Corporate Marketing Game Culture

The original tabletop role-playing game.

Watching this video (it really isn't worth the effort), I was struck by how little I recognise now about present-day D&D.  This isn't relevant to game play or my opinions about the present state of the game, merely the acknowledgement that there's been enough change that even if I were to sit down at a table nowadays, I'd probably have to be retaught the game from scratch.

This is different from the way I felt watching videos just pre-covid.  Not that much that was in those videos wasn't obscure or ridiculous-sounding (I'm old, and therefore still reeling from the concept that tieflings ever became a "thing"), but it more or less sounded thereabouts to D&D.  Not so much now.  In the video linked, the content maker pats himself on the back for providing "species traits" — that is, "abilities," when D&D used a human-spoken language rather that corporatese — to each of the races that the "new" version of the "new" version has gutted the individualism of humanoid species in favour of a "same humanoid statblock."  Yeah.  Woke meets fascism, please stamp hands here.

It strikes me funny that players of two years ago are already finding themselves wallowing in a re-envisionment of the game that has less to do with a new edition and more to do with rando-marketing changes that seek to appeal the loudest voice in the crowd about whatever rankles them most this month.  I recognised none of the "species traits" imposed by the content maker.  Oh, I can kinda, sorta, mostly figure out what they were called once, or might have been in ancient times, but the words themselves are emblematic of the recontextualising of skill-sets to the point where there's just no way to guess the thing without being on the inside.  And since this official approach is ongoing, month by month, players in 2023 should find themselves scratching their heads by 2028.

The comments below the video are rich with people who have decided to ignore the new rules.  They've gone back to a book that makes sense, they trash the grey soup the new generic template has created, they describe about thirty different ways to personally solve the problem for themselves.  Exactly what the company doesn't want.  The point being, however, is that the new player, picking up D&D today, doesn't have any of this baggage to carry.  They'll have no knowledge of the old way of doing things, so they'll just embrace the new.  And thus the rift begins.

Now, I've been hearing lately that I'm "provocative"... that my use of language, even now, when I'm not ranting, might still alienate new readers.  That "woke/fascism" thing, there.  I refer to things with clear sarcasm, meaning that some of my readers might not wish to engage with what I say.  Worse, I often post a link to a video and then fail to summarise it.  My bad.

I used to work for a massive telecom monalith, an entrenched utility, with infinite security with regards to it's placement in the national market; essentially, the sort of entity that half the country has to buy product from because that's the only available product.  I'm on the internet now by their grace.  If the reader's curious about what a company like that is like, imagine a villain in a Philip K. Dick novel.

I remember getting an email one afternoon that ran pretty much,

"Letting you know that Jenny Marsden has been sunsetted. Her work is being reassigned."

This turned out to be one of those 15-minute things.  No one knew what Jenny had done.  Obviously something really wrong.  Security shows up, time given to pack desk, gone.  Yet unquestionably the cleanest place I've ever worked, one of the best paid, time unhesitatingly given for stress-related issues if one asked.  When my mother passed and I needed a week, it was granted without hesitation, and by that afternoon a $200 basket of niceties, with flowers, arrived for me to take home.  So one has to wonder just a bit how bad evil really is.

As an aside, Hasbro, the corporate-entity struggling to get by, is typically seen as a big company.  It has assets of some 6.34 billion.  The company I speak of, that I worked for, is nine times as big, 58 billion. I'm well aware of what it's like to live and be in a culture that's eternally hedged, sanded down and laced with apologies, that they might not wish to feel abrasive to people who are having a policy shoved down their throats.  I was three rungs down the ladder from the company's CEO; two below the vice-president, whom I soooooo enjoyed the company of about once a week (sarcasm), thankfully on video phone, as he was 2,000 miles away.  Meetings were an interpretive joke, where everyone spoke in a sort of mixed-bag of positive, non-rational rhetoric, straight-faced, as though this is how they'd been taught to speak in grade school.  Sometimes, I would marvel at the skill of it; but I would worry over how these people spoke to their kids.  I mean, what does it feel like to be "outsourced" to summer camp... er, "seasonal transition for junior stakeholders."

This is what a lot of this D&D jargon sounds like to me these days.  I know, I know, my voice, calm or heated, is unfiltered.  I don't make my readers comfortable, I don't sanitise my positions or concern myself about those I might repel.  Many, unquestionably, instinctively flinch at my charged words, while my sarcasm registers as hostile.  The problem is that people don't understand what I'm saying; the problem is I'm saying it so brutally that the immediate response is that I must be attacking something about the reader, personally, specifically, related probably to whether or not they're a good person.

The "sunsetted" email is a perfect example of the alternative.  Don't say fired, it's upsetting.  That VP used to avoid — spasmodically, I'd call it — ever using the word "bad."  Things were either good or not good.  As though the use of the word "good" counteracted the need to use the attendant "not" whenever things weren't working out as planned.  But a sunset... well, that's nice, isn't it.  Jenny went into the sunset.  Compare to that my grief and the company's compassion.  I can see my immediate boss reaching for his cell, punching the button that brings up the caterer in my city (again, he was also 2,000 miles away, though he'd visit occasionally), making an order for the "grief package" and hanging up, job well done.  No one does soft, smooth, compassionate, flower-sending like a soulless evil corporation.  I have personal experience with that.

