Enthusiasm

 

Is the Internet Dying?

Posts and videos like this one are quite common now.

https://youtu.be/3dstGVhEshU?si=ftytETA4smpZ55sh

Beneath it this morning, I wrote,

Data is currency, and only the rich have vaults. The more data you have, the better you can target the user, predict and manipulate their behaviour. But you can't collect data at scale without already being big; so indie creators, small platforms or emergent voices can't compete. Impressions are rationed, not distributed by value but on metrics that favour those already embedded into the system. Brand recognition, click-through history, budget... these things assure that if you're not able to pay for more, or optimised for visibility, you're preset to be ignored, discarded and not allowed at the table.

This inevitably leads to content that is designed to appeal to the lowest, least-offensive common denominator, driven by an algorithm that culls out everything except precisely this. Still, this doesn't describe the "internet"... but the tools that have been built so far that use the internet to drive unimaginative people into cattle runs precisely as they'll allow. The "internet," however, isn't to blame. The dullness of the average person, who still possesses a disposable income, is simply being given precedence over those capable of seeing what's happening. This comment will be ignored, and not receive likes, because it's NOT familiar, simple, emotionally easy or outrage-inducing. It's too complex, and therefore has no value on the internet that has been built, that allows a comment like this but won't sustain or support it.

I'd like to unpack that, because I have a platform here, on a blog that suffers from the precise same issue.

This shouldn't come as news to anyone who isn't self-aware, but since the messaging is never, "Are the familiar platforms on the internet dying?"... because this isn't the click-baity title I stole for this post... it's worth taking a moment and clarifying the following:

The internet is a decentralized communication protocol — a neutral infrastructure designed to connect devices, people, and ideas across distance, without requiring permission from any central authority. It is, at its root, a system of open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS and others. These allow anyone, anywhere, to publish, to share, to access, and to build.

Yet although the internet was designed to be open, those companies that control the physical infrastructure, its discovery mechanisms, and its distribution platforms are free to decide what can be seen: not based on public or personal need, but on profitability.  Those gatekeepers throttle traffic, they impose data caps, they charge premiums for speed, they create artificial scarcity and they control what platforms can be found through shortcuts not related to actually typing out a site's url.

As I say, for anyone paying attention, this is dead obvious. Yet a video like the one above says nothing about this. The framing of the above video, and others like it, is the usual: the internet as a decaying cultural and technological entity, collapsing due to algorithmic cycling. The conspiratorial tone makes good content, while platform "artificiality" is suitably disturbing for the masses. For those who perceive the present culture as their "identity" — divorced, obviously from the culture of their immediate experience — this collapse is deeply unsettling. What will they do when they get up in the morning and the "internet" as they know it is gone?

I hope they remember how to continue eating food and using the speech-ear language model that's survived for thousands of years.

Yet this is not one of those discussions about how people should get sign off and develop a sense of self away from their computer.  This is simply an attempt to cut away the fat.

In reality, speaking as someone who was not raised with it, the internet has largely been... let me see, what are the words the girl used:

"If you search for anything online now, you just become buried and bombarded with garbage. Honestly, recycled blog posts, SEO bait, faceless robotic Youtube videos."

Yes exactly.  That would be an accurate description of most platforms post-2005.  Lest people forget, this video, when it dropped, was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen... though, obviously, it does not remotely compare with television or film.  It's cheap, a lot of the moves are clumsy (though granted they rehearsed)... and it's not stage-quality work in a first-class theatre.  But sure, for the internet, it was unexpected.  But no one rushed forward to give them a movie deal or anything.  They're not the Beatles.  Hell, they're not even Lizzo.

This, though, has been the defining element of the internet since its inception.  The internet is a landfill of mediocrity, available in staggering abundance because it's cheap to make and cheap to see.  It is not a revolution in great thought (all of which takes place elsewhere) or a renaissance of creativity. The really "good" stuff — such as it is, though I'm much harder to impress than I was when I was this young woman's age — is still done with lots of money on film, in studios and through old fashioned printing.  The internet is the world of low expectations... which makes it all the more interesting when we're told to worry because the expectations lately have supposedly gotten lower.  Well, you get what you pay for, yes?

I don't know precisely what else there might be to say.  We're not going through the "bronze age" of the internet, nor the "silver age" either... because there never has yet been a golden age.  We're in the stone age of the internet, and we have been since it's inception somewhere in the far off 60s.  Those decrying the "end" of the internet are merely those with so little life experience, and with such short lives, that they can barely comprehend something beyond the narrow, flat dimensionality of their worlds.

Yesterday, I stumbled across this video.  Oh how I laughed.

Apple Polisher

 

Heretic

Slopware is low-effort, high-gloss product that mimics the shape of utility without providing it.  It's the repackaging of an aesthetic that arises as an inevitable commodification that surrounds any human activity: top shelf, branded, expensive crap that has more to do with signal than use.  Gold plated deluxe lightweight ski poles and LED-lit barbecue tongs, folding leather stools for camping, mason jars labelled "flour" and "sugar" in vinyl script, neon signs referencing drinks the bar doesn't serve.  The culture of buying shit surrounding the culture where the activity is actually pursued is intensively invested as far as the market will bear — there is nothing at all unique about D&D in this regard.

Except that, perhaps, it is actually possible to find content where people discuss actual skiing, actual camping, actual cooking and a host of other activities where slopware pervades overtop.  D&D, on the other hand, has evaporated within the cloud.  Miniatures, standees, tokens, dice and dice towers, plastic coins, item cards, lore snippets, holiday-themed packaging, artwork prints, miniatures, pins, stickers, mini-posters and even candles and soap, have eclipsed the old material contributions of maps, modules and splatbooks.  I have considered getting into it myself, as an act of desperation... but experiences with the menu, though I did better than break even, has soured me on it.

The literature that remains has devolved into "how to have fun" and "how to express yourself."  There's no tie to adjudication, risk, conflict, structure.  The aesthetic has become so dominant that the activity no longer needs to take place.  Buying slopware has replaced it.  That's the activity. How much can I get, how can I display it, look at my collection. The dice featured at the front of the video linked above are so obviously impractical for actual play as to be laughable, but this isn't addressed because it doesn't need to be.  We don't care how the dice land.  We don't care what they reveal.  We're just going to make it all up anyway.

The book, A Canticle for Leibowitz, is the perfect literary analogue for what's happening here: the ritual preservation of artifacts from a forgotten age, stripped of their original function, revered without comprehension. The monks in Canticle copy blueprints as sacred texts, illuminate circuit diagrams, recite fragments of technical manuals, all without any practical grasp of what they once meant. The act of preservation becomes an act of worship, disconnected from utility, divorced from context. D&D slopware mirrors this precisely. Dice that no longer need to resolve anything. Books that aren't read for mechanics but displayed for prestige. Rulebooks treated like lore-bibles, not instruction manuals. The game is lost but the relics remain, enshrined.  Slopware, then, is more than just kitsch and clutter... it's the liturgy of a secularised hobby — gestures repeated in the absence of meaning.  A die rolled to hear it clatter on the table, only to have the number "interpreted" out of existence.

Those who have been reading these brutal essays, one after another, will probably miss this next point; I've deliberately buried it in the fourth essay because at this point, only the bitter who remember the game will still be here.  Everyone else, who do not like their bullshit having been called out, will have left by now.  This fourth essay should be the nail in the coffin; a title, a diatribe about the last miserable performative element of what's left, so that such will be done and gone by the second paragraph.  So welcome, you made it here.

I love the game of D&D.  That's the tag line on this blog.  That's just performative, not a general reference to things related to the mystique of D&D... but the game itself.  The skill-set, the challenge, the problem solving, the fall of a bad die, the intensive complexity, the potential for high immersion on a massive, intellectual scale.  Those who have been here from the beginning know this is how I feel, because of the vociferousness and the ferocity with which I've argued it.

I personally no longer think the culture comes back from this.  Perhaps if I'd been asked last year, certainly three years ago, I would have said, "Yes, given the collapse of the official sector, the ceased flow of official materials, I think steadily we find our own way again."  As of these last few months, culminating in the clarity that has built these posts, I'm abandoning that perspective.  And I've just explained why.

