacks like regular drones without witty sayings or nerd humour. And they just wanted to buy their books from a clean and well kept store like anyone else.
Vocal gamers at the FLGS are not all gamers, and I’d bet they aren’t even most gamers. Given the bad reputation being a gamer has, “Gamer Shame” is big business. The guy with the wierd hobby doesn’t get the corner office and it will stay a wierd hobby while wierd people are the only ones seeing it.
If the only people you ever saw watching sports were half naked overweight middle aged guys in full body paint and wigs, normal people would hide their love of sports. That is the RPG hobby.
Why assume the two bullet point lists are mutually exclusive – why not try and bring the two together?
So the audience:
* were goal-oriented (gamers eh? who knew?)
* challenged the quality of the content
* didn’t feel the content rewarded their investment
* didn’t fit the profit model
* were vocal and felt they weren’t being listened to
So why didn’t the designers…
* design for goal/achievements?
* raise their game?
* find ways to increase user satisfaction?
* change their model?
* listen to them, ask what they really want then deliver it?
Yes, you can market for the easy money. Only catering for 80% of market on each release cycle means over time you’ll get diminishing returns and an increasingly dissatisfied audience who will then go out and create what they want or find a way to re-create an experience they were satisfied with.
As long as you hate your audience, you’ll never make it.
Part of the user base was annoying, so the business model changed to stop appealing to them. Again, the popular notion that businesses have to come to you on bended knee and beg for your attention is wrong. Businesses develop customer criteria and look for people who fit them.
So to summarise: the customer is always right – except when it’s inconvenient then screw ‘em?
Agree casting pearls before swine is bad and yes, sometimes hitting the stop button is smart.
Other times, it takes hard work and a different view on the situation to effect meaningful change.
Good luck. Those people in the next village will be much the same.
Back in the lat 80s Michael Franti headed an alt-rap group called the Disposable Heroes o Hiphoprisy. By the early-mid 90s he decided he wanted a different audience (he wanted to reach young people with his own background, not white liberal college students), changed his sound and moved on.
By your standards, Franti was “screwing” his old audience. Okay. You believe that anybody who wants to change communities, change themselves or just plain change is some kind of cynical asshole. That’s a dumb thing to think, and the effects of this false belief will make themselves known to you — and probably already are.
I grew up in a business owning family… and I can tell you that, “The customer is always right unless he’s a dick.” is pretty much the regular mantra. it created a very profitable business for my father as well. Turns out that the other customers don’t like the dick customer either, so refusing to serve him or her actually leads to more sales from the other customers.
Bad customers, those who treat people poorly especially, are considered a loss that most businesses anywhere are more than willing to cut.
This is a very interesting thread. I am DMing the latest Encounters season in a small book store even though there is a Game Store down the street. The reason is that I don’t want to play with gamers anymore. It sounds like it’s counter-intuitive, but it makes sense especially after reading this article. I’m actually recruiting and grooming my next game group from the book store patrons which to me is a more desirable group.
Interesting post, and one that I largely agree with. Couple of points:
“Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.”
In my experience, the majority of the former tabletop RPGers who become seriously into online gaming (to the point of near-addiction) are the ones who were always focused on concrete goals in tabletop RPGs too. They were never that into the actual roleplaying — they were into the escapist power fantasy. They dislike or are disappointed by real life, and by their powerlessness in real life, so they substitute power in a game — and the way to get that power is by focusing on concrete goals. Computer games allow them to do that even more than tabletop RPGs do, so they gravitate more to computer games. And, since they play so many computer games, for so many hours per day, their opinions and actions within the games appear disproportionately important to anyone studying gameplay.
“They related to content in a cynical fashion.”
The cynical response, of course, is “write better content”. I recognise that’s not the *right* response, though. Relating to content in a cynical fashion is a consequence of focusing on concrete goals, of course (why waste time with fluff when you could be doing something that will make you more powerful?), but it’s more than that. As game designers, we’ve been encouraging people for years, both in tabletop RPGs and online games, to focus on extrinsic rewards (experience points, levels, new spells, gold, special weapons/armour/equipment, upgrades of all kinds) rather than on the intrinsic reward of the story, the game experience — the content. It’s no surprise that such encouragement has created a generation of gamers who are extrinsically focused. Nobody starts out that way; we’ve trained them to be that way. Focusing them more on enjoying the actual experience will be a long, slow process, if designers even want to do that.
