Erik Steiner is a PhD candidate at York University, studying the economics and marketing of role-playing. He’s apparently talked to a lot of people and eventually came around to me. Before you understandably anticipate a disaster, I’ll tell you the payoff: a great conversation and opportunity to articulate important ideas.
Because, at his invitation, I did experience a sinking, sick feeling, as whenever someone contacts me to talk about marketing, open license, independent publishing … as I’ve said in other interviews, I am probably the worst person in the world to talk about this. That’s partly because I’m bad at doing it, but more importantly, the reason I’m bad at it is that I hate and despise its very existence and purpose. I stand by my point in A People’s History, or at least a person’s, that the entire point of marketing is to sell something without regard to its actual features or performance. In fact, it’s considered the highest skill if the thing is entirely shit. The technique is to hawk something which the thing does not do, or at best not necessarily.
- Minor dishonesty = telling people that this toothpaste will get you laid, i.e., well, it’s true that brushing your teeth at all is a health benefit concerning a visible piece of your anatomy, although this toothpaste will only do so insofar as it’s the same as the others, and whatever differences it may have are irrelevant. A similar example concerns what a great parent you are for feeding your kids breakfast, which is true as far as it goes, merely directing false attention to this particular box of cereal.
- Medium dishonesty, essentially a con requiring the mark’s buy-in = telling people that this beer will make your parties awesome and you in particular very popular, i.e., no, it won’t, because no beer will actually do that, although beer as such is indeed a component of parties. A similar example is almost implying that insurance protects your family from fatal accidents, which is easily mentally substituted for the actual service of providing compensation for the survivors.
- Blatant lies, either omission or commission = well, pick your poison, but for example, the historically accurate “it’s toasted” incident for cigarettes, or claiming that a shampoo will make your hair “healthy” (hair, for your information, is a protein exuded in mass from cells and is not in any way alive; the shampoo, if it does anything at all, provides a pretence to mask your potential poor health).
The other, related primary technique is to associate the thing with a given subculture and lifestyle as the latest, necessary gear, which triggers various fears about inclusion and dials down the general cultural attention to things’ actual qualities of any kind. Consider how determinedly the role-playing subculture confounds “creator” with designer. That’s not “the creator.” The creators are the people playing. Designers are merely that subset of active creators who adjust or arrange or innovate the instrumentation. The full distortion includes confounding design/designer with publisher, regarding which, I say:
The only way to promulgate play is through play. The only way to share your design work is to recognize that it’s your problem, not theirs [other people’s]. The activity does not need your game. The activity does not need any game [i.e., any purchased text].
A product may or may not reflect the design of some rules and concepts, and, if it does, it may or may not arise from enjoyable play. Given those layers of ifs, my attention or commitment to an announced or advertised role-playing product is at best provisional, and by default, absent. (You can hear this, and the interviewer’s confusion, in Interview: Independent publishing, latter days, as he keeps asking me to provide opinion soundbites on the latest alleged hotness)
OK, that’s the negativity I harbored when I began the interview, and to Erik’s credit, during the conversation, he stated his own concerns with exactly the same things, and raised the question of actively combating them, viably, not merely feebly protesting. That came toward the end and I don’t think we had the energy to get really concrete about it. Since then, I’ve considered these things:
- About activity: to play openly, to encourage others, to explore venues and procedures; perhaps counter-intuitively, to seek personal enjoyment without sacrificing anything in martyr/parental terms
- Therefore to share and demonstrate play without fabricating an entertainment device, i.e., a commercial or a skit
- About culture: to abandon the hobby as such, let alone its pretensions toward industry, which painfully includes nearly all (or all!) of the prevailing means for public communication of any kind
- Therefore to focus on experiential learning both for myself and for anyone in contact who’s inclined, whether in-person or online
- About publication: to hold fast to remembering that this in itself must be fun to do, and to perceive that some people would really like it for what it actually is; otherwise it is actively destructive to play
- Therefore to provide texts in forms I myself find useful and fun to touch, and seeking ways to make them “honorably visible,” as opposed to the poisonous ideals of penetration and mindshare
… or perhaps you can think about the approaching-1000 posts at this endeavor as at least my attempt at these, which I hope is better phrased as “our.” In just a few weeks Adept Play will be seven years old. Has it done anything? Has anything changed? At what scale, and for what identifiable sector? Have we changed? How?
I’m encouraged that the Happening did indeed happen, or that here and there, podcasters or practitioners demonstrate that they are not mere hipsters but also playing-first to focus on celebration and exploration of the activity. I’d really like to know your thoughts on this state of affairs and especially on specific effort for the upcoming year.
14 responses to “On not getting it out there”
Great interview! I thought to watch it a few minutes each day and ended up watching the entire three-hour four-video thing in one sitting!
I’m glad you liked it, and I hope it can proceed into some discussions here.
If you have the time, check out Why things are the way they are as well, which is a conversation from just a few days later. They go together, but the second one is only audio and isn’t on YouTube, so it’s easy to miss.
Some fact/names clarifications:
1. Williams is Lorraine Dille’s married name, so when I say “the Williams” it’s not quite right, as her brother’s name is Flint Dille.