But frankly, for myself, I was never in it for the "culture."  The culture has always been an annoyance.  I'm in it now, and always will be, for the concept, the meat and potatoes, not the glitz.  I continue to believe that the future of D&D is a computer-generated model, one in which a legitimate sandbox is obtained though an A.I. capable of processing and frankly killing player characters without batting an eye.  That isn't the first model we're going to get, if the ethical bullshit of chatGPT is an indicator.  But it doesn't need to be the "first" model or the tenth.  It just has to be a model, something that any small group of designers can put together, IF they have the substance and detail necessary to work with.

Some might say this is a bit pie-eyed of me... but I should hope that after all this slaughter, in which I've gratuitously called out every miserable shitty thing about this culture with razor-sharp finesse, that "naively hopeful or starry-eyed" is the last thing I can be reasonably called.  I'm not hopeful because the culture will save itself, but because someone like me, who can see the culture for what it is, would have the sufficient means and power to build a program that would strip all this crap away like so much mosquito netting.  It wouldn't be called D&D, of course, but it wouldn't have to be.  Stumbled upon by a generation that followed the last generation of those "role-playing farts" as immersive and brilliant wouldn't need or want the tarred, urine-soaked brand name of what D&D is going to be seen as in the next few years... because this isn't going to get better.  This is going to get a whole lot worse.  I think I've made that clear, too.

Fundamentally, it's never been the brand that mattered.  It's never been what the character classes are called or what monsters are included, it has always been the duality of the setting mixed with the potential of the possible... and that invention, utterly brilliant in the extreme, gets to stay, no matter what we slop over it for a time.  Look carefully at this a third time:

Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time. Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect. Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design. Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.

Do you see the word "dungeon" or "adventure" here?  Do you see the inclusion of dice, role-playing or collaboration?  Does it invoke a facilitator at all?  No.  Because those things, for all the substance we assume they have, aren't actually necessary to the procedure of the game.  The procedure is obstacle, investigation, action, obstacle.  Everything else is dressing.

Obviously, I like the adventure, the character classes, the particular skill-set and the atmosphere of a medieval fantasy setting... but these things are, in essence, just a topology for arranging obstacles.  Adventure is just the narrative shell we've adapted ourselves to, but any procedural motion will suffice.  Dice are merely a way of resolving uncertainty mechanically; real life is full of uncertainty, none of which is resolved by dice, so it's reasonable to expect that any adaptive future mechanic need not depend upon 14th century technology.  No matter how popular it's become.  The die isn't sacred; it's not a holy relic before which all future generations must bow.  Future generations, those not habituated to the nostalgia of a childhood they never realised, will comprehend this.  In the end, it won't really matter what the genre is, or how the skill-set is devised, or what limitations we impose upon character action.  What will matter is that in some form we'll be able to functionally live an alternate life, fascinating and profoundly able to affect the real one we also have, devoid of all this constant crap and bullshit.

Well, okay.  We won't.  But our grandchildren will.

More importantly, because we must apply this now to the living, we should just go on doing what we're doing.  The future depends on this.  The less they have to do, the less skull-sweat they need expend on stuff we could be inventing now, the more ahead of the game they'll be.  The success of the process isn't getting to the finish line.  We're not in a single-competitor event, we're in a relay; it's our job to carry the baton from the year of our birth to that of our death, as well as we can, not for our own personal glory, but for the greater good.

Don't worry.  When it comes the time to reach your hand out with the baton, when you're on your last gasp, you'll find a hand waiting to take it.  This is the one fundamental truth that gets lost in all the performative personal glory that seems to pervade... but it's just air, it's just noise, it's not real.  Macbeth was a fool.  It's not about our hour upon the stage; its not our importance as the player; it's not about our being heard.  The idiot is he who thinks, after all this time, that what happens in our lifetime is what decides the game.  There is no decision yet; death is just a story that seems to end for us; it's not the real end of the story, else none of us would be here now.

It's the baton that matters.  The baton is free of marketing, it's free of ego, it's free of flattery and self-importance, because it's value rests only in how well it can serve to make the next baton.  Those of the past, those who past it onto us, they had their demons, they had their critics and their own self-puffery; they too did their wheezing about their time on the stage, as we do, as our children will, and their children also. Which comes to nothing at all, because in the end, even the sound and the future are silent.

Perhaps it "signifies" nothing... but all that is mere association, implication, shared ego.  But the amount is not nothing.  The amount is everything, since without the amount passed ahead from the first human that discovered how to spear fish and feed more kin to the one before me that built a cabin.  The amount is everything.

Damn all the rest of this, though know it for what it is.  Lift your head, mutter your curses, then put it all aside and pay attention to what matters.

This reversal, following these posts, breaks the rule.  A diatribe like this is supposed to end, after all the venom, after all the dismantling, in either collapse or self-immolation.  I'm supposed to conclude with saying, "As a consequence, I'm shuttering this blog and seeking another approach to life."

But this is what I mean when I say, I am not like other people.  I have not come to this commitment through nostalgia or happenstance or because it just happened to be popular.  I'm not capitalising on it, I'm not dependent on it and I'm not limited in my capacity to research and understand human behaviour by "what I have learned from role-playing."  

A running theme through these posts has also been the question, "Why am I different?"  Something happened to me in those formative years with wargame playing; almost at once, I took to D&D like a fish to water.  I didn't wallow around for 25 years before finally realising what the game was about or putting aside the rhetorical preaching of the official class.  I despised, hated and resented the bullshit I found in the Dragon Magazine from the first time I read the thing, though I'd been playing D&D all of two months.  It was so obvious to me, if not to others, that the slop parading as "helpful" in those pages was just filler: bad writers with bad ideas and limited writing skills without the least understanding of what they were screwing with.  My friends had to listen to my 15-year-old diatribes then, as you good readers do now, as I sliced into some awful bit about the "biology of the purple worm", which was utterly unhelpful and irrelevant to actual game play.

That nature of mine did not come from D&D.  It was firmly in place some six or seven years earlier, as I began to open textbooks about human anatomy, astronomy, geography, statistics and history that were sitting on the shelves of my school library, at a time when an elementary school had baldfaced books with rich, glossy plastic fold-over plates showing the circulatory, endocrine, nervous and hormonal systems, which I greedily drank with my eyes and explained to my friends — who did not understand and did not believe me, even as I turned the pages and read the words and proved it was so.  Something in me broke... perhaps in a good way, perhaps in a bad way.  It depends on one's point of view.  But by the time I came to D&D, I was well versed in the historical persecutions of knowledge and adaptation, along with the fundamentals of human ignorance and propaganda.  Hell, I read Mein Kampf in junior high school, two years before D&D, because it too was there on the shelf, for anyone who wanted to take it down.  Because in those days, when they said that sunlight was the best disinfectant, they really meant it.  Not like now when we say, "let's educate the kids about fascism," what we really mean is to soften it until it feels like a minor case of the mumps.

Coming from that, from seeing at 13 the unmasked face of evil, and how truly deep and pervasive the lies could get, the frivolous nonsense surrounding D&D when I began the game was child's play.  And so, I've never been "one of the number."  Never been a "true believer" in the Leibowitz sense of the word.  I am a born heretic.  One that got through the door, that shouldn't have, and now that he has the bone between his teeth, won't let go.

This is a great game.  No matter how many ways people find to piss on it.

The Great Valley

Returning to this:

Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time. Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect. Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design. Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.

As I look at this, questioning why my perception of D&D remains so radically different from that of others, I must return again and again to my wargaming as a youth, when scenes like this represented the most profound games I'd ever played.

I'd grown up on boardgames, from Life to Scrabble, in a home where my parents thrived on them, having acquired their taste in the boardgame rush of the 1960s.  Board games, before my time, were suddenly everywhere, in department stores, TV commercials and family living rooms. Companies were releasing new titles at a steady clip, and the sheer presence of games in American culture had surged compared to previous decades. The expansion of suburbia all created a perfect storm for domestic entertainment like board games to thrive.  My parents must have purchased at least 30 games between their marriage in 1958 and my having reached self-awareness around 1971.  Many of those same games are still in my daughter's possession, in good condition and still brought down and played by her and her friends.

But a game like Squad Leader was simply out of my parent's reach.  I can't say why.  On the surface, they did not see the point; it was overly complicated; the goal itself, to "kill" enemies was inappropriate.  The strategy did not fit their view of strategy games, which is how my father would have described Bridge or Cribbage.  So I could not bring out my wargames on Friday nights when we used to play, not even for my older brother (five years older and utterly distant from me) and definitely not for my sister (who was not an intellectual).  A game that simulated combat could not be termed, "light-hearted family entertainment," and that was very much the reason my parents liked games: because of how the random element shifted one's luck.