No other game has ever involved & immersed me as much in the storyline, in the content, and in the atmosphere, as _Planescape: Torment_ or _Half-Life_ did. Both games were brilliant enough, intrinsically rewarding enough, that extrinsic rewards were near-irrelevant. In some respects, most MMORPGs are the worst culprits for focusing on extrinsic reward — with grinding & farming being the clearest example (almost no intrinsic reward whatsoever, as recognised by gamers & designers alike).
I was talking to Justin Achilli about something similar over on his blog. It certainly is a pickle, but the advantage MMORPGs have is that they quickly develop subcultures where you can largely avoid an atmosphere you dislike. I can always join an RP guild in WoW, for example — and many people who are done with the TRPG “community” actually end up in an MMO RP troupe.
At the same though, people like grinding (see Zynga games). Gridning isn’t bad, though I’m not into it. Ignoring strong signals not to grind in a space and doing it anyway is the bad thing. This is what our gamers did. I can’t get much more specific without revealing more than I’d like about the project, however.
Interesting article.
It’s something I often struggle with, that is, how to create a community of gamers when so many gamers are not about community.
Disclosure: I’m one of the organizers for Toronto Area Gamers. We try to be a fan-based community of gamers, for gamers and by gamers. And there are days when I just want to throw in the towel and learn how to play baseball, for all the reasons you cited.
At the same time I see a lot of people really trying to bring the social and friendly to gaming. I will timidly point out here that there does seem to be an antagonism between RPG tabletop gamers and the game industry. I agree that RPG tabletop gamers carry a significant amount of the responsibility here.
What I would like the developers and those folks like your friend to here is that there are those of us out there, adult RPG gamers, with disposable income, who actually want to build stuff… I hope that the frustrated industry folks who want to make great stuff and those of us who are actually inclined to buy it and promote it as a hobby can connect.
I don’t think there’s as much antagonism from ordinary gamers as there is from scenesters. Remember that I’m supposed to be one of the worst people in the world of tabletop RPGs, and people are 90%+ friendly when I meet them. The only guy from TAG who was ever a jerk to me is the Story Games regular who was all about “bringing gamers together.”
I have a deep suspicion that the reason all of this is true is because the hobby has set itself up with designers/producers and consumers, when the actual experience of the hobby is more like a small group of artists buying and using paint and canvases. The idea that the fundamental transaction in the hobby is me buying something from someone is always going to be cuckoo, once you think about it a while.
No, the problem is that a group of *consumers* somehow got it into their heads that they’re “artists.”
It’s self-aggrandizing delusional bullshit like this that lead to the wider media community, even in areas where you’d think RPGers would be valued, walking away as fast as they can.
Gamers aren’t artists. A gamer is a consumer who purchases and uses a category of products, specifically GAMES. That’s all.
That’s no more “cuckoo” than golfers purchasing and using golf gear…. Which certainly doesn’t make golfers “artists.”
Get over yourself.
Whoa!
Is it that weird to think that a GM is an artist when they portray NPCs? Whether with funny voices or interesting descriptions or just compelling motivations, they are creating in order to help draw people into the fiction of the game.
When a player portrays a character, there is no art involved when they make decisions on that character’s behalf? They’re making fictional decisions as important as any improv actor’s that your care to name.
That’s not to say that they can’t be aided by good games, of course they can. (Many of them you yourself have written.)
If RPGs aren’t a means for people to create together, why did you incorporate Lester Dent’s pulp writing material into your Thrilling Tales adventure generator? Why did you spend time talking about different written and visual and radio pulp examples and subgenres there? I think it’s quite clear that you put those things in there because it’s very helpful for people who are faced with a fundamentally creative and collaborative task when at the table. If there was no artistry to it, those decisions would have been bad or at the very least pointless. They weren’t, they were good decisions. Just kidding, they were great decisions, I rave about them all the time to people. They’re the examples I use when I say that RPG play benefits from the incorporation and understanding of fictional artistry.
