So! Lots of people read and responded to Why You Can’t Have Nice Things. That means it deserves a follow up, but I can’t address individuals, so I’ll try to sort everything in to broad response categories.
We’re just resisting your marketing!
No. I’ve seen strong naiveté from the RPG community about what 21st Century marketers are really up to.The first thing you need to do is read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Recognize the sentiments? Things like You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention? That’s not resistance. It’s unconscious capitulation to the values of marketing as they have existed for over a decade.
The real danger behind post-Cluetrain thinking, and the line peddled by the likes of Clay Shirky, Seth Godin and others is that it is so easily adopted by adherents as a progressive ideology instead of the vapid simulation of honesty that it is. The indie community has basically been completely compromised by this kind of bullshit. It’s seductive because it consists of this internal programming:
- It’s my job to have conversations and be responsive in a genuine, feeling fashion.
- My empathy and responsiveness can be determined by objective metrics.
Is sincerity or integrity actually required? No. In fact, it’s probably something of a hindrance. Sincerity includes arguments and other unpleasantness, but “the conversation” doesn’t need any of the messy parts of genuine communication.
You might not notice it, but it affects you. It explains why being nice in gaming communities is so often a tense, passive-aggressive affair, always on the verge of breaking down. To gamers, good online behaviour is internalized marketing values — fake-positive, inhuman values. You’re not being yourself. You’re selling yourself. It’s a capitalist panopticon.
Think on this: My essay could never appear on ENWorld (because of the language) or RPGNet (because, incredibly, it would be against rules banning “group attacks” — RPGNet would moderate it as if it was racist hate speech).
I know you are, but what am I?
Some argued that by saying unkind things, I was the very thing I protested! Y’know, that’s not a bad objection. I don’t think it’s true, but it does emphasize the problem that we have when it comes to engaging in useful criticism. Right now the RPG community is stuck on competing dogmas that don’t honestly truck with the fact of their own subjectivity. Things are “broken.” “Core stories.” “Railroading.” “Toolkits.” “The Big Model.”
Some of these ideas are decent as folk terms, but they’ve been raised up as the basis of unity for a bunch of asshole subcultures. In some cases, the dogma is so strong that it will go to extreme lengths to exclude contradictory voices or evidence. I’ve read lots of essays describing how RPGs are made and developed that don’t match my direct experience. None of the writers ever bothered to email the people whose jobs they believed they were detailing. The capacity to own your own beliefs as an artistic stance has atrophied behind a pretense of RPGs as some kind of technology.
(That pretense also explains why games that try to aim for the stereotypical sense of art are so often clichéd and uninspiring. If you lie to yourself about the nature of your creative stance it’s going to draw shallow results due to a lack of critical introspection.)
So what’s left? Pushing back. Pushing hard. And it works. I was pleased to see some serious self-analysis on ENWorld and in comments on my own blog. But that’s not the best way. We need critical communities that work, that don’t force us to choose between flames and the banality of internalized conversation marketing.
Hm, maybe, but doesn’t every group have that?
Like I said, we noticed that out of all the groups we worked with, the gamers stood out. It may be that every scene has the same number of jerks, but RPG jerks are remarkably easy to meet compared to non-jerks. They dominate conversations about how games should be played and designed.
That’s a big problem. Why?
- Jerks act as if failure is the default result of trying to get a game together. Success is difficult.
- Jerks think of other people as instruments to be manipulated, and assume they’ll be treated that way in kind.
- Jerks focus on superficialities and technicalities, not intentions and aspirations.
Putting assholes in the drivers’ seat takes games and the scene away from a place where it could be influential not because gamers are some kind of counterculture, but because their ideas look like the results of annoying personalities and deficient values. There’s better stuff beneath the surface, but if your initial scouting reports look bad here and better elsewhere, why dig? Nobody has an obligation to get to know you better.
Why do you hate us?
That’s easy. I don’t. I think most gamers are cool people. I’d like to hear some of these cool people speak out.
So why should we have nice things?
So after saying all these bad things about a subset of gamers, why do I think they should be a part of all the cool stuff that’s happening in media and fiction? The answer’s easy: Once you correct for assholes, gamers are pretty much guys with flamethrowers in a world trying to bang the rocks together. I’ve said it before, and I’ll talk about why in more depth in a future post.
So, you’ve identified some problems (people using terminology or argumentation instead of communication, dismissiveness of new additions to the culture, toxic relations with producers); do you have any ideas for solutions to some of these problems? (Aside from the quite correct “jettison the customers who are killing your business,” of course.)
Next post!
That’s not resistance. It’s unconscious capitulation to the values of marketing as they have existed for over a decade.
Could you expand on this a bit? I think I see what you’re getting at, but I want to be sure. You’re saying that the sentiments expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto are fundamentally marketing principles, and that any attempt to treat similar ideas as revolutionary or anti-corporate ideology is disingenuous and dangerous?
Sort of. Marketing is a fact of life. Marketers are not bad people. Modern social marketing reduces it to the basic mode of human interaction. That’s bad.
Let me know you by your anger and disappointments. Let me know your disagreements. Then we can connect as people.
Ah, okay. That, I get. And I see how it applies to the gaming community in general. Not so sure what the connection is there between that and the “resisting your marketing” objection. Or is it not actually directly connected, in your argument — more like, “No, because you don’t understand what marketing is — and while we’re at it, the real problem with modern marketing is X?”