For those much younger than me, I don't suppose it makes sense that landing on the square labelled, "Strike It Rich! Find Oil – Collect $200,000" could be something that would produce cheers, laughter or an "oh no!" from someone else who thought they'd won the game — which brought no tangible benefit  —  not only once, but a dozen times over the course of ten years' game play.  It seems absurd now that a simply chance of landing on the right place could produce strong, resonant emotions... yet I plainly remember that they did.  Unquestionably, this element is crucial in understanding in how I see D&D, it's precepts and purpose, in a manner different from those who grew up in the 1980s, when a very different sort of board game came to the fore.

Which is not to say that I didn't become hopelessly jaded about simple randomness, to where I cannot now find an iota of enthusiasm about playing the Game of Life — except in watching my grandson play it, when he's old enough.  Tactical and strategic games like Squad Leader and Panzerblitz drastically reduce the random element; a player might get lucky on a single roll, but the tactical element is so powerful that even a long string of good rolls won't save a player who can't place or move their units effectively.  This characteristic absolutely took hold in my consciousness between 1976 and 1979, in those years when D&D did not exist for me.  We would spend whole Saturdays, and then Sunday afternoon too, after church, fighting one long brutal incremental battle, most of which never ended because halfway through the wave for or against would make the winner clear.  Unlike cribbage, which has to be played until the last hole is pegged, dense strategy games never need to be played to the last dead unit.  Like with chess, the loser tips the "king" and the new battle is set up.

These games were serious.  Again as with chess, the participant did not bump a stack of chits, did not walk by the table in loose clothing that might disrupt the delicacy of the layout.  A battle required patience, concentration, a sense of knowing that one's value as a tactician was being challenged, not just a sense of "seeing who would win."  Our reputations rested on each contest.  These games conditioned my expectations, my thresholds, my core sense of what a meaningful game was, at an age when I was discovering my imagined desire to someday write professionally, my understanding of "becoming a man" and the onset of many, many influences — from drug use to politics to musical influences — that I began to also take very seriously.

This mindset — that a game is a serious thing — is what makes me a "grognard"... intemperate, declarative, indifferent to other points of view and impossibly expectant about why any player expects they have a right to sit down at my table and receive any of my time.

I certainly appreciate how out of line that is with nearly everyone, even those my own age, who discuss or debate the parameters of D&D.  But if we had been saddled with a player at those wargame contests who did not take it seriously, and if they had tried to argue that we shouldn't, the result would not have been a discussion, but an immediate exile, followed by five minutes of "Can you fucking believe that...?" before immediately returning to game play.

What amazes me is how thoroughly this attitude pervades throughout human activity that is not role-playing.  Sports events are not known for players who take loss well, either at a professional or non-professional level.  A charitable housebuilding venture is not populated with those who would be patient regarding poor attitudes towards safety, disrespect of anothers' space, laziness or lack of focus.  Jacking around at a walk-a-thon would not be seen as acceptable.  But reprimanding a timewasting, derailing, bullying, rule-nitpicking player is NOT ACCEPTABLE, because we must all get along... not in the sense that the acting-out player needs to go or change, but in the sense that everyone else MUST accept that player as being justifiably themselves.

The explanation is inevitably the invocation of "fun."  Which only puzzles me further.  However seriously we took those war games, we did them because they were fun.  When I participated in sports between the ages of 8 and 15, it was for fun, though winning was deadly serious and much of the activities were made unpleasant by overly provocative coaches and parents.  Still, it was fun to win the city-wide championship in baseball as I did in 1979, mere weeks before discovering D&D.  It was fun to come in fourth in the 800 meters when I competed in track in grade 9 that same year.  I've always thought it was fun to win on my merits, or even on the throw of a die, because at least somebody succeeded with the same chance I had.

But I don't see the fun in performative exhibitions designed to fluff ego.  I don't see the fun in public displays of wish fulfillment.  Or in throwing out all the rules so that the reason for us to be here is to pretend to play a game that means nothing.  I get nothing out of this.  I'm not going to work on building a world so that others can "pretend" to play.

I'm damaged goods because when I began to have fun on my terms, not those of my parents or teachers, fun came from something substantial: hitting a ball that was hard to hit, catching a ball that was hard to catch, hitting a goal that was small and defended, overcoming odds, defeating a competitor, implementing a strategy that worked.  Fun wasn't performative.  Self-indulgence mattered only when we had done something that earned that indulgence.  Indulgence for it's own sake, just because I want to feel it now, from a sense of entitlement and not accomplishment, feels hollow, empty, performative... like patting oneself on the back for having used the toilet.

And again its funny because my measurement still holds in the real world.  People are proud of the families they raise, the houses they upkeep, the resilience they show, the service they give, the sacrifices they make, their commitment... and these are, in fact, the things adults find "fun."  A game is fine, but concrete pleasure begins with taking a delapidated, abandoned yard of a house that's received too little care and spending five difficult and costly years clearing, cutting, shaping, investing and growing a yard that glistens with such beauty that our friends would rather come spend the evening in our back yard than they're own — and tell us so.  Fun begins for me with sinking my teeth into a problem that is in no way going to be solved in the next few months, then solving it.  For my father, fun began with building a cabin from scratch, using the knowledge he'd gained as an engineer, so that he could do that with a minimum of errors (there was a corner of the cabin he just couldn't align right, but I'd have had to walk you over and show it; sadly, the cabin is gone now).

A good life is found in the pleasure and fun of a lifelong engagement with the world.  Coaching a volleyball team, acquiring skills and then using those for the benefit of others, seeing physical labour, care, creation and disappointment not as crippling, unpleasant things, but merely the price paid to earn love of thing through effort given.  This isn't fun as fleeting pleasure but the glow that comes from purpose and pride.

For me, this is what D&D is.  Not an excuse for fucking around on a game night, not a mode of enablement for losers so bereft of purpose that they can't bear up having a fictional character die.  Not a cheap, tacky plugged in adventure bought at the grifting game store, slapped together by a grifting company, so that I need not put more than 20 minutes into reading the thing.  I'm not half-assing my way through the process of being a Dungeon Master and I'm not encouraging others to do so — because the price of laziness is not failing to get things done; it's not the implementation of slopware in place of a game worth playing... it's the eventual personal poison one acquires about oneself, as slowly, steadily, we watch the rest of the world just move on and leave us behind... when at last we realise that we're not worth anything to anybody, not even ourselves... and we never will be.

That is the real penalty.  It's ignored, but we see the consequence everywhere.  That guy who used to play... he was so funny... what happened to him?  Oh, well, when I had to end the game to focus on my kids he just sort of kicked around for a while.  I heard he was playing in a few campaigns at the game store.  Remember how he wanted so bad to be a DM?  He bought the books and he ran us that one time... and it was just awful, but we praised him and yet, somehow, he never ran again.  Anyway, yeah.  He never did get an education. Never did get married or have kids. Never could keep a job.  I guess... well, I don't know.  I haven't thought about him in years.

Films and television, magazine articles and books, used to warn about this; they used to explain it, demonstrate it, deconstruct it... but there was never any money in that so they stopped.  Self-help books aren't about helping, they're about making us feel good without earning it.  There's way, way more money in fostering laziness, taking a cut from it, exploiting it, because lazy people, those who want to have fun on their terms, are easy prey.  They're desperate and needy.  They have a larger disposable income because they're not supporting anyone and they're not making or improving anything.  They're alone.  They're circling the drain... so heck, why not tell them, as they're going down, that "circling" is fun, just like a carnival ride, so pay us a little to tell you so.

Because the problem hasn't gone away.  It's not like the "great new game version" of D&D is self-sustainable.  It's not like any of those people have a website.  All the websites related to that version belong to the grifters, taking their little bit as their audience comes round this side of the drain again.  And when those grifters run out of D&D players to grift, they'll find other versions of the same weakness, the same poison, the same crowd who considers shared experience to be more important than success.  "Success" is, after all, a consequence of effort... and the last thing that any one who wants to show in performative D&D, or story-telling D&D, or rule-of-cool D&D, is effort.

