Here’s the beast: all the things I think we should collectively consider as the social and commercial platform for role-playing’s history … and content, and emotions. Distribution, political context, money matters, subcultural effects, and more: presented not as momentary justifications, but as a layered history with a deep structure of cause and effect.
Many thanks to everyone who participated, in some cases as long as they could, especially as it ran to more hours than I imagined. The “workshop” component was personal testimony, which mattered greatly throughout.
All the participants have the in-class materials, including the slides and recordings. For everyone else, these things are available for purchase. However, patrons! Be sure to get the discount code at the Patreon.
Following the session, the conversation flew thick and fast, so I’ve pulled out some of it to include here. Participants, please continue in the comments!
A lot of games were mentioned, so I’ll complete the tags list as I continue to edit.
I also think I under-reported the genuine harm done to a specific age group in the United States, during the moral panic approximately 1984-1994. I’ve discussed it in the past so I think I assumed that knowledge was shared, but in the recording, you might get the idea that I think the impact on role-players wasn’t big. It was big, it was abusive, and it was pervasive. My age group missed the whole thing, but please don’t under-estimate the trauma for this age group, or get the idea that the resulting shame/persecution complex was made-up or unjustified.
19 responses to “Workshop: What Went Wrong”
The moral panic worked its way into everyday life even in Canada. I have a very clear memory of being 14, in a doctor’s office with my mom, and seeing an issue of Psychology Today with an article warning about the dangers of D&D. And the subway ride home with mom berating me with all the ideas she picked up from the article. I chalked up my turning away from RPGs around age 16 as “growing up” but it might just have been internalized shame.
The difference in age-based experiences, including regional variants, is profound. For example, I encountered absolutely no moral panic about D&D or role-playing during my teens. It showed up briefly, later, when I was working at an after-school neighborhood program during college (so, about 1985), from one parent, and that’s it. The heavy impact fell on a single cohort.
For people reading this, I want to clarify that my treatment diminishes the importance of the moral panic (subset Satan) regarding role-playing. I consider that the activity had already been mostly annihilated, and made vulnerable to such things, by something much more prevalent, pervasive, and unrecognized. The cultural abandonment occurred entirely before the panic. Then the world had its little fun with the younger role-players for a while before moving on to other things to flip out about, and the wounds inflicted and the victimhood remained among them.
In the Italian industry-subservient subculture, there’s currently a very strong push from people involved in publishing and self-identified game authors to professionalize every aspect of making roleplaying games (according to these, every person involved in making a roleplaying game product is a sustainable full-time salaried position). There’s even courses of “I will teach you how to make roleplaying games your job” with the associated social posturing and personal attacks towards people that call this model unsustainable.
This has never really sat right with me, as the numbers simply aren’t there: the largest Italian roleplaying-only game publisher employs 4 people and does around 1M EUR gross sales (this might seem like a big number, but it really isn’t for a publisher). I’ve heard through the grapevine of people exploited for free or underpaid work, authors earning peanut royalties, and even the people making a regular income from publishing struggling with making ends meet.
It seems to me like most people are mostly doing this stuff for pleasure and at maximum recouping costs, and what I couldn’t fully understand is why the constant push towards consumerism, selling more, increasing profits, influencer marketing, etc … if at the end of the day very few people make actual money from this.
What I realized through the workshop is that the posturing is part of this misguided attempt at legitimacy through sales/commerce: if I say it enough times, I think it will become true (since I need to project demand to the distributor), and if I manage to earn serious money from it, roleplaying will have become a “real thing”. (and damn whatever I distort or destroy doing this).
I wonder how much this system can sustain itself on dreams of growth before crashing like the late 90s.
Most of the economists I follow think that reality does in fact catch up with bubbles and speculation, e.g., “the inevitable crash,” and similar. I am not expert enough or at all to object formally, but I do wonder whether that’s true. It seems to me that certain monetary practices and policies which are no better than scams do manage to persist, either outside the crashes or, I guess to stay with bubble imagery, bobbing around a little but floating free afterwards. It might be too easy to believe that rotten products + vaporous culture + repetitive unsatisfactory purchasing must eventually meet comeuppance.
Anyway, more to the point of individual life-choices, and related to my reply to Mark in the attached page in the post, I have found the following habits to be remarkably enjoyable, or maybe to say, they make it easier to look at myself in the mirror. (1) Buying at DriveThru only when it’s not available any other way, and always something I wanted before arriving there, i.e. never browsing; and (2) pledging at Kickstarter only For No Reward, which, again, yields immense satisfaction, real pleasure, that I had not anticipated.
Continuing to reflect on this staggering workshop, what is currently hitting close to home is the point at which all the crazy “industry” shit meets us simple practitioners and does its best to turn us into hobbyist consumers: the point of sale, or POS, if we want to be correct in more ways than one.
The slides about dopamine vs. seratonin A2 were nothing less than an awakening. It’s obvious to any of us living under the dominant economic regime of the world that buying more shit doesn’t make us happier, and we all know that the dopamine hit of a little retail therapy isn’t exactly GOOD for us, but, I mean, how bad can it be?