I don’t mean art in the sense of a museum piece with our pinkies extended, I mean good old fashioned Art For The People – a regular person creating something fictional for an audience. You helped us be better portrayers of pulp heroes and villains with that game, and that is art.
But whether you call it art or sport (another good example, since many connect athletics to dance – a physical activity requiring skill and improvisation within a set framework) or something else, gaming has at its core a noncommercial activity. Companies have to find some way to help that activity along in such a way that people will pay for it.
To use your sport comparison, soccer can and is played with a ball made of rags. It doesn’t mean there is no place for soccer ball manufacturers. It just means they have a very different relationship with the soccer enthusiast than a car manufacturer has with its customers.
I guess what I’m primarily talking about here is Malcolm’s bullet point: “resisting desired behaviors”, with desired behaviors being the behaviors that make companies money. I think that is not a bad thing. I think that is a good thing. I think that is the best thing. And I think it should and will never go away, because to play RPGs, all you need is one person in your group to own the books and some dice, and you can work hard to improve your game/the fiction without ever buying anything again. At some point, we’ll want to buy a better soccer ball, and we’ll come and find one. Until then you can expect resistance to commercial offers of any kind, because the offer has nothing to do with the reality of the fundamental activity of the hobby.
“gaming has at its core a noncommercial activity”
….and the prosecution rests.
You can’t fix this level of dysfunction. Tabletop RPG Community Delenda Est.
This is precisely why producers of other media look to draw the non-toxic individuals and elements from the community, and convert them into their base, rather than engaging with the community as a whole.
The end result, is that tabletop is left with a rump core of completely dysfunctional “fans” that not only is shrinking, but actively driving people away, thereby speeding its own demise.
Interesting, and very telling, response. Sort of sad, though – I thought you’d believe in the value of your own work at least as much as I believe in it.
Damn right tabletop RPG is a non commercial activity. Storytelling pre-dates the written word. RPGs were played before the word “commercial” had any meaning.
Doesn’t mean to say that commercial is bad. But you have to be careful about your assumptions.
If you’re selling fridges, you don’t have to prove the value of refrigeration. If you’re selling gaming products, you do. Of course the audience is cynical with the content. You should have known this before going in.
In 50, 500, 5000 years, when The game industry has mutated beyond any recognition, people will still go out into the woods on weekends and tell stories around campfires. They’ll still act in plays. They’ll still draw, paint, scuplt. These things ARE non commercial. The commerce is incidental.
Goal orientation is as much the industry’s fault as the gamers. Just have a look at the rules of most tabletop RPGs
For someone involved for so long with RPGs, I am surprised that you still haven’t realised that.
Have you considered that perhaps the people you attracted never wanted the product in the first place? It’s like baiting for trout when you want mackerel. You’re going to get trout, you know.
Well to me, the core of RPG playing is the people actually playing, creating stuff for each other, without paying each other, for the enjoyment of each other’s company and creativity, _and_ the setting and rules they have purchased. It’s a mixture.
You could go totally commercial and have everyone pay each other to be there. Or you could go totally uncommercial and have both the rules and setting be open content. I think the latter is more common.
It doesn’t really apply to that. I’m talking about much more mundane scamming, grinding behaviour, whining for more stuff, etc. When people contribute creative content to something with a free or cheap initial buy in they *are* usually doing something desirable. What we experienced was the equivalent of gamers being lousy tippers and notorious thieves in bookstores and libraries (which they are, by the way). With the exception of one guy it wasn’t a problem of biz versus creativity at all.
Actually Jason, following my analytics I found a RPG/MUD site *you* participate in where a poster is simultaneously talking about how Armory Reloaded sucks (while admitting he never read the book) and implying someone should pirate it.
Whether or not piracy creates significant losses, the question remains why anyone should produce anything to cater to these shitheads, and how you could possibly ignore this level of shiheadedness.