That's the infrastructure we can see everywhere we look.  People tell me they come to read this blog "because there aren't any others like it."  That's because the support for what now passes as D&D isn't being built by gamers who sweat over mechanics, build campaigns from scratch, or care whether a system holds up under pressure.  It's all opportunists, wrapping intellectual entropy into bright packaging and calling it inclusion, creativity, collaborative or a community.  It's the industry of avoiding responsibility, the hollowness of self-gratification, the slipping into passive identity.  That's where the money is.  It permeates every nook and crack, from the company selling the big, brassy slopwear to the internet pundit scraping their tiny fraction from pageviews, clicks and a cheaper, cruddier slopware.  I am hounded day and night by Patreon to sell product, because this is where the exploiter is in turn exploited, by the frog sitting atop the frog that sits atop the frog.

All this to simply make it clear that, in 1979, when I did find D&D, this is not what I expected from it.  As recent as last year, I was still wrapped in a delusion that hid all of this, as I planned books I was going to publish and awareness I was going to provide, to an audience that's split between those who know well enough to move the fuck on, ditch D&D and get on with their real lives, and those who what the slop because it's easier to eat.

I'm a dinosaur.  And I'm in the wrong Land before Time.  There is no Great Valley.

(Continued)

Systemic, Widespread Failure

Before the rise of widespread public schooling in the 19th century, education was largely a private affair. Tutoring was the dominant mode, whether it was a governess for the children of the wealthy, a village priest for rural families, or itinerant teachers who moved from home to home. The learning experience was highly individualised. Instruction could be adapted to the student's pace, interests and abilities. The relationship between student and teacher was often personal and long-term. Education was not standardised. It was not age-graded. There were no bureaucracies enforcing curriculum. The subjects taught reflected the values and goals of the family or the immediate community rather than those of a centralized institution.

Tutoring in this time period did not support the model, "Let students make their own mistakes." The model was built on correction and mastery. A tutor's role was to intervene immediately when a mistake was made. Mistakes were not opportunities for discovery. They were treated as failures of attention or discipline. The student was to be shaped and improved, not merely left to explore.

Naturally, when public education was imposed, the original model was borrowed from that of the tutor... which led to egregious abuse of students when something that was designed for individual guidance was instead imposed in a factory atmosphere. Putting that aside, our point here is that mistakes as opportunities for discovery were not a principle of early schooling. The model demanded imitation, recitation and memorisation, which didn't work as well as the tutoring model and were clearly a problem almost at once, as adddressed by John Dewey in the 1910s and 1920s, especially in the United States. However, the two wars, the Spanish influenza and the Great Depression interrupted the continuity, clarity and instituional coherence of new ideas, so that it appears to us, a century later, that these issues weren't "addressed" until the 1950s and 60s, when Dewey and especially Maria Montessori, a contemporary of Dewey, suddenly became the rage.

Long prior to that, however, Dewey had stressed the process of learning by doing — and in that framework, mistakes were reinterpreted as signs of engagement. It wasn't the mistake that mattered, but the process of struggling through it, guided by reflection and self-correction. But then, as decades passed, this subtlety was gradually lost. Over the course of the 20th century, as education systems expanded and bureaucratised, these pedagogical ideas were distilled into slogans — like "we learn from our mistakes" — which became detached from the conditions under which that learning might actually occur.

The result is that today, the idea of learning from mistakes is promoted as a kind of motivational shield against failure, not as a structured methodology for learning. It functions more as a cultural reassurance than a teaching principle. It is therapeutic, NOT pedagogical, that is, "related to teaching." Thus the phrasing we often hear, where a teacher says of the children, "We like to arrange things so that children have an opportunity to make their own mistakes," is a modern creation, not rooted in traditional education and not rooted in proper educational science.

Something important to note here is that education obviates the need for us to make our OWN mistakes. We already have a history of others humans before us making mistakes, which we can learn from just as ably and completely as our own — and more rapidly as well, since we can jump right to the conclusion. No one says to themselves, "I'm thinking about making my own bazooka, but since I believe we learn best from making our own mistakes, I've decided to do it that way." Likewise, numerous STEM fields do not give students a chance to make their own mistakes because the consequences would be disasterous, not just for the student but potentially for society as a whole. In fact, these things make it obvious that the right path is not to make our own mistakes and start from scratch, but to learn the right way the first time, from the get-go, and move forward.

The theatre of making mistakes is reserved for low-accountability environments, especially soft or poorly evaluated subjects — say, for example, Dungeons and Dragons — where failure carries no immediate cost and the teacher can retreat into ambiguity. Proper education, on the other hand, is fundamentally a preventative structure; it's designed to save time, to avoid the need to learn everything the hard way, to spare the student from making the same blunders their predecessors did. The humanities show us the failures of culture. Science teaches us not to re-invent the wheel, or misapply a method. Mathematics is a set of distilled truths we don't need to rediscover through trial and error. Coaching sports teaches the athlete how to move and direct their body. All of this is the inheritance of mistake — already processed, already learned from, and ready to be taught.

To replace this with "personal discovery" through unstructured failure is to destroy the core function of education. It's anti-civilisational. It romanticizes ignorance and reinvents hardship. Yet the reason for this mistake-as-positive myth persists is partly emotional — it makes students feel safe. It removes the threat of judgment. It's egalitarian. But it also flourishes because modern schooling is no longer trusted to teach the right path clearly. If institutions aren't transmitting mastery, then students are left thinking they must find their own way. And thus the mistake becomes the teacher, not because it is good, but because it is the only thing left doing the job.

This exposes the structural deflection of responsibility within modern education, which explains in large part why many would-be dungeon masters don't have the wherewithal to comprehend or manage the game books, even when they are studied, simply because the tools aren't there to jump ahead and comprehend without having to start from an educational scratch. This is further worsened by those self-same students having been programmed to believe that the "right way to do it" is precisely the way they cannot. They've been taught to learn from their mistakes, but they can't see the mistake even when they've made it, because they don't know what a mistake looks like. At the same time, having not been taught to accept principles and truths as a matter of trust, they automatically don't trust what they're told. This disaster of an educational approach has crippled nearly every D&D player, so that their own option is to play hard into their handicap, discarding the rules (which they don't understand) and the functional game (which they don't understand) for the principles of social exchange (which they've learned through trial and error) in order to create a game system that is essentially a mystery to them.

Let me state that again as clearly as I can, for those in the back not listening. For most players and dungeon masters, the game's mechanic's are opaque, avoided or discarded not out of rebellion but out of illiteracy — not knowing how to learn, not knowing how to trust what’s taught, not knowing how to correct themselves because they’ve never been shown what correction looks like. They play into their own limitations, not because it's ideal, but because it's familiar. And they compensate with social performance, because that’s where feedback is still legible.

That final paragraph nails something few are willing to say: that this modern educational mindset has crippled not just content knowledge, but the very ability to recognise structure, accept authority or pursue mastery — not just in formal disciplines, but even in games.

I don't need to prove this. This series of posts, in which JB of B/X Blackrazor excoriates letter after letter from individuals who clearly don't comprehend and cannot express what's wrong with their game play, demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that these are people for whom traditional D&D is an utter, unfathomable, incomprehensible mystery. While JB does an excellent job of pointing out how a mixture of responsibility, self-improvement and messaging would enormously help, it's impossible to see these letters and believe, even remotely, that this advice could possibly be accepted as true. In short, though the letters were not written to JB personally but were, rather, sampled from the internet, we can see that a lot of people exist who are asking for advice, who at the same time are evidently not able to take it at face value.

We are articulating a problem that deserves to be repeated in every space where the integrity of learning, systems and self-improvement is taken seriously. This isn't just illiteracy in the narrow sense of rules comprehension. It's a meta-literacy — an inability to recognise that one doesn’t know, and worse, an inability to accept knowledge even when it's offered plainly. It's not rebellion. It's not defiance. It's not a choice being made by people who prefer this system to that, or this standard of play to that, or role-playing vs. roll-playing. It's something sadder and more dangerous — a learned helplessness masked by confidence, a posture shaped by years of vague instruction, shallow encouragement and the complete absence of epistemic accountability.

Those in these letters do not come from people who are stupid, but from those so deeply embedded in an unstructured, unschooled, emotionally therapeutic version of play that the very concept of D&D as a designed system with external logic is alien to them. The points that JB makes would be automatically rejected because the framework in which those points would make sense no longer exists for these people.

What we're looking at is the educational failure of the hobby space laid bare.

D&D landed in a culture that was far more traditionally educated than the present day's. Moreover, having learned to read standard board game rules starting from the age of 8 or younger, most of those who first came to role-playing table-top arrived from the culture of complex wargames, where parsing out rules like these had become second-nature, though we were just 12 or 13. It was therefore relatively easy, first of all, for three or four kids to figure out the rules of early edition D&D, and other game systems besides, with the added culture of knowing one could trust the elder generations because they're diligence with regards to rules was tightly established.

