Of Little Account

"But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavours to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity. Just as television puts the goals of its creators behind the demands of advertisers, and movies are more answerable to accountants and marketers than to audiences and filmmakers, role-playing games bend the knee to owners who care more about the bottom line than the needs of play and story.

"Peterson notes early on that D&D was an unlikely success. Although Gygax left behind a comfortable living in insurance to pursue his gaming hobby, he likely never expected to make more than a modest income. A big reason why is that D&D was never actually meant to be a product. He wasn’t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up. He wanted this because that’s exactly what he had done as a game player and creator himself, folding J.R.R. Tolkien–style fantasy into his passion for wargaming."

 —  Leonard Pierce, 'Dungeons & Dragons' Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

A gift like this doesn't arrive every day.  Err ... ahem ...

I told you so.

Which doesn't exempt the author from being wrong in many places throughout the article.  International copyright law doesn't work the way he thinks it does, or the way the WOTC pretends that it does ... but no professional writer wants to lift up that rock and free the creepy-crawlies inside.  And like most outsiders — and oh yes, this writer is definitely an "outsider" — he's forced to base his article upon public sources of knowledge, which is fair.  After all, he hasn't time to visit around to dozens of local non-league affiliated gaming clubs to learn what grassroots players think or do.  At least he acknowledges that homebrew campaigns still exist, even if he has to link stackexchange to prove it.  I rarely expect this much, so I suppose I'm grateful.

My position continues to be that capitalism doesn't actually "kill" D&D's artistic development.  This is ongoing, and will continue to be ongoing for as long as players and copies of the game are available.  The thudding malaise of the industry does smother improvement and innovation by giving a bullhorn to the stupidest, least imaginative participants (the non-productive 80%), catering to their needs and structurally building a public persona to match those expectations.  Yet we'd be hard pressed to locate an industry that doesn't do this.  The harder pill to swallow derives from the "productive" 20%, who are prone to climbing onto a cross whenever some beloved part of their game is threatened by legitimate improvement.  All the blame cannot be assigned to capitalism.  At least one part in five must be assigned to dogmatic quasi-encephalitic fundamentalism.

"Encephalitic"?  Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain.  It makes a far better term to describe the online intellectual pollutant than "flame wars."  It's difficult to promote change and growth in an atmosphere fed by tetchy man-boys clinging to the few good memories they had before they were ten — namely, game modules written at a grade eleven reading level hoisted on pedestals formerly occupied by fantasy writers who are degraded now for the crime of not having been born in the "woke" 21st century.

But ... now I'm just taking pot shots at random.

My larger point is that the folderol surrounding capitalism and its billions, the "evil" that wins in the end, evaporates like a puff of smoke the moment some technologist invents something more interesting than Instagram.  Technology giveth billions and technology taketh away.  D&D's value is that it's not based upon a product or a gadget, but upon small groups of humans collaborating in real time, with a set of rules not dependent upon what a hipster or a company thinks.  The whole world does not sit at my gaming table; the whole world has no say in the kind of game I run.  I need the cooperation of just two to four other people ... a number that's far too small for a big company to design for, while being just the right size to commit whatever heinous acts personally suit our ilk.  It defies mass marketing by not depending on what the mass market needs or wants.  It defies influence by the rich.  It does not need a public voice to function, and unlike the "crafts industry," it does not need buyers or sellers.

It needs our friends.  And ONLY our friends.  The rest of the world and what it thinks, the hue and cry of lost artistic dreams and whatnot, the sad demise of the originators, the failing shark tank of present day family members squabbling over scraps, can all just fuck right off.  Because they're irrelevant; just as "the Christian gawd" is irrelevant to the kind of sex I had earlier today, despite 2000 years of trying to dictate how that's supposed to go for all of us.