Who's Out of Touch Now?
In a recent article, Malcolm Sheppard has taken to attacking (and confabulating) older gamers, the old-school movement, and the anti-Swine movement all in one. Well, good for him, points for trying, but he's full of shit.
What's his basic argument?
He says that old-school gamers make three big mistakes that "may have been true when those of us now drifting between 30 and 40 were starting out, but aren’t true for younger people". According to him these three are: "Nerds and Jocks and Never the Twain Shall Meet", "Roleplaying is Mysterious Minority Activity", and "My Scene is Hateful".
Well, let's just examine those three ideas, and see which are held by the regular gamers of a certain age, and which are actually Swine ideas, shall we?
First, "Nerds vs. Jocks". Back when I started playing, there was no such distinction. This is not something we created back in the "bad old days"; back before the Swine made their presence felt, nerds and jocks, and headbangers and preppie girls and countless other types of people played RPGs. I know, because I saw it. In my old gaming groups in junior high and high school we had headbangers, we had the most popular guy in school, we had brainy girls, we had guatemalan immigrants, we had drama geeks, preppies, regular guys, whatever. They all digged D&D.
Its like I said before, back when I first started gaming, I was just about the nerdiest kid who played. But within a few years, I was by far the least nerdy. It wasn't that I had changed all that much (though I do get cooler every year), but that all these disparate people started abandoning the game, and their spaces were filled by geeks, freaks, rejects, hopeless nerds, anime otaku wankers, and eventually outright Lawncrappers. It wasn't in the old-school days that D&D and RPGs weren't inclusive of regular culture. It was afterwards, and the more and more that Swine took over and demanded that RPGs had to be "deep" games requiring a massive commitment of time, money, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and (often) pretentiousness to enjoy, that normal people left. In other words, your fault, not ours.
Second, "roleplaying is a mysterious minority activity". Well shit, see point the first. It was the Swine, more than anyone, who pushed this. They are the ones who want RPGs to be something not for the "Unwashed Masses". They're the ones who want to pretend to be artistes and intellectuals and beat poets because they play a fucking game about sodomite pirates or sexually degenerate university professors.
Back in the old school days, the "mysteriousness" of RPGs was that it was scary to adults, not to kids. It was forbidden and "satanic", and that made it unbelievably cool and appealing. But making a character took 10 minutes, and you didn't need to spend a fortune to play, or go to special stores, much less have to hang around dingy corners of the internet reading thousands of pages of "theory" invented by some fuckwad expert on bat penises.
RPGs were cool, back when moms were afraid that if you played D&D you'd worship the devil. Today, moms are still afraid; they're afraid that if their son plays D&D he'll end up being a 40 year old virgin who doesn't bathe and will never move out of her basement. And the latter is decidedly NOT appealing, to the kids or anyone else. And again, your fault, not ours.
And the third point? Please, you people INVENTED hate. You're the ones who wished nothing short of D&D's destruction. You were the ones who declared that people who like regular RPGs and don't embrace your theories are "brain damaged" and "child abuse victims". If the scene is hateful today, it is because you made it so, by trying to subvert the hobby and twist it to your civilization-despising humanity-abhorring self-loathing nihilistic psychoses.
So, I rise for the third time to say: your fault, not ours, you fucker.
And Mr. Sheppard's "solutions"? Obviously, to get rid of anything but the Swine. "Play what you hate"; he says, and "stop looking on principles"; implying that we should surrender to the Swine in order to make peace. This is nothing short of Maoist genius at work: destroy the hobby, create war and anarchy, and then insist that if only the other side would stop fighting there'd be "peace". That type of peace, our hobby can not afford. It is the peace of the grave.
He also says "play to the now". Which is fine and good, but its not what he means. He means "stop making games that try to maintain regularity, stop trying to make games that take a stand and refuse to bow to our will, and please please stop making games that end up being more successful than our theories". The Now, and who gets to own it, is what this war is all about, and he knows it. That's why he's pleading for us to surrender. But we won't. We shall stand athwart your Swine revolution, and we will make better and better regular games, old school and new and innovative, that will be founded on regular principles, and you and your kind shall die in the gutter of obscurity.