Oh, I absolutely agree with the other bullet points and the general bad behavior. I’ve smirked for years at the “I looked at the art through shrinkwrap and will now review the book for you.” crowd. Even at conventions where my upbringing would teach me to be on my best behavior (hey, I’m around all these strangers and I want to make a good impression, right?) things are a million times worse.
Heck, I even concede the overall point, that existing RPG gamers are not a good group to try to sell things to. But just being resistant to marketing is not a bad thing, or if it is, surely the other 2,999 ads we’re exposed to on an average day will eventually wear us down.
P.S. WORA is a place built specifically for negativity, so it’s really extra super atypical – like a really focused FYAD.
I don’t think it really is emblematic of resistance to marketing. As someone with experience from the inside in that field my perspective is that gamers are *exceptionally* vulnerable to marketing. Over at RPGNet, the community decided it cannot function without allowing spam. If this was some kind of coherent media criticism, yay! But it isn’t. They respond to marketing and buy stuff, but they also rip things off and act so annoying that even success doesn’t make it worth doing. That problem applies to free stuff/culture too, so it has little to do with profit motive.
Well, that sort of leaves me wondering what that whole bullet point was about then, if they’re not doing what the company wants them to do (i.e. they aren’t doing what makes the company money), that would seem to me to be de facto resistance to marketing. If you’ve seen vulnerability in other types of marketing and salesmanship and whatnot, doesn’t that concede that it’s the approach that was at fault and not the target?
It’s not really “de facto resistance to marketing” any more than taking a dump in the middle of the Gap is (or even stealing from the Gap — piracy doesn’t necessarily preclude buying, but it does signal jerkwaddishness) after you’ve bought $500 worth of clothes.
Over on Facebook, a former GW manager responded to this article by talking about GW’s hiring and marketing policies. Apparently GW has a pyramid diagram with hardcore older players at the top, listed as the smallest segment and the biggest spenders of all. GW trains its management staff to absolutely never hire these people and avoid building events to appeal to them, but they still spend the most.
Again, though, in the GAP situation, the “desired behavior” that would “make money” was buying, and buying occurred? I guess I have no clue what kind of thing you are talking about in that bullet point and without you being able to reveal more specifics, there’s not much more to say.
The GW example is interesting, but doesn’t that imply that they see the worst offenders as very small in number compared to the group of GW gamers as a whole? That’s kind of the opposite of what you’re driving at in your post.
1) A “most desired action” isn’t the set of all desired actions. You can buy stuff and still not be someone a business wants to sell stuff to. Insistent bad faith participation is a long term liability even if it creates short term gains.
In fact, for anything involving communities people who spend nothing but contribute cool stuff are just plain good. That applied in this instance.
2) The GW example brings home the fact that I think that for all of their sound and fury, this group is a small segment of gamers who are overrepresented online.
Good points. The optimum outcome is both good community and money I guess. If that can be achieved, great. If not .. I guess you have to choose one.
That’s a great insight. If any kind of creative work is going to earn its keep over the long haul it needs communities that are willing to run with it who add value and act as evangelists. Basically, if somebody doesn’t pay for anything but makes something cooler, he’s adding value that a good business model will reward.
And the guy who wrote Periphery and Age of Empire isn’t a consumer who got it into his head he’s an artist? The truth is that dancers become choreographers and actors become directors and great roleplaying games train consumers as artists.
Dancers and actors are not “consuming” dance and theatre. In any event, I’d say gamers are artists. This is hardly important though. Lots of people are artists. Lots of gamers are shitty, infrequent artists who are impaired by an essentially consumerist approach, and to be honest, the indie community coddles that more than fucking anything. You yourself were over on RPGNet arguing for Luke Crane’s God-given right to spam and you rattled off some Seth Godin-ish twaddle related to it. This is pretty much the opposite of what’s desirable in a community with any creative backbone.
I didn’t say dance and theatre productions, I said choreography and direction. Dancers are enlarged as artists by great choreography and actors are enlarged by great direction. Great roleplaying games are more like choreography and direction than they are like dance and theatre productions.
