The Disposable Customer

Recently I was asked to give my thoughts on the responsibility of game designers to make clear rules so as to respect the time of their customers, and — specifically in the context of role-playing games — to help those customers learn how to manage the game.  I was asked to give my perspective on what game designers should do.

Depends.

Let's say I'm in the chair manufacturing business.  If I want my business to thrive, then rationally, I should be able to make chairs that won't collapse under my customers, else injuries will occur and I'll be sued out of existence.  Likewise, if my chairs are uncomfortable, which they might be for a spectacular number of reasons, I'm not going to drive customers to my product.  Success relies upon providing for the customer's needs for a chair; and it is only through the making of good, solid, comfortable and attractive chairs that I'm going to continue to be in business.

Unless, of course, I can make a semi-comfortable, semi-attractive chair that I can sell so cheap that buyers won't concern themselves with an expectation of quality.  Furthermore, I could target a market in which I sell chairs to certain peoples who must have chairs — such as community halls, roadside motels, governments — but who won't themselves be sitting in these chairs.  For these people, being able to buy 35,000 chairs super-cheap will more than compensate for all the luckless people who will have to spend one or two hours in them, once a month, once a year or perhaps only one time in their whole lives.  I can make a fortune selling shit chairs to emotional monsters, bringing sore asses to millions ... begging the question, where is my "responsibility" in this?

The accurate answer is fuck all.  I got my money.

And so let's ask ourselves, where's the imperative for game designers to do more than the bare minimum of language usage to make games, when we can count on a steady market of brand-new ignorant eager 11-year-olds who will buy whatever shit we put in front of them, so long as there's a pretty picture slapped on the front?  Answer: none.  Absolutely none.  Because all the burned, savvy, whining game-vloggers slapping down a game for being poorly written can't match the brand recognition of the COMPANY when it comes to what an 11-year-old will buy.

For those people out there who think someday a Table-Top RPG-maker will come along and do it right ... um, no.  "Doing it right" costs too much, requires hiring people who are too much trouble, can't be sold for more money than a shit product and wouldn't be recognized for its worth in an industry where crapping on new stuff is a better eyeball grabber than praising it.

It's not worth giving a rat's ass for "responsibility."

Therefore, it follows that there's no market value in preserving the customer's time, or teaching customers how to be a DM (or GM, though I despise that appellation).  You, oh customer, have already bought the game.  You're going to quit the game in two or three years anyway, so who cares about YOU?  When you quit, you'll be replaced by a horde of children who are 8 and 9 today, who will scream for our game for Christmas when they're 11 or 12.  You are a disposable customer.

This is a fact of purchasable RPG content that's blatantly obvious and blatantly ignored at the same time.  It is a beautiful sweet-spot from a toy company's perspective.  For decades now, toy companies have pursued a bottom line acknowledging that 90% of all toys given this Christmas won't last until May.  Either they'll get broken, or the short-attention span of kids (an attention span that we've systematically created by funding game-toy based television shows) will tire of the toy within a few weeks.  Which is great!  Means that by May, the kid's going to want another toy.  Planned obsolescence!  Ought to be written under the company's banner.

Now, here's a thought for those out there hoping for a well-written, sustainable RPG.  For every kid who buys a set of books for an RPG and becomes an avid player for more than five months, I'd guess there's a dozen who will open the books, decide they're too complicated and never do anything with them.  The reader is free to argue this; I don't, after all, have numbers to prove it — all I can offer is a purely anecdotal tally of people I've met who owned the books these past 42 years.  I've had dozens who, knowing I play D&D, have asked if I want their game books.  "I never really played" is always part of that dialogue.  I'd guess that others here, especially if they live in a big city, have had that same experience.  Accumulating twenty good copies of the Players Handbook, all free, would have been easy.  If someone came up with a clever exchange policy, give a D&D book, get access to a games channel, they'd accumulate thousands.

As manufacturer, I know I'm pissing people off; I know they're looking at the books and not making heads or tails of it.  I know they're on line slagging me off.  But my bottom line says, "Sales getting better."  And they are.  So fuck you, unhappy customer.  I'm feeling awful about it all the way to the bank.

Realistically, given how complicated RPGs are; and how expensive they are to produce, since words alone aren't enough for the customer; and how dumb most would-be users are about virtually every skill a DM needs ... I don't believe any language is capable of being 100% "clear," ever.  People get into arguments over the rules for Monopoly and RISK.  People can't remember the rules for Cribbage or Backgammon half the time.  Most people — including your would-be customers — have a 6th grade reading level.  Just look at all the things that people can't agree about related to D&D, though we've had 47 years to reach a consensus.  We will never reach a consensus.

As such, there is NO VALUE in discussing what other game designers ought to do about the their work, or what responsibilities they have, or their respect for the user or their commitment to teaching YOU, some stranger, what you need to do.  D&D is a weeding process.  Just as 1st Year Engineering does its level best to get rid of all the people who shouldn't be engineers, because they can't think like an engineer, there's a bonus in the reprehensible grift participated in by game designers:  the incomprehensibility of their game designs is sure to get rid of everyone who can't think like a DM.

For example, people who think "GM" is a worthy substitute.