When we loop this back to present-day D&D, the connection isn't forced at all.  Just as the illusion of fairness, progress or unity pervades the office environment with saccharine finesse, this hobby, where players used to argue over saving throws and now argue of terminology that's been rewritten into PR-safe think and talk, has been remade in Hasbro's corporate image.  The old guard that used to direct the game — when the leaders of the D&D division were actual DMs and players — have been replaced with number counters concerned about churn and marketing analysis.  They're disassociated from anything to do with the game, and are renaming and redesigning it according to surveys, brand strategists, messaging architects and identity leads.  And the "speak" associated with the game has deeply reflected that now — so much so that when the content maker above uses the language himself, he does so unflinchingly, without any self-consciousness, unable to guess at how ridiculous he sounds to an old-school player or, more importantly, those who don't play D&D at all.

And this, of course, has led into another practice that we should consider most carefully.

As a client of Patreon, I make them money by encouraging people to support me and my efforts to bring clarity and improvement to D&D, both as a game and a cultural fixture.  Patreon, of course, sees me as a "cow."  It is my role, as they see it, to walk out into the field every day and eat the grass, which also happens to be green.  You, dear reader, are the grass.  Then, having consumed enough of you, my role is to return to the barn and allow myself to be milked; this changes nothing about my physiology, so I can surrender the milk at little suffrage to myself.  Which is why cows don't kick up a fuss.

Youtube uses the same principle, so do most service providers, who count upon content makers to produce product (eating grass) while making content that provides income (milk), while the lion's share of the proceeds goes to the company, not the milk-producer.  With Patreon, I at least get to keep most of the grass in my belly, while with Youtube, I don't even get a lot of that.  But enough with the metaphor, let's make the point.

I don't work for Patreon... but because it relies on me, and how much I can make for them, they have tended in the last few years to push me to make more milk for them.  As I said a few posts ago, they urge me constantly to sell product, because they make more money from me on products I sell through their system than they do on donations I receive.

Recently, however — and this doesn't just apply to Patreon, but to many platforms — they've begun to seek me not as a client or a person to provide service for, but as an employee.  For example, I received this email a few days ago:

RSVP for the fireside chat,

Don't forget to join in on Tuesday, May 20 (12:00-1:00 p.m. ET // 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT) for a fireside chat with Eric Han, VP of Trust & Safety. You'll hear about some proposed policy developments for this quarter and have a chance to participate in a Q&A.

It's 10:11 AM as I write this, and I'm in Mountain Time, so the chat is going on while I write this. I'm a terrible employee.  When I was at Telus, I had to attend something like this every six weeks.  But I don't work for Patreon.  They don't pay me.  They provide me a platform but they don't pay me — you, Dear Reader, do.  But you can see the corporate speak plain as day. There's no fireside here. This isn't a chat. I'm not joining anybody, I'm being asked to listen to a vice-president I don't work for tell me policy I have no part in setting, and it's being framed in a way that's intended to frighten me.  "Trust and Safety."  Those are loaded words, no less so than any I've used in this post, including woke and fascism, and deliberately crafted words to make me think that if I don't attend this meeting designed to help someone else's business, I'll be in danger.

Patreon might have a quarter they worry about, but I don't.  I have no questions.  They have no answers I'm interested in.  And just to be clear, for those readers who have been programmed to equate the word "answers" with the dictionary definition of that word, in corporatese answers are "words that sound conclusive and are designed to placate you as you bend over this table while we unbuckle our belt."  Many of you here probably don't know that.  I thought I might be helpful in translating that for you.  It's a word they often use in the process of sunsetting you.

For those who think I should protest, therefore, and close down my Patreon account, oh, how naive of you all to think there's a space left where this isn't the norm.  You're watching it in real time ruin your D&D game, and the total resistence is negligible.  Because the approach, mask slipping an all, works.  Because, it's estimated, 35% of the population lacks an inner monologue — though that's a simplification, it has a lot to do with the variability of a monologue rather than the total lack of thought; all it really means is that the "doubt" response in many is compromised — there's a good chance that 1 in 3 of your audience is going to buy the language hook, line and sinker.  In essence, we're speaking of a lack of radar.  On this same principle, anything I write in a blog post is going to bang right into that 1 in 3 demographic, which won't understand the connections I make from paragraph to paragraph, will feel my shifts in subject are "jarring" or "abrupt," will respond to words like "woke" and "fascist" emotionally and not intellectually, won't get sarcasm (because what is sarcasm) and will feel that I'm just a bad, bad person because I didn't say we were going to have a fireside chat by the sunset, with a nice basket of goodies on the table.

A writer has to make choices.  We can go for the sure thing, the 1 in 3 that's out there, has disposable income and is enormously gormless, or we can speak to the other 2 in 3 who can't agree on a fucking thing, including how wide your stance should be while taking off your belt.  Like I said, choices.  You can't please everyone all the time.  But you can please that 1 in 3 all the time.  Which is what all this corporatese is designed to do.