Reading and internalising dense, technical rulebooks wasn't just possible — it was expected. We did it for FUN. We nitpicked and argued and parsed out each and every rule not from the standpoint of "should it exist," but what was it accurately and precisely trying to say. This was the original meaning of the "rules lawyer" — not an individual seeking to redefine words to rid the game of the rule, but those ready to demand fundamental obedience to a rule "as the designer intended it."

This was possible because the rulebook was written like a contract or a constitution — not a soft, scurrilous, emotionally gratuitous document designed to make the reader feel better about the purchase they've just made, but a thing with internal logic and deliberate authorship that demanded respect, interpretation and rigorous application. The original DMG was a very strange animal, in that many of the rules didn't make sense, weren't well-crafted, weren't formally explained, lacked an internal logic and were quite obviously representative of the feeling of the writer and the company that supported that writer. Still, it was close enough to logical, the writer having been bred in the formalisation of games, so that a person — even someone new to the game — could try, test, fill in the blanks and produce a working model despite those designer shortcomings.

Moreover, the culture at that time, faced with this flawed document, saw the problem of interpretation as coming nearly as possible to the intentions within, which were — and are still, for many people who have moved back to AD&D and similar period games — interpretable through discussion, debate, reason and a deeper understanding of what games were and how they were supposed to work. Video games at that time were present, but weren't seen to overlap the board-game structure. They tended to be puzzle-based or sports-based, having more in common with the structures of jigsaw puzzles and competitions, than with intellectual examination. This is also largely still true; both competition-games and logistical styled games are still essentially related to sports and puzzles. Online RPGs are guessing games, or best choice options, solved through mental cognition but not through a strategical approach not already baked into the game.

Those coming to D&D presently, with the mindset of a video game, naturally seek immediately to see what the game will allow — this being the fundamental truth of video games. The boundary is simply, can I move here or not; can this thing be picked up or not. Nothing that can be done in the game is against "the rules." If it can be done, it can only be done because the program meant it to be done. Approaching role-playing with this attitude is logically, "If the DM can be convinced to let it happen, then that's fair, because if it was wrong, the DM could not be convinced." Of course, human DMs are far more manipulable than graphics.

This has trained a generation with a kind of "mechanical permissiveness," where the only test is, "can this happen." This strengthens the "learn by one's own mistakes" approach, since most game players start by trying to figure out what can be done, to get the most from the game. It's always possible, of course, to go learn from someone else's mistakes, to see how G-27rSexy Ranger solved the problem in a youtube video, but somehow this approach is less about "how do I learn to play" as opposed to "how do I learn to play like others do." It is a copycat approach, not a learning approach.

This learning process can't be applied to real world mechanics. A great many things that can be done shouldn't be done, for reasons having nothing to do with permissiveness. A game world has no consequences, except the requirement to start again. The real world has consequences that make starting again impossible.

Early D&D and other RPGs embraced the "What should be done?" model from the outset — not because the consequences of doing something that shouldn't be done were in themselves harmful, but because D&D, unlike video games, begins in a space where others are not merely engaged, but are directly adjacent to one's person. An individual player who develops a mindset of killing things in the game a bit too gleefully, though not necessarily against the rules, tends to cause others to question their physical proximity to the individual. Likewise, individuals who bully, who speak loudly, who fail to bathe, who talk out of turn, who don't show up or who commit a vast array of other unsociable behaviours tend to be removed both quietly or dramatically, as necessary.

This contributed to early tabletop becoming a self-correcting space rooted in real world consequence, where agreeing upon what the rules meant, why are we here, what kind of experience do we want and how to obtain consistency were placed front and centre in those discourses seeking to interpret and understand the rules, just as they were interpreted in Monopoly, RISK and a host of other games. We were used to this; we did not perceive a time when we would not continue to play boardgames in tandem with D&D... but it was becoming evident, as the end of the 80s approached, that there were new breeds of players emerging that did not share these priorities.

The cultural deterioration of the game table did reflect, to some degree, those points about video games already made. But the larger factor, I would argue, would be those coming to tabletop without any background in other games whatsoever, or interest in playing such games. These would not be the majority, not by any stretch. But it was a small but vocal element that seemed to find a value in game play that resisted or disregarded the rules of the game itself. This doesn't need to be thoroughly examined. We may simply refer to this as the "story people" and leave it at that. Tabletop permitted an outlet to a behaviour that needed a stage, and those with that behaviour began to make themselves known. Rules were not important, because a stage does not need rules.

It was, however, a loud minority, often charismatic, often admired for their creativity or "immersion," and increasingly elevated in published materials, actual play media and designer rhetoric. Their influence was disproportionate to their number, because what they offered was a new way to play — or more accurately, a way to use D&D as a scaffold for something else entirely.

This deviation was exacerbated by the arrival of a new "official" set of rules, 2e, which began the long splinterisation of game rules that were never universally settled. We're well aware of how this has turned out. Notably, 2e utterly ignored the efforts and structural analysis of those individual DMs who had spent the years after AD&D attempting to make sense of the game. Like each smaller splash that was made by writers like Moldvay and Mentzer, plus those crude splatbooks that grew from the published literature rather than the personalised game experience that was identifiable at the very small game cons that were in existence, the publisher's failure to interpret was shoved out in front. Progressively afterwards, D&D became less interpretable, by those less able to interpret, contributed to by an educational system which, as expressed, has moved increasingly to a hands-off approach.

So here we are... with a game more popular than ever, but less cognitively playable than it's ever been, approached by those without the educational tools needed to interpret a game never designed to be sensible. A game that, for many, is not even a game any more, but a genre and a mood. Something to be enacted, not mastered.

For a fellow like me, this leaves nothing.

Explaining how the game can be played, or should be played, requires an audience capable to accepting things on faith, as judged through long experience of recognising good from bad. Yet universally the sentiment is automatically distrustful, both because the industry itself had destroyed trust, so that every reader looks at a new idea or system with jaundiced eye; and because trust is something taught, in a present-world where every moment of trust means humiliation at the hands of a grifter or a phishing scheme. We're purporting in rhetoric to teach people "how to learn" but we're not in fact doing this. We're telling people to make your own mistakes, but we're not giving them the capacity to deconstruct a mistake sufficiently to recognise one.

I cannot teach if my audience cannot accept, even after a vast stream of effort, that I might know something they don't. This leaves very little.

We talk about "learning how to learn" as though it's a lightbulb moment — but what's actually being taught is a sort of non-discriminatory sludge, where all answers are valid, where the test considers the willingness to show up and mark the page as the only entry exam, regardless of what multiple choice is marked. Failure is not something to be eschewed, but a thing to be stamped onto a badge and worn as evidence, as though this itself was the proof, that something was learned. "I tried" has replaced the "participation ribbon." But we can't say what this learned thing is. We only have the badge. And those with similar badges band together and form cliques that praise the value of the badge, assuring that its meaning need never be fully understood. Because the praise of our fellows is enough.

Not only is it a club to which I do not want to belong, it is a club to which I cannot. I am unable to be "performative." I cannot replace fact with validation, or success with shared struggle. I automatically question the value of the badge because I was taught to question. And to demand an answer... that I might pass it on to the next person, without concern for their feelings about it.

And so, I drift. I feel a pang of fury, scream into the void, then immediately perceive it as a humiliating, stupid reaction. I write out long deconstructions like this one knowing they'll be read, misinterpreted, forgotten and the point not undertaken. If I'm honest with myself, there's no point left in my being here.

Those who may read this, and wish for me not to go away, should ask, if you have not adjusted your game world to fit the advice that's been given here for 18 years, what are you learning? If you feel you haven't been able to accept that's been said here, because you know better, then very plainly you're not learning ANYTHING. Because learning is not seeing and judging, then discarding. It's seeing and trying. With the comprehension that if someone takes the time to make a sound argument that can't be dismissed without handwaving, then it's time to think, "Hm, maybe he knows something I don't know."

If you cannot do that. If you cannot accept this about yourself, or your judgment, after reading this space and all that's here for 18 years, then I'm not your teacher, I'm the enabler of your complacency. And I don't want to be that. I have no participation ribbons for you.