So take your own advice, Malcolm. Stop making games that don't appeal to the mainstream. Stop making games that try to make our hobby that of a tiny minority of self-styled elites, and stop bringing your hate into my hobby. Embrace the new, and accept that in spite of the best efforts of the Swine for the past two decades, the New is and will continue to be the Regular kind of gaming that you loathe and mainstream gamers love.
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Castello Natural Virgin Oversize + H&H's Beverwyck
Comments (9)
Who the hell is Malcolm Sheppard and why should anyone give a rat's ass about what he thinks?
As much as I appreciate your rants Pundy, some times you just need to mark people down as known idiots and leave it at that.
He's a well known Swine, influential in their movement.
Again, another post that proves once again that The Pundit is a fatbeard through and through.
He using his imaginary swine to promote his imaginary war to make him seem more important then he really is.
And we know you have a low self esteem problem, but telling people how cool you are just makes you look pathetic and desperate to make yourself look cooler then you really are
Wow, what a bold stance for Not Having a Fucking Point, truthsayer. Well done, surely no one will notice that you're intellectually bankrupt and have fuck all to add to the discussion.
Lame rant yet again. Out of ideas again, eh?
I love the nerds vs. jocks bit since I lettered in Track and practised Kung Fu while playing D&D and Traveller in the 80's.
Pundit, seeing some of the deliberate crapping from douchebags on your Xanga, I can only say that you are best know by the enemies that you keep.
While I don't really agree with Malcolm's suggested solution (it's all so vague, with a lot of critiques and not a lot of actual practical suggestions), he has nothing to do with your swine war. His big point is that we look to the massive popularity of online fan fic and livejournal-based RP'ing that is huge among the youth of today. This is entirely outside of indie, trad, swine, whatever. You probably already know this and are just misrepresenting his argument so you can keep your fake war alive, which at this point only Jeff "kung fu master jock" 37923 is still following.
But good luck with that!
@walkerp - Speaking of embittered douchebags, do you still have to tell your friends not to get erections around your mom?
I think there is enough room and a valid purpose in having the hobby support two kinds of product. The mass market, appeal to a wide spectrum game (ala D&D 1980s), and more segmented, experimental products with a limited audience.
The former means that people who want to become full time tabletop RPG designers have a way to make a living wage, and sustain and support the first new entertainment format since the invention of the motion picture, with an audience of millions.
The latter helps to push the design envelope in new and creative ways, taking risks no mainstream work could afford to, much of which result in dead ends and regression but occasionally produce breakthroughs that advance the state of the art and can be fed back into the mainstream products to the general benefit of the entire hobby.
There need not be a war between these two groups of developers - in fact, I would hope that developers would easily move from one segment to the other as their creative visions and business opportunities change. We should strive towards a model like the software development community has - some people work on huge codebases for mundane but important tasks, and others devote their lives to trying weird new forms of development, experimenting with new languages and protocols, and creating from scratch solutions to old problems. Programmers often drift from one kind of project to the other, often doing both one as a job that pays a salary and the other as a hobby that scratches a creative itch.
Mutual respect is key. The creative innovators have to give props to the people who keep the trains running on time, and providing a stable and large pool of prospects for their experiments. The big game teams have to have the fortitude to admit when some whacky game about Irish immigrants, or the secret life of Tribbles, or pederastic cave bears actually does break some new ground and adds a new tool to the toolbox.
I will say from my personal observations that most of the problem lies with the small press community (more the fans than the designers, to be sure) - some of whom have adopted a "punk" sensibility - they see themselves as engaged in a war against an entrenched political and social order that only The Revolution can overthrow. Taking shots at "the man" (although almost always directed at games not actual people) seems to be a core part of that ideology. Within the larger companies I often find a lot of respect for cutting edge game design; tempered with a world-weary cynicism that comes from seeing "revolutionary" ideas that are discarded retreads of things people have been building since the 1980s but the new generation thinks is innovative mostly through their own ignorance.
One thing I think Pundit is right on the money about though is that the balance has shifted too far from the 1980s ideal of small, elegant designs that were very raccomodating to those players without a lot of RPG experience towards cumbersome massive monuments encrusted with years of special cases. In addition to being open to new ideas from outside the mainstream, the big game teams have got to become ruthless with the pruning of their own rules as well because a lot of what gets published today has become virtually inaccessible to the next generation of potential gamers.
RyanD