And the indie community is diverse and not under my control. But you won’t see me celebrating lame play. My own prescription for shitty artistry is trying to design games that enlarge gamers as artists and that challenge problematic play paradigms.
I disagree. Tabletop RPGs have always had the concepts of GM-as-artist, and player-as-artist, at their core (along with the concept of kill-things-and-take-their-stuff, admittedly). Whether you create a game-world, or create a character, you’re absolutely an artist.
The challenge of the tabletop RPG industry has always been, how do you create products that essentially self-sufficient artists want to buy, given that all most gaming groups really need in terms of products is 1 game system (which they can then, if desired, extrapolate to work for any genre). There are various ways to meet that challenge, but they’re all really off-topic for this post, IMO.
Talk about missing the point.
Pretending that the diverse lot of people who have played D&D is some marketing focus group you can tap is well, folly.
“Gamers” are not a unified group, other than being majority middle class white males and some groups aren’t even that.
Gamers are not some passive market of consumers and unlike most hobbies that have to put out money to play (like say Golfers or Paintball Guys) its a one time buy in hobby
Most y ongoing expenses are purely optional. Yes Gamers like to buy stuff and they buy enough stuff to keep say Adamant with its high quality products alive, but its not mandatory.
Ignoring piracy here, there is enough free and legal stuff to game for a lifetime, or unlike most hobbies, they can just make stuff up and have just as much fun.
You can’t treat them the way Wal-Mart does its customers because they don’t need you to have fun.
Really all gaming is about getting together with friends, hanging out and playing pretend, sometimes with minis and thats about it.
Its not a consumer hobby, its not about “interacting with product” its not MtG its just friends and fun and imagination
If you can’t find a way to tap that or you can’t deal with the jerks that are in any hobby, that OK. They don’t need you either.
Pretending that the diverse lot of people who have played D&D is some marketing focus group you can tap is well, folly.
I think you’re largely not conscious of how you are already influenced by people doing just this. You came over here from an ENWorld thread where you are actively being marketed to via social media — and not by me.
Well true and well said.
I worked in marketing for many years and have been both the recipient and the generator of more marketing B.S. than I care to think about.
Heck I have a little game company and I do a lot of little things (like show up here for instance) to get the word out about it. Its marketing to be sure, but its not very monolithic being directed at two small niches in the industry.
And while my post was angrier than it needed to be I’d stand by the “monolithic” statement.
Given how little money this hobby actually makes ,I’d suggest that its far more an overlapping series of related interests than anything else.
Just because someone like 4e D&D doesn’t mean that they they can be sold to the same way as every other gamer.
Rather like Robin’s Laws gamers fall into a smaller series of types, the “hobby” is a lot more fragmented by styles, interest levels, mechanical preferences media preferences and so on. Certainly an educated guess can be made that “some one interested in gaming will like X as well” but it far from as refined as a lot of other activities.
As you mentioned with ENWorld and its social marketing, everyone makes a constant effort to sell-sell-sell all the time in the US.
EnWorld in its defense is nicer than most
My society is so fixated on sales and marketing that for example my home state, California is considering selling ad space on license plates!
Stuff like this and the 24-7 bombardment is part of the reason for the cynicism and unwillingness to be pixie led. Passive resistance is you like.
“Gamers aren’t artists. A gamer is a consumer who purchases and uses a category of products, specifically GAMES. That’s all.”
Not all tabletop gamers are artists, but many are – primarily the set that GMs. Unless you prefer tightly-designed narrowly-focused indy games (and this segment of the market is still fairly small), tabletop games are one of those things that lend themselves to glorious mish-mashes of rules and settings, with the GM grabbing tidbits of rules and content from any source he can get his hands on. He takes this glut of inspiration and assembles bits and pieces of it into a product that entertains others. By any reasonable definition, this is art. He just doesn’t get paid for it like a painter, a novelist, or a musician does.
No, gamers aren’t deluding themselves when they see games as art. The problem lies elsewhere. The toxic thing about gamers is that we have gotten it into our collective heads that because we find creative work fun, and do ourselves for free as a hobby, other people’s creative work has no value.