2. Alliance Distribution was created in the late 1990s by the merger of two game distributors, Chessex and The Armory. It was then acquired by Diamond Comics Distributors in 2000, and that’s where the notorious Bud Plant is relevant.
3. In the late 1990s, Wizards of the Coast obviously already had Magic: the Gathering as its original publisher, then acquired TSR and GenCon in 1997, and then acquired the Pokemon license in 1999; that’s when the Hasbro purchase process officially begins, concluded sometime in 2002. The OGL, d20, and D&D 3rd edition are all established during that purchase/transition period, as was Peter Adkison’s acquisition of GenCon LLC and departure from WotC. This is why D&D 3 (2000) is published by WotC and D&D 3.5 (2003) is published by WotC-inside-Hasbro, because they fall on opposite sides of when the purchase was concluded, but the eventual turnover to Hasbro was planned and in place before any of these or associated publications.
4. Dangerous Journeys was published by Game Designers Workshop (U.S.A.), not Games Workshop (unrelated, in the U.K.). As a useful point of comparison, the latter was far more powerful in distribution through their own shenanigans and would certainly not have been cowed by lawfare of that kind.
“to seek personal enjoyment without sacrificing anything in martyr/parental terms”
This speaks to me as I have embarked on a *Mausritter* campaign with my kids (11 and 8). We’re five sessions in.
I knew that death was too harsh, so I imported a kid-friendly optional mechanic from *In the Realm of the Nibelungs* (via its supplement *Rheingold*, not yet translated) so no mice die, being teleported to safety faw away instead.
Still, failure and defeat are on the table, and my daughter (11) has great difficulties with this – we had to pause and postpone continuation of the game until the next week twice, for instance when the PCs lost the boat race of *The Frogacle* adventure included in *The Estate* boxed set.
This did not surprise me as my daughter has serious issues with losing (and not being in control). She cried when we started playing *Super Mario Kart* and did not win the first race…
I am a very experienced illusionist GM with a deep bag of tricks but I have left all that behind. It would be incredibly easy to tailor the *perfect* game session for my kids, resulting in satisfaction and smiles.
But I don’t do that anymore.
1. I consider illusionism a toxic practice and while I can easily foresee my kids being taught just that by peers in high school eventually, I will have no part in that.
2. I think it’s important to teach my daughter how to deal with frustration — but this is not the goal here, just a byproduct of my process.
3. But I do want to enjoy roleplaying *with* them and do *not* want to be an entertainer. I was rooting for them to win that boat race, and openly so, but the dice said no and that’s okay. That’s why the game will be exciting – to them, to me – the next time, too.
You are brave! I found role-playing with my kids at that age to be impossible, even though they often enjoyed it, because I would become so exhausted … sometimes due to frustration at not knowing how to explain a rule without being “the parent,” sometimes without even knowing why, just wrung out like a rag.
I felt bad about it because I’d like to share this thing which is so important to me. And I do in fact like hanging out with kids in general and enjoying whatever it is they’re learning or interested in doing. However, somehow the combination of variables does not come together for me.
This was such a good interview. Ron, you’re so clear and succinct compared to seven years ago – the concepts have really come together, and it makes me so happy to hear you say “I have this class about this, I have that other class about that”.
I found it really useful and relevant to my activities as a teacher of independent scriptwriting, especialized in comic books, so I bet that for people who roleplay often it will be even more so. It’s really something to be able to characterize a given endeavor as practitioners of an activity.
As for next year, I’d love to see videos of you DMing one shots. Personally I think I would enjoy it as a viewer, I would learn from it as a roleplayer, and I hope it’d help reach more people.
I appreciate the kind words. However, I don’t understand your final point. Adept Play is full of recordings of me as GM. Since the term “one-shot” can mean many things or nothing, I don’t know what you’re seeking, but I’m sure you can find it among them: single-session, situation-resolution focused, or whatever.
My bad, evidently it’s called single session. I’ll look harder for them.
It’s not about terminology. One-shot does literally mean a single session, but people use it so variably that I have to ask for clarification.
Here are some recent examples: Gothcon 2024 (Fantasy for Real, Dreams of Fire), Lincon 2024 (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Circle of Hands)
I’m interested in why you specified a single session. There are plenty of other examples of bounded, single-story play which included two or three sessions. Would they serve your needs as well? If not, why not? [editing]… wait, let me try that again, re-phrasing so as not to be so rude, “let me know if I should share any links to those.”
Oh, thanks! 🙂 It’s just a hunch, a feeling, that by having one-shots easily available it would be easier to share the way you do role playing with the world, to see your principles in action. I feel this is a good moment to welcome new people, now that you have the different seminars and are able to refer to them on the spot as I previously pointed out.
I have the hope that people could compare and contrast your one-shots with the more readily available rpg-as-radio-theatre videos.
And I even felt one-shots could have a bit of an edge over them. I myself am a Dropout fan, and have begun and left unfinished at least three separate stories by Brennan Lee Mulligan and co. They’re long! Entertaining, but requiring too much commitment. I think if I could watch one-shots by you I would kill two birds with one stone: not only would I be entertained, I would learn from people actually doing the thing, which is the one thing the Critical Roles of the world by definition cannot do for me.