(Continued)

We Don't Learn from Our Mistakes

Progressively, I've come to think less and less of my personal writing as an artform.  This isn't to say that writing can't be art — of course it can be, with the metre and order of words being laid out for the purpose of expressing aesthetic, rhythm or emotion.  I've long since ceased to be interested in this direction myself; I'm more interested in the communicative aspect, the passing of thoughts and ideas, than I am in esoteric concerns.

Quite often, some will describe writing as a craft, including my writing, and when it's used that way I'll let it stand.  However, I tend to see "craft" as the composition of a physical article, such as a chair or a garment, in the fashion of repeating the creation of a thing to the point where high competence is achieved.  Again, this can certainly describe writing, especially with any content where the thing being communicated is more or less the same.  One monster in the wiki is described pretty much like any other, as is any given spell, place, sage ability or whatever.  The "craft" is making the subject material clear, not in necessarily communicating something unique.

In a larger sense, I'm much more interested in design, the making of original things for a purpose, than in these first two.  Design can incorporate craftsmanship; it unquestionably can and ought to relate to aesthetic.  But with things such as the game campaign's creation through text, or the fabrication of this specific post in the making, the joy is in building a structure that conveys first one point, then builds upon that point with the next, and so on, until the overall design becomes evident.

Perhaps the two most destructive sentiments attached to the creation of art, craft or design are the simplifications expressed by, "If you don't succeed, try, try again..." and "We learn from our mistakes."  The latter has led to an expression that particularly annoys, "I need to make more mistakes," as though the making of mistakes automatically teaches, or the even more egregious, "I've reached this point because I've made enough mistakes," which likewise tries to commodify effort as though the only thing we need do more of is fuck up.

These phrases trivialise what happens in the creative process and — as I've witnessed — tend to undermine a creator's resolve when it turns out that repeatedly trying something fails to magically create a positive result, while at the same time the individual fails to learn anything from their mistakes.  Trying and failing are not a recipe for success.  Unfortunately, however, the model for success does not fit easily into a framed wall plaque.  Thankfully, education is not limited to 10 word sayings, while we have infinite time and space with which to sketch the problem.

Let us begin with the notion that we've tried, failed, made a mistake, and yet we're prepared to press on.  Our first effort must be to examine what we've done, not what we want to do.  This is often missed or forgotten, as the desire to reach the goal seems to dictate that the first action is to get up, forget what we've done and move forward. In fact, it's often framed that we should put the failure entirely out of our mind, as though the failure itself is the enemy, and not the inadequacy in ourselves that it represents.  We shouldn't, we're told, admit to inadequacy; surely, if a failure occurred, it wasn't us. It was the alignment of the planets, the shape of the earth we stand on, the temperature of the air... anything conveniently blamed outside the framework of our responsibility.

If we throw a ball at a fence and wish to hit a small spot 90 feet away, then presumably with enough effort we'll eventually hit the place wished.  The goal, however, is not to hit the place once, or occasionally, but to hit it precisely when we mean to hit it, every time.  At first, it's generally assumed this has to do with our eye and our aim — but in fact it also has much to do with our fingers on the ball, our stance, the way we move when throwing and the clarity of our thinking... things which can't be resolved through merely hoping our aim will improve by repeating the action endlessly.  It's often because there's no one around to kick the thrower's feet further apart by a few inches, or straighten the thrower's body, or change the fingering on the ball, that many would-be pitchers simply cannot comprehend why those thousands of hours throwing a ball at a fence never amounted to anything.  They suppose, "Well, I guess some people have it, and I don't."  While, in fact, a proper coach might have changed everything.

The point being made is that rather than assume we know "how" to do a thing, and that the failure is in our lack of effort or practice, we should stop and examine a problem from all angles.  In role-playing, it's often taken for granted that much of one's success depends on the game being played.  But from experience, I can state with experience that while I consider 1st edition D&D to be superior to 5th edition, it's quite possible to be a consistently terrible dungeon master in both, such that the edition really doesn't matter in terms of the game's design.  This is very last thing that matters, in fact, since most of what happens at a table between the adjudicator and player has little to do with the rules as compared to the manner in which information is communicated, the temperament of the adjudicator, the attitude of the player and the reasons for which all participants are there.  The first thing to be addressed as a dungeon master is not, "Am I running the right version, genre or system?" but "Why am I acting as a dungeon master?"

Yet obviously the first question receives all the attention.  It is easier to answer — we merely repeat what we've been told by those who are supposedly "in the know," whom we respect (again, a respect whose justification we should question), allowing us to assign "awareness" of the best game to the testimonial of another, rather than ourselves.  This outward looking assignment of truths, however, is nothing short of disasterous for the system runner; they don't really know why, from experience, that it's a better system and they don't really know why the respected individual defended it (and there can't be many reasons for this).  But worst of all, they don't know what they personally want to achieve.  It's more or less the assumption that, like a car, once I turn on the key and get it started, everything else is a matter of respecting the dangers involved, following the rules and not hitting other things too often... as that gets awfully expensive.

Operating a car, however, is comparatively simple with regards to basic rules and risk management.  Moreover, there's a clear, ever-present motivation to pay a great deal of attention to what one's doing, understanding that failing to pay attention carries with it the factor of having no attention left to pay.  The consequences of running as a DM are nowhere near as dire.

"Failure" is inevitably baked into the expectation players have of a DM, as well as what we tend to expect of ourselves.  We know that whatever the system might be, it's extraordinarily complex.  Most don't want to run it, so that even "trying" is seen as a conquest of sorts.  It's sort of like being told to drive a car over two eight-inch wide boards at 10 km two feet above the ground.  Lack of success is more or less guaranteed, so that the willingness to perform the stunt becomes all that matters.

Note that in the example, the damage sustained from failure is purposefully minimised.  A slip off a board two feet above the ground is hardly going to seriously damage the vehicle, which serves to express how little we need to care when our game chokes.  "Oh well," we can say, "No big deal, do a little better next time, practice makes perfect, etcetera."  Except of course practice in itself makes nothing, since practice without intent or self-awareness only calcifies the manner in which we make mistakes.  In fact, repeated bad DMing in an atmosphere without consequence only makes a DM worse, given our propensity to feel comfortable once we're assured that we're doing "well enough."

It's for this reason that we can't count on our players to improve our play.  Most either resort to a passive-stance, simply dropping the campaign if it fails their needs, or tolerating endlessly our mediocrity for social or purposeful activity on a given night.  Pressing a player to criticise forces them into a place of responsibility for our actions they don't want.  At the same time, after months and perhaps years of complacency, having a new character enter our campaign who is willing to criticise becomes the last thing we would want; we were doing fine, weren't we?  Thus we can see how DM-player relations calcify mistakes rather than encouraging any learning from them.  It is only when the DM cannot get players, or has players consistently drop out of campaigns to where they fold and fail with uncomfortable frequency, that a DM is pushed into a place where they have to confront that second question in the above, "Why do I want to do this?"

"Learning from our mistakes" is an intellectual process that defies repetition or resolve.  We can resolve to hit a fence with a ball, but we can't force ourself to do it precisely.  We must set aside the goal and look clearly at the problem: why did this failure occur?  That is the first rule of design.  Deconstruct the previous attempt, look at all the parts, test each, learn what each thing is doing and then adjust or replace the part that fails to produce the desired effect.  This is very much what we do not do when our game world fails.  Must likely, we rush out to obtain some other sort of system, assuming this is the problem. Or we choose to adopt another individual's mechanics within our system of choice — such as a module or a campaign, while retaining no understanding of the errors or mistakes made by that individual's design.  These patterns of behaviour follow modern consumerism.  This car's a lemon?  It's a Ford?  Don't buy another Ford.  Surely, it's a bad car company, unlike all the others that don't produce lemons.  Our bank ignores us?  Move our accounts.  This neighbourhood doesn't suit?  Move.  Don't like the couch?  Buy another.  Pay no attention to the universality of car designs at a certain price point, or the universal motives of a bank, or the consistent quality of property occupation at our income, or the fundamental cheapness of every couch at such-and-such a price.  Make a cosmetic change, hope for the best.