Games have always had a fairly low, one-time cost barrier to entry. Gamers initially didn’t buy enough product to keep a big RPG company afloat for very long after their game was released. So companies learned to start putting out lots of splatbooks and selling them to the mass of players, rather than just selling new games, modules, and creative aids to the GMs. And due to the larger audience, they sold more, and the companies got to live a little longer. But people caught on to the fact that a lot of them were neither necessary nor very good, so players stopped buying as many books as the companies wanted. So the companies tried, mostly via marketing, to make the splatmill more and more important to playing the games.
This offends the longtime players, who have gotten accustomed to (or spoiled by, depending on your POV) the old-fashioned low one-time price point. They got angry and bitter and cynical that they “had to” buy all these books to keep playing the game. A sensible person would have by now either stopped buying splatbooks, or started playing a different game. A sensible and creative person would probably write their own game and play that – many did and still do. But many gamers identify very strongly with the games they play, which makes it difficult to stay sensible. They want to stay “with the scene” but they don’t want to pay the suddenly-ballooning price. So instead of those other alternatives, they started stealing books. It was easier, and they could still say they were playing “their” game.
Stealing books cut into company profits. Some might argue that pdf piracy doesn’t. I suspect that in this case they are trying to rationalize for stealing content, but I’m not interested in arguing the point, and it doesn’t actually matter here. The important thing is that as people steal books, the companies *think* they are losing money. As they grew more and more desperate to make a buck, they churn out increasingly quickly written and increasingly poorly thought out splatbooks and new editions. And gamers get more bitter, and more of them steal or quit, and they spread their attitudes to others. And so the cycle continues.
It’s made worse by the general demographics of the usual gaming crowd. Lots of older gamers are extremely protective of their hobby and hostile to newcomers. A distressing number of groups are populated by the kind of aspiring sociopaths who you constantly hear about killing new characters or assaulting female PCs. And much as the old stereotypes are being stamped out these days, there is a large and very real contingent of gamers who simply can’t figure out how to relate to others without creeping them out or scaring them away. I’ve met plenty of them, and I’d be frankly astonished if I was the only one.
Honestly? People who aren’t “gamers” are much more fun to game with. They aren’t jaded and cynical – you can still dazzle them, surprise them, appeal to their sense of wonder. They don’t insist on everything being done just right, they are more willing to experiment and try new things, and they are generally more diverse and interesting people. I’m not really surprised to hear that they are more fun to do business with, too.
Painters aren’t artists. A painter is a consumer who puchases and uses a category of products, specifically PAINTS. That’s all.
At least if you’re a paint-mixing company… And let’s not get started on all those authors and how they simply don’t exist as they don’t buy anything.
Now if you were to have claimed that gamer is to artist as golfer is to athlete then you would probably have a point. But to try to define an artist by their commercial habits is silly.
So the point of the original piece is that a lot of gamers are so obnoxious that nobody wants to work with them. Would those behaviours include gratuitous aggressive and insulting remarks on online forums?
Sure, if they really are gratuitous.
If.
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So because gamers have strong opinions about the games they play, can sometimes be a bit socially akward, and are intelligent enough to not blindly hand over their money for a product they don’t really like, they are jerks and bad customers. I’d rather be an intelligent human being that can make my own decisions about what to purchase, than a mindless sheeple that buys whatever the corporations put out. This guy actually used profanity to describe RPG players, and he calls us jerks? Pot meet kettle.
Specifics–examples of problem behavior, some basic details of the company’s business model, et cetera–would be really helpful here. This post is interesting, but I can’t tell whether I agree or not because I don’t know if what I think you (might, maybe) mean is what you actually mean.
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While there are some social defectives most gamers are pretty cool people, however to the articles points ,
* Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.
Thats often what guys do anyway. Sit down, hash it out, move on. Thats normal for American men. Deal
* They related to content in a cynical fashion.