PS Do share the bounded ones you said, we don’t have to be strict about single session. 3 or less is fine.
Sure. Jack Cosmos and the desolation of Smug (Space Rat), Oog is all you need (Great Ork Gods), Para Int’l and so many beetles + Tinfoil hats, everyone! (three sessions of InSpectres, each probably fulfilling the single-session criterion)
However, I caution you against this focus on activism: “people,” “people out there,” basically, messaging out there into the internet. Nothing you’re trying to communicate about play will get through, especially if they are looking at isolated YouTube experiences outside of these pages and text at Adept Play. Most of them don’t even really know what a website is (a location with its bounded topics and interactions), as they operate in a haze of notifications. Few of them know what play is even in a pragmatic sense, not the point of being able to rely upon it. To a general (or super-general, diffuse) populace, any of these videos will look like inexpert, amateurish, “shitty” product, and the people in them will look unprofessional, “cringe-inducing” or “dire” or any number of other dismissive terms that will appear as soon as you promote them in that diffuse way. They aren’t entertainment and therefore cannot serve as what would be expected, so-called edutainment.
This is an academy. It only works with commitment and with a sense of place. As with any such place, people who experience some benefit or development unfortunately often think that anyone will be similarly excited or altered in perspective at first contact, mistakenly thinking that some kind of enlightenment-on-contact is involved, forgetting that they themselves went through years of contact, possible rejection or separation, re-contact, reflection, attempts, failed attempts, and whatever else, before deciding that the benefit was real. When they go into activist mode, every time, as I’ve now seen for twenty-five years, it operates in reverse. As they try to meet-and-help “people out there” by forming common ground, they get sucked into the values and standards they’re trying to fix, losing the benefits and development.
I ask you partly for my own sanity in whatever ongoing interactions we may have, please focus on your own enjoyment and active play, not on messaging to the diffuse non-culture.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about, don’t worry. I don’t plan on doing anything myself. It’s just that it’s the only thing I could come up with regarding activities for the following year. I will keep in mind, however, that this is an academy. If I come up with any other ideas I’ll post them.
I run into somewhat similar problems, though not so dire, at the comics school I work at. Unlike other places where you can learn manga style or American superhero style, we have a build-your-style approach with a strong base in the Argentine-Italian style, and we also do quite a bit of decolonization work. The value is obvious to anyone who actually goes to a few classes, and quite inscrutable and difficult to market to the public at large.
Thanks a lot for the links, they will be useful to me personally.
With apologies to you or anyone tired of me going on about this … I thought I’d provide the positive side of why I’m doing this, specifically, providing recordings of play with minimum, “street” production value. All of my cranking about “the people out there” concerns outreach to the hobby, which is essentially a commercially-captured and now commercially-defined subculture. Actually two, the smaller one called table-top role-playing enclosed by the bigger one called gaming. Its members are obsessed with inclusion, acquisition, and ever-shifting status and branding. They are whom I am tagging as essentially unreachable in terms of the activity, which can be confusing because at a glance, they seem to be “the role-players” and “role-playing.” [and yes, I remain with “role-playing” as the term for the activity, too, regardless of confusion, because fighting about that is distracting and constitutes its own engagment with the hobby, which is a bad idea]
I am indeed all about outreach, but not to them. I’m looking for, or remaining available and open to people who are interested in the activity, and some of them may be found wandering about in hobby social spaces, but there are a lot more than that. I think the Adept Play videos are appealing and interesting to them, as they show persons like themselves doing something understandable, in ordinary language and social space. They also show play of varying quality and success, like any activity when viewed up-front in its making. (As a stand-up practitioner, I’m sure you recognize the difference between a slick jump-cut among “Famous Stand-Up Guy’s Funniest Moments,” including a modern soundtrack and commentary, vs. actually attending one of the early, pre-celebrity shows from which some clips were taken.)
So I do appreciate your attention to what the videos can do, and I would indeed be happy about seeing them shared or discussed elsewhere. I’m taking pains for you and anyone reading this to know that I think hobby/gaming venues and people committed to them are the wrong environment for the effort.
I haven’t been able to watch more than a few minutes of Critical Role and have mostly avoided videos of actual play (though CR is something different yet) for years, including here at the site.
However, I have recently begun to see the value of such videos: when I’m grappling with a particular issue or trying to grok a particular game.
I’ve watched two videos of Fiasko (including one with its creator Jason Morningstar) this fall and it made me confident enough to play it (not least because the videos and some discussion here alerted me to the game’s problems).
Here at the site, I have pored over various videos lately, rewinding & taking notes, examining the prep files and notes that come with them, and they have been very enlightening and useful.
Ron’s practical exercises in the workshops are a case in point: participating is great — some things clicked for me and in almost all cases, they really, really make me want to play the respective games -, but even without that, they have been very useful.
(Sorry if this is not exactly concrete. Maybe in some future post…)
And who knows? Maybe I’ll watch entire multi-part AP videos next year…