The proper mindset as a dungeon master is that of the individual who chooses to "rough it" by wresting themselves from the contrivances of civilisation and learning self-reliance.  That is, the willingness to cut our own timber, saw our own lumber, use tools to fashion the chair from scratch, upholstering it ourselves until we have the "perfect" chair that would be uncomfortable for anyone else but suits our needs precisely.  This is more than a lot of work — it's a mindset that craves work, that craves a level of suitability that won't permit tolerance of inadequacy.  It's a rare mindset... one not cultivated by the consumerist culture in which we live, as the foregoing examples describe.  It is a mindset that one is not born with, but is obtained through observing others with the trait.  In my case, it came from my father, who live in an outback region of a minimally-civilised frigid climate, who grew up making his own fun — there being none to purchase — who thence learned to build oil derricks from scratch and eventually applied that ability to the construction of his own cabin, which I witnessed as a child and grasped was possible, even if that wasn't my peculiar choice for fun.  Watching someone else do an "impossible" thing, however, encourages a belief that there is possibility in ourselves, once we can wrest ourselves away from the assumption that if we haven't got what we want, we just haven't yet found the store where they sell it.

My own efforts with this blog and elsewhere contribute to this feeling in various readers.  Though they don't know me, they don't necessarily understand me, they accept that I have my demons and sense that the things I do can be done by themselves.  The message sent is that personal achievement breeds — in a particular few — a desire to experience personal achievement.  This is aided in that many of us, for either long or brief periods, have already witnessed someone else in our lives who sacrificed time and convenience to make something of their own accord, for their own purposes, though they could have just gone out and bought something that was nearly the same.

Many, however, eschew this notion entirely.  Perhaps they were required at some point to make a birdhouse or fix their own bicycle, only to despise the process.  Perhaps they were pushed into participation activities like sports or games by their parents, only to have coaches insist they hold a ball in such a way or swing a bat just so, finding that they hated the criticism, the expectation, the demand on their time and the sense that they would rather just be in front of something else they'd enjoy more.  For such persons, "success" always means something that can be found on Amazon and shipped to one's door in 48 hours.  And any success that can't be so shipped isn't worth having.

My memories of "organised" activities, from cubs to scouts to church events to sports to school activities and drama, with all the fluidity of abuse that those entailed, it does not surprise me that many people simply aren't "enlightened" by such opportunities.  Most tend to be run by taciturn, inflexible persons with an agenda that precludes empathy or patience, particularly those where competition is involved.  I did not find "team" sports to be particularly "team" focused... but then I grew up in a very different time, when an adult coach screaming at a small child unrestrained was not only commonplace, but encouraged as a form of encouragement.  The balance of abuse no doubt drove many who might have gotten something positive from such far away from "do-it-yourself" fun.  I found competitive running and writing provided sufficient isolation to enable me to become interested in the process and not the achievement, and thus escaped the crushing of my ego that was so fervently attempted by so many well-meaning institutions.

I have no doubt that many egos did not thrive so well as mine.

The various parts of D&D, and indeed any activity, ought to be posititively structured to deviate from such approaches.  The goals are deceptively simple.  Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time.  Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect.  Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design.  Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.

To comprehend the design requires, as said before, deconstruction.  Looking at each premise in turn, and starting with the first sentence, we must puzzle out what "series" means with repect to "events"; what "events" are fundamentally; what does it mean to "engage" with these events.  What is "verisimilitude"?  How do we define "place" with regards to the game's rules, and what meaning of "time" are we applying here?  Are we speaking of game time, or are we speaking of the "modified historical timeframe" of the events.

All of these things have been discussed in this blog, but it becomes very easy to get our of our depth.  "Series" dictates a rational narrative based upon cause-and-effect, where the players' actions, and not the inventiveness of the DM, dictates the course of what happens next, so that the players may control the thread of their game play in a manner similar to which we control our real-life presence — that is, in the way that we choose to leave our house, buy a ticket for Bermuda, interact with the people there, buy things of our own accord, swim in the sea, take risks that we can see as risks prior to taking them, all without a sense that our actions are being unduly influenced in a manner that isn't also being dictated to everyone else around us.  When the DM decides that as the player characters, the things that specifically happen to us are not that which might happen to anyone else in the campaign — such as an expositional NPC coming forth to give us, and only us, the information that only we need, specifically because we are the players, then we are not speaking of cause-and-effect, but influence-and-response, where our actions are dictated by the DM's choice to act against or for us, and not by our choice to decide what matters to use in a free and fair indifferent game world.

Likewise, "events" are definable moments in a campaign that ought to occur spontaneously, due to the player's actions, not as prescribed set-pieces similar to a midway funhouse, where the players are prescribed to enter at this point, prescribed to experience a set of curated events, before being allowed to leave by the designated exit with the pre-designated goal having been achieved.  Desirably, events should be culminations of sequences, some random, some dictated by player choice, where a fluid and uncertain consequence may or may not arise, such as what we might expect in a sports event, where the certainty of success does not exist, where the winner is not known in advance, and where ultimately any odd event may occur that adjusts or shifts the outcome in a manner that neither the players nor the DM had reason to expect.  There are limitations for achieving this in a table-top RPG, but the possibilities far exceed that in a video game or a standard module, though it requires a considerable hands-off approach from the DM, a willingness to allow the players to fail, a recognition that consequence and is not a bad thing in and of itself in a game atmosphere, and the lack of presumption that the DM exists as a shield to protect players from their own emotional states.

Thus we may continue with this sort of deconstruction at considerable length.  Each point in the last paragraph can be further examined within its constituent parts, and ought to be, excitedly, by the would-be DM.  A self-driven DM should pause to consider what a "culmination" is, or "curation," or "consequence," any of which could be another lengthy paragraph to follow this.  My willingness to deconstruct each of these things in turn, ad nauseum, descends from my willingness to do it only to myself beginning with when I first ran the game, when they were less clear to me but no less important where it came to the question, "What am I trying to achieve as a dungeon master."

There are no straightforward answers.  There are no answers that are sufficient for the rest of our lives.  My revisitation to any point intellectually never fails to derive some aspect or condition of the game's structure or value that I hadn't previously considered, because the game's potential for examination parallels that of understanding the human being itself, how it is formed, how it relates, how it shifts its behaviour in response to new knowledge, what motivates it and so on.  D&D is not a game of hit points and spells and monsters.  Those things are merely the house that D&D lives in.  I live in my house while giving very little consideration to the floors, the walls, the windows or the manner in which the refridgerator runs (except, of course, when it doesn't).  Most of the time I am concerned with what I'm doing in my house, not the house itself.  I don't care so much about what a spell does, but that it is rigidly defined and cannot be used to exempt the player from the fundamentals of play — that it's a tool the player uses, not a get-out-of-jail free card the player employs in order that they don't need to play.  Much of my DM-player contentions have revolved around this particular viewpoint: that I expect the player to succeed as a responsive human being, whereas the player wishes to succeed as a consumer who has bought an item that fixes their problem.  Enforcing the consequences of viewing a competitive activity from the latter point of view had produced enormous volatility and resistance over the years; and I've found, with such people, no degree of precision in language can dissuade from the seeking a particular Holy Grail that will let them "win without trying."

For some players, this seems to be the only point in their participating.

That is not a system problem, or a genre problem, nor a DM failing, it is a person problem.  It is the case of an individual who, like the footballer who strives to injure opposing players, or the blackjack player cheating in a casino, needs to be asked to leave.  This isn't personal.  It is dismissive of a certain person who has clearly been raised incorrectly.  There are certain individuals who consistently act in bad faith, sabotage group dynamics or refuse to engage with any sense of responsibility or self-awareness.  More importantly, we all have some degree of this behaviour, as we've all, to some extent, been raised badly.  This isn't a question of separating out these good people from these bad people.  The question at hand is not can we fix them, however, but can we encourage them to play well with others, or is it a case where we're spending more time handling such persons than we able to give to the game itself?

It is for these persons that we need rules.  Most, however, are more than willing to accept that it would make no sense for a character to use a two-handed sword and a shield at the same time.  Their approach to the game carries a recognition that their survival depends on their choices, not their effective game-awarded power.

Extrapolating from this, we can see the difference between those who view the game as a challenge to be overcome, at no cost to their own ego, and those who view the game as representative of their value as a human being.  It is in these dichotomies that we come to understand the tremendous capacity of the game to represent not just actions, not just rewards, not just an experience that allows the suspension of disbelief, but the whole human condition slathered on top in a way that can't be achieved through a video game or story.  No one at the table is "controlled," even as much as they might be in sports.  In sports, where we stand with respect to others, how we're permitted to hit or kick or throw the ball, or where we're allowed to land, or what boundaries we're allowed to pass between, are rigorously designed to limit freedom of action.  We're allowed to win, but that win is prescribed by the shape and limitations of the competitive space.  If a player chooses to inordinately assign too much emotion to their winning a match, if they emotionally step out of the "construct" expected of the player, then they are sent from the field, and potentially the game and the sport entirely.