Maybe because your “content” merits such a treatment. I think even calling it “content” deserves suspicion
Even the oldest gamers (the 60+ crowd of late age gamers) have spent a lifetime being treated as stupid consumers who just have to take it. Now they have choices and maybe some of them have developed a little savvy over the years.
Now sure its possible there is a lot of knee jerk cynicism, I’ve seen my share of this but its equally likley its deserved. Its no longer the age of play D&D,play Pong or watch network T.V. and thats it Modern consumers have 10,000 choices and are starting to know when they are being played. Good for them.
* They dissuaded other users from getting involved with the content.
Maybe if you stopped using words like “involved with content” it might help there. Those are the kind of words that merit a cynical reaction. Its corporate speak for “clichéd packaged pap” instead of something cool. Its also possible they simply they disliked what you did. Half the reason we have the Internet is for this purpose, to help ordinary people steer ordinary people in the direction they want them to go. If they aren’t buying your narrative, then well tough. Its like complaining about a bad review on Amazon.
* They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).
Again with the corp-speak. The buyer is not you gravy train or somebody you can mold the way you want and “direct their behavior” You are asking them to trade their limited money for something you have. If you offer them something they want to pay for and they might. Or they might not. Same as every other business. If you model doesn’t work either fix it or do just what you are doing, do business with someone else.
* They complained all the goddamn time.
Its rude and I do wish that my fellow hobbyists would be a bit politer. However everyone complains and role playing game enthusiasts unlike sports fans don’t riot or cause much bad behavior.
I used to run an mid-level RPG company, back in the day.
Our dedicated fans were by far and away our biggest problem. In the end, they killed the company and the game.
Don’t get me wrong, I love TRPGs, I still game, and I have a lot of TRPG-player friends. But this article? Spot on. I’m afraid it’s not ‘hating’ if it’s true, people.
The simple truth is that a large minority of TRPG players are toxic.
Thats the same everywhere. Hardcore fans often suck. You’ll see this pattern repeated in every activity. Go to a Punk Rock, Sports or a Firearms board sometime and watch the flame wars.
Now if they are the ones buying everything, you may have a problem. or not if they just buy it anyway …
So gamers are “Doin’ it wrang!” from the marketer/synergy builder POV.
Of course we are! We are, by our nature, not passive consumers of products. It’s part of the very essence of gamers to 1) make our own entertainment and 2) criticise/kitbash any toy given to us.
Yes, this makes gamers a difficult, demanding and cantankerous demographic, many of whom are certain they could do a better job than the people selling to them. Suck it up and raise your game buttercup.
No, gamers are only marginally less passive, and many are far more passive than fans of traditional media. In fact, part of the problem was that gamers were more passive than we wanted compared to other groups. Thus, they were disposed of in the new model.
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In other words, gamers don’t lap up any shit you give them just because it has a brand name on it, thus it’s not worth the effort to make a quality product and you want to push them away. Good. We don’t need you. Gamers have been doing fine for over 2 decades without corporate shitheads trying to pinhole them into focus groups and demographics. Go fuck yourself.
Yeah, yeah. Rage against The Man, Sparky. You’re HARDCORE.
Oh, and by the way– its nearly 4 decades now, not 2.
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I think you have hit something here.
My grandfather was a bowler. He never complained half as much about his hobby as I’ve seen my friends do.
And honestly, I’ve seen some of the bad behavior in myself when I was younger.
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Sorry, as a very long-time tabletop RPGer (with, I like to think, a vague semblance of social skills) the only thing I am reading in the above article is “I had this brilliant idea, but those lousy gamers refused to accept my awesomeness.”
Then you aren’t reading thoroughly. As I remarked many, many times, we had no problem whatsoever attracting tabletop roleplayers. None. Their behaviour made it undesirable to continue attracting them.
In other words. You didn’t reject it. We sent you away. Get it?
I know, I know, this doesn’t fit a self image where you’re cool kids wittily. fighting off commercial influence. In point of fact, and as I have also repeatedly said, tabletop gamers are some of the easiest marks around for marketing. You put a high value on remote relationships that have no sincerity or substance, making it easy to sway you with shallow compliments or pseudo-sympathetic gestures.