I’ve forwarded both these articles on to my SL Star Trek Role Playing forum… I think there are a lot of valuable insights to consider here… I just hope the right people consider them.
I’m finding these articles (and the bizarre responses to the first one) interesting and useful, partly because I and my friends are considering getting into the industry (harnessing all the hard work of pioneering the pdf market that other people have done – er, sorry about that), but also as a warning about my own behavior.
Jerks, I’m almost certain, beget more jerks. My friends and I recently spent an entire year as part a global Vampire LARP (yeah, That One). It’s probably best to just say ‘it went horribly’, and also to note that it’s a real downer to meet a friend from high school, only to find out that they become a horrible person when they grew up. This has left me in a particularly foul, cynical, unengaging frame of mind. However, we’re now engaged in a superhero rpg that started with about five people, which ballooned to nine by the time the first game started, became fourteen by the second session, and looks to get bigger again by the third. As successful as it looks, though, I keep expecting ‘next week’ to be the point it all breaks down. But, because the game itself is fun, and because my friends are really happy about it, I try to keep my negativity to myself. I still have my misgivings about how long this will last, but at least everyone’s having fun so far.
Oh, and I’d like to mention that, the only thing that surprises me about the observed behaviors is that bit about focusing on concrete goals, not social interactions. In my (admittedly limited) experience, that seems like it would be the behavior more of MMO players than tabletop.
There’s some real assholes in gaming. In fact, I kicked a player out a month ago for being an opinionated jerk. I have also kicked members out of bands and I have left left bands because of jerks. I have met music fans whose overbearing opinions are damn near intolerable. I’ve overheard some conversations at comic shops that made me embarrassed to be human. I have seen sports fans nearly come to blows over opinions on that hobby. I have seen meetings that ended in yelling and tears, all over strong opinions on what made a better layout. I have been in more verbal fights than I can name because I like and use Apple computers, and someone else thought I should use (insert other operating system here), same with GIMP vs photoshop.
Go onto some musician/music gear boards and start reading, or some music boards. Not mainstream crap, but indie stuff or metal stuff where people actually have a passion for it (like gamers).
I am sorry to say it, but anytime you see a person devote their time and identity to a hobby, you are going to see opinionated passion running rampant. And there will always be those vociferous tards that spoil it for everyone. Your friend who made a brilliant product and then withdrew wouldn’t have lasted long in the music industry either, or many other hobby/passion industries.
I think why this article rubs me wrong (and now tries to validate itself behind a ten-year-old (read: outdated) article) is because it wants so hard to be right but just does not WORK. There seems to be some desperation in trying to insist that there is something wrong with the COMMUNITY, not the approach the OP/’friend’ tried to take.
And here’s the thing that irks me most, SO MANY people have thought they had the most brilliant idea since CAT5 cable, and thought “how could people NOT buy my (insert grand internet idea #765347653959345 here)”, and the truth of the matter is, it is VERY difficult to get money out of people for online (insert idea here). I think someone on ENWorld put it best, “you failed your marketing roll.”
I challenge anyone who has been frustrated by gamers to spend some time in another field where people are passionate. Spend a few hours in a music store, you’ll see the same shit (again, talking about MUSICIANS, not mid-life-crisis dads buying a $4,000 Les Paul because they are too scared to buy a motorcycle). Spend some time in a small record store and you’ll overhear some snotty quips equal to or greater than anything you’ll ever hear in a game store.
This is what makes hobbies like gaming great, and music great, and being a record collector great. We don’t have to CARE about marketing. We go into stores, read boxes or talk to people and get recommendations, and spend our money accordingly. the jerks will always be jerks. Put on your thick skin and click ‘ignore’.
We all love new tools that work well (I use Maptools, I love things like the gamemastery campaign tracker and initiative tracker pad, I have the line of sight indicator, tons of dice, et al). Keep throwing shit at the wall till something sticks. My favorite Beckett quote: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” But don’t blame the fail on GAMERS. It just sounds pitiful and butt-hurt.
Yeah. You missed it.
I picked the Cluetrain Manifesto because it’s a highly accessible foundational text for modern marketing, and more conceptual than technical, compared to discussing things like social media ROI measurement, SEO/SMO and such. Certainly, you seem to have little idea of how customers qualify themselves to enter a sales/desired action funnel. In my experience, if you don’t know this you do indeed “not care” about marketing, as your response to it is reliable and mostly unconscious.
I doubt you read with any honest reflection. It’s more likely you got worked up on some other site somewhere, skimmed just enough to cherry pick bits out of context and headed straight to the comments. Why?
1) You seem to be under the illusion that the project failed. It didn’t. Tabletop gamers were just an irritating waste of time.
2) You also seem to think the issue was a lack of appeal. As I repeatedly explained, this was also untrue. We had to make tabletop gamers go away because they were assholes.
I think that you and many others have this fantasy that gamers brought their passion and creativity to something that just couldn’t handle it, resisted being suckered and moved on. Triumph! But the sad truth is that tabletoppers were a less creative segment that engaged in repetitive unpleasant behaviour.
This was the real heartbreaker for my buddy, because he designed the whole thing based on the kind of creative values he thought roleplayers had, but they were such dull assholes they didn’t take advantage of it.
As I said elsewhere, the behaviour I’m talking about has fuck-all to do with passion. It’s just the same as y’all being shitty tippers and smelly convention goers. It’s exactly the fucking same, you think it’s everyone but you, but it *is* you.