D&D has none of this.  The boundaries are utterly fluid.  Actions are not limited by a pre-set win condition.  Emotional excitement beyond the pale is, to some degree, encouraged.  As in sports, players argue, they engage vociferously, they shout and feel the intensity of a near win or a near loss just as keenly; but they are also able to lie, discard the competitive, pursue alternative life actions, conspire, investigate and even gloat without consequence.  If a player were to survive a combat, stand up and shout at the DM, "In your face, asshole!"... that would be entirely keeping with the game culture, even viewed with laughter and memorability, whereas in a tennis match it would get the player tossed.

A working model of the game is achieved through attitude, approach, a focus on design elements that reward thinking and disregard convenience, an understanding of what we're trying to achieve and the awareness that mistakes — those things that disregard the game's function — can't be fixed without first understanding what those mistakes are.  It's in this that the game wallows and fails and increasingly breaks across the main of tables where it is played, from a refusal to (a) accept that the game's design is incapable of managing a human problem this complex; and (b) accept responsibility for adjusting ourselves to that need.

We cannot learn from mistakes if we think just making the mistake is all we need to do.


Continued

Supply

 
Sorry about yesterday.  It's my way of sorting myself from those who's motives are grift, grift and more grift.

I've had too much time this week to stew and stare at internet content, catching up on the state of the world and the perversity that has become youtube.  The drive towards abhorrence content had subsumed most of the channels I used to be subscribed to, so that I ended in cancelling some two dozen subscriptions this week simply because I don't want to be told what's wrong with things.  It's all too clear that if I should wish to increase my viewership and presumably my online intake, I should pick something that (a) I know well; (b) deserves respect; and (c) write continuously about how shitty it is and why no one should ever do it, like it, care about it or spend a moment thinking about it.  Dissonance, obviously, since its like the old joke about the Hasidic Jew who spends his life obsessively thinking about how much he hates God, only to find that his constant wrestling with God throughout his life lands him in heaven, because "constant awareness was a sort of prayer."

Following this practice, then, I ought to diatribe at length on why first edition sucks, and by extension why D&D sucks, why it's stupid that anyone plays it, because obviously it's for weak-minded, cretinous, deserving losers who should be laughed-at and vilified for wasting so much of their time buying shit and attending games.  I should write brutal take-downs of every sort of product, belief, cherished ideal or notion that the game — and by extension, every other like game — sucks, the players suck, you the reader sucks, etcetera, while funding the blog with online internet products and such.  Because, after all, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is obviously a grifter, stoicism was invented for immature males, A.I. is on the verge of destroying the film industry, atheism is poison, as is bubble tea, and so on.

It's not that I want to unplug.  I just don't want any part of... this.  The decision to commodify hate, coupled with pandering to the lowest common denominator blessed with a work-job and no dependents, simply isn't something I want to be part of.  The urge to step back, get out of the internet-farming plague crowd and watch it tread by from a quiet, reclusive sideline is becoming desirable.  The act of burning my bridges, pulling up the drawbridges, to stop performing, to cease looking for a public place in this horrorshow, increasingly seems like the only rational alternative.  Every part of me wants to clamp down, close shop, work quietly on  my projects and just not engage.  Because... this... is just awful.

Some history.

Jim Keegstra was a Canadian high school teacher and mayor of Eckville, in Alberta, about 7 miles west of our family cabin on Sylvan Lake.  In the early 80s, when I was 18 and just out of high school, the stories of Keegstra teaching his students anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial and claims of a global Jewish plot, hit pretty close to me.  Keegstra was dismissed form his position, charged, and the ensuing legal case set a significant precedent in Canadian law regarding the balance between free speech and protection against free speech.

In short, I live in a country where free speech is not a blanket right, where "sunshine" is not the best disinfectant, where the vocalisations that has made the American system can't be trotted out and given room to breathe here as they are there.  It's not legal here for people to express themselves as they might wish where that expression is harmful, as judged by people who do not see "hate" as a privilege or a virtue.  Such people need not be muzzled, but it must be made clear that there's a line that needs not to be crossed in a civilised country.

Presently, despite the imposition of an increasingly authoritarian government in El Salvador, the dramatic reduction in gang violence — effectively ending a reign of terror that lasted over a decade and was exacerbated by transnational criminal networks and external demand for narcotics — has led to a significant improvement in public safety.  For those who hav elived under the daily threat of gang violence, the change has been immediate and profound.  Areas once dominated by gang control are now accessible, and many Salvadorans feel freer in their movements, even as legal and civil freedoms have eroded. This perceived restoration of order has earned Bukele immense support, especially among lower-income and rural populations who bore the brunt of gang rule.

Personally, I don't know what to think of that.  On the one hand, I am sick to death of freedom being the watchword of every half-assed moron ready to throw anything and everything on the pyre for the sake of a few bucks awarded by an excessively indifferent trillionaire industry operating without oversight.  On the other, I'm not certain the solution is to kick in doors and shoot the motherfucking hate-mongers in their chairs upon their pressing "enter."  I would like to see some legislation... and not the sort that requires 15 years of "fact-finding" and "investigation," designed to ensure that nothing is conceivably done to those able to continue funding all of the world's elections to their favour simultaneously.

I'm concerned that the Chinese route is inevitable.

Meanwhile, I'm not onboard.  I'm not encouraged to defend any form of D&D at present, especially on a silent stage, while my present investigations into creative writing and youtube on that account are entirely personal.  My wiki is privately connected to the internet and certainly isn't about hate.  This blog has become equivalent to dead air.  My patreon is evaporating, presumably because I don't spew the material it wants to support.  Meanwhile, I have probably another 20-30 years to spend on the planet, doing something with a physical body in a steady state of degredation.

There are going to be many bad days ahead and, I think, in the end, it's not going to matter whether I have access to the internet or not.  There may not be anything here that I ever want to engage with.

The Monkey Declines to Dance

It's been six days since my surgery and I'm more or less recovered. There's bruising all over my stomach, I'm a bit stiff, the bandage comes off soon; I'm finding it frustratingly difficult to concentrate or achieve flow as I normally would, so the week's been something of a write-off. A holiday, as it were.

I'm certain that readers have noticed the distinct lack of my traditional D&D content on this blog.  It's been about writing, comics, occasional ventures into other things (recorded my third essay video today), and the wiki, but not D&D, not the books I'm supposed to be writing, not a lot of advice telling how to run this or design that.

Easily, I could churn out an essay like that.  Talk to your players thusly, concentrate on this part of your worldbuilding, consider this when initiating an adventure, organise your NPCs so that they provide such-and-such... whatever.  Those who might have gotten a burst from the recent post I wrote about dungeon mapping, worksheets and setting the standards of a sandbox should note that I was not the initiating factor there.  A reader, and as it happens one who doesn't — so far as I know — support my patreon, took the time to write and ask me a few questions. Which I then graciously answered, spending my precious time not map-making or writing wiki pages to invest in performing that service.

For 17 years of this blog's existence (the anniversary is the 28th of this month), I have never hesitated to do that.  I have always been open to being asked things and the answers I've given consistently have always been more than the reader expected to receive.  There's always been a positive fall-out for other readers when I've done this.

The only thing going on with my ceasing to invest of my own accord is that I'm sick and tired of speaking to a wall.  My audience here equates to a group of about a hundred people who pay their money to the ticket window, sit down in the seats, in the darkness where I can't see them, while I do my little performance on the stage... to pretty much no acknowledgement, no response, no notice, no attention given and definitely without support beyond that ticket window.  Apparently, despite my every effort to reach out, to explain, to discuss, to appeal, to resolve and to bend, I'm expected to do my little performance and shut up.

So, I've decided not to.

Please feel free to continue buying your tickets.  I can make as much money and a helluva lot more if I shutter this online presence, get a straight job and use that capital to go on building my wiki and game world, which matters to ME, for my reasons.  But providing advice here without the expectation of either notice or communication?  Thank you much, but I'm done.

Someone wants to ask me something, I'll answer.  Feel that I have something to say, that you'd like to name, fine, I'll say it.  But I'm done with this bullshit dead-air stage time for it's own sake.

I'd rather have surgery done and be forced to rest than go on with what's been happening these last five years.