Thank you for your deep insight, but I never had any illusions about being a “cool kid” or anything like that. Entered the hobby as an adult, incidentally.
That the RPG hobby has its share of total d##ks is indisputable, but one would be very hard-pressed to find ANY, and I do seriously mean ANY, human activity / endeavour even moderately d##k-free.
What is the old saying, about the aqueaky wheel that gets the oil? I have noticed this in both government service and in private enterprise – it is often the really obnoxious customers / respondants that are remembered the longest and in most detail. The “nice” ones, well, not so long.
Painting a big chunk of one’s customer base with the same broad brush … well, good luck with your marketing endeavours, is all I can say.
I’m not marketing — don’t do that job now. The RPG guy you thought was totally nice and standing up for your image against my blandishments? Probably marketing.
Your utter certainty must be a great comfort to you.
“# They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).”
How is that sending someone away? They didn’t want to buy the crappy product and told you why it was crappy…
Jesus Christ. There’s a dozen posts clarifying what this means. It means that they wanted what we had, but they wanted to get it by be thieving, fraud-using assholes.
Malcom, as one of the three Ink Monkeys, I constantly have to deal with the same handful of socially-malevolent personalities over and over again. Reading your post both explaining them and supporting the very thoughts I’ve had about how to handle these people has been like therapy for my entrenched, combat weary soul. You’re right though–most players are “good” and appreciate “good” but I’ve never heard it put so boldly that we should not only write away from the toxic players, but we should actively seek to push them out. Thank you for this perspective.
John Mørke
Freelance writer for White Wolf’s Exalted.
Gee whiz – this is mostly a hobby, not an industry
False dichotomy.
Around every hobby is an industry to support it!
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Before I knew about DrivethruRPG, I desperately needed some PDF versions of DnD books I already had. I had a packaged set suggested to me that included all of them. Upon downloading this, I felt like I was cheating, and never touched the books again, eventually deleting them.
Why blame gamers for not knowing of a viable consumer alternative? I’ve since bought books from drivethruRPG as often as I could, and that isn’t very often- but when I can’t, I always come up with something that I can use under an open license or offered for free by the creator, even making my own settings and connected optional rules based on what makes sense for the setting and what I think would improve the system’s portrayal of it.
What drove me to buy into PnP was playing NWN1 online, in an RP server.
I’m still looking for a group, and am now focused more on White Wolf products.
I have not “stolen” any of them, and still buy them whenever I can. I may build characters with the intent to make them more focused on doing particular things, but I Roleplay the consequences as much as possible.
And yeah, if there’s anything particularly awesome, I am even more determined to get whatever contains it- I’ve yet to find a Mage campaign near me, but I won’t give up.
I think this entire blog post is naive. The music, film, TV, novel and gaming industries….any entertainment industry…they all suck for the content provider, unless a hegemon (e.g. you’re D&D, Lady Gaga, Harry Potter or Glee).
It was summed up for me by a quote by Russell Crowe regarding the acting and music industries; “If you choose to go into the entertainment business, then bear in mind that the world owes you nothing.”
These industries are not what Ayn Rand had in mind when she wrote Atlas Shrugged. To paraphrase a lyric, “What the world needs now is another roleplay game designer, like I need a hole in my head.”
So go ahead and rail against the toxic audience, saying you abandoned them. The truth is that there are many more where you came from, and as Warhammer 40K says, “you won’t be missed.” Gamers make easy targets because geeks love to call geeks geeks, which just redoubles the hypocrisy of this blog post. Go ahead and fire us as customers, we owe you nothing, and you’re not needed.
I’m gonna let this commenter through despite the late date because it cites Ayn Rand, which means I can intellectually eat and shit the commenter at my leisure.
Anyway, you failed out the gate. You seem to think I am pining for your attention. Instead, I am explaining why you don’t get *my* attention when it comes to creative work, despite the fact that I like RPGs and most gamers. You showed up half a year after this post to tell me you don’t need me.
Listen, I guess this video sums up my feelings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlhOUyy4wbs
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