Well, the dopamine cycle of hype-fueled anticipation coupled with anxiety about the activity working at all, social anxiety (as us hyper-social primates all have to a lesser or greater extent), and the inevitable crash, such that we’re never in pleasure mode, only in withrawal or not-withdrawal, well, shit. Shit, shit. This isn’t simply about trying not to eat too many RPG cookies so one doesn’t have indigestion or keeps the pounds off.
This cycle, insofar as I engage in it, threatens my very enjoyment of the activity itself. Because it hooks my brain into a cycle in which the activity itself has no place.
This has had an immediate effect on my purchasing habits, and not only in roleplaying. Not only will the shiny new thing not rescue your game table, it might break it.
I’m really glad to see this. In the tradition of our recommended reading to one another, I suggest Never Enough by Judith Grisel.
For purposes of general viewers of these comments, I want to stress this point about dopamine or, more generally, opioid neurochemistry: that this has nothing to do with pressing levers to get jolts of pleasure. The pleasure is absent – a memory of the first time or two, at most. You’re either in withdrawal (in this case, horrible isolation and paranoia) or numbed-out to the level of relative function, and that’s it.
Furthermore, that this cycle has nothing to do with injections or (as we call them) drugs. It is already operating in the brain and mind with the substances we make ourselves; in fact, if it didn’t, then heroin and whatnot wouldn’t do anything. I’m saying that the miserable addiction-cyle of social anxiety is obviously vastly more prevalent and arguably a worse thing than pharmacological addiction.
Errata, errata …
At one point I referred to Avalon Hill not publishing RuneQuest 3rd edition, which of course they did twice (1983-ish, again in 1993-ish). I was thinking of the never-completed RuneQuest 4th edition.
I’ll continue to edit this comment to add to the no-doubt long list.
I loved this workshop so much. A thing that kept circling my brain while watching it is how basically this…
“Status and friendship are difficult, within and between groups.”
+
“Play is fragile and can fail at any moment.”
…somehow ends up being celebrated as a slightly tragic but ultimately fun and quirky feature of the hobby.
I point to Knights of the Dinner Table which never read as indictment but as a point of identity confirmation. “I know that guy!” or worse, “I AM that guy!”
And this runs through into today’s meme culture like all that gross repetition about the bard player who seduces everything. Or the habit of people unironically referring to player behavior as “shenanigans” as if unruly, juvenile rampaging is just the social norm. And it’s all kind of presented with this kind of chipper, “We may be dysfunctional but we’re family!” vibe.
It’s so disturbing.
Hey, just finished watching! Made a few notes here and there, nothing profound except perhaps that my mom made an actual fresh fruitcake from scratch this Christmas and it was pretty good!
Just a few things –
1. I got into roleplaying games first of all because I was at one of those summer kids activity programs, in 1980, might or might not have been a “gifted kids” thing, I don’t remember, where they ran T&T for us, and I took home a copy of Goblin Lake, which made me the scrappy underdog rpg loving rebel that I am today. (Afterwards I found out that one of my best friends’ older brother had Holmes D&D and we played some of that too. But T&T was my first love, you know that – and that’s the origin story)
2. RE: list of 1982 RPGs, man, all of them still loom large, whether by reputation or experience, in my gaming brain. Those first couple years of the 1980s were core in my concept of the RPG universe.
3. I got RPGs the same place my dad got model trains
4. The 90s. Oh man, this was big. I was so goddamn alienated from what was being published in the RPG hobby in the 1980s, in terms of the games which consisted of a firehose of slickly produced supplements. I had left home and all my friends, including my gaming friends, to go to grad school at that time. There was no “staying in close touch via the internet” and long distance cost money. I didn’t have anyone to game with (not good at making friends) and I didn’t have money to plug into those firehoses, and none of them reminded me of anything I really thought was cool like Talislanta or 1e Ars Magica or Nightlife or Amber (which my friends and I had played a *ton* of). I still have zero nostalgia for most 90s titles. The fucking 90s. My 20s. Rough times, mostly.
5. I was on Usenet and BBSs before the web, and was on the web in very early days, and I do remember the awesome underground anarchy of a world of enthuisasts unhyped and unmarketed to, sharing what they thought was cool. Times when the internet was still underground, there was a kind of wild energy there… couldn’t last. But I know *exactly* what you’re talking about and the crazy amateur stuff that burbled around there, I *do* remember fondly.
6. Google Plus and fucked up dynamics: I remember when I had the temerity to “plus” a comment that disparaged a notorious asshole, and the asshole (who didn’t know me from Adam) showed up in the comments to call me and everyone else who “plussed” it on the carpet and demand we explain ourselves. You got some fucked up shit there, though he was arguably one of the fuckedest upedest and an extreme case. (Three guesses who.)
7. Serotonin vs Dopamine. Whoo, serious food for thought. You mentioned how we generally get dopamine hits, I don’t think you called out explicitly how you trigger the serotonin? I’m assuming it’s something along the lines of “creative engagement, thought, focus, participation”?
That’s all I wrote down. Again: fresh fruitcake, not bad!
Given some time and fatigue pressure at the end, I might not have placed the fruitcake concept properly. The issue is that the WotC effort ended with the relevant parties getting what they wanted: Peter with GenCon, Hasbro with Pokemon and Magic, a number of people now employed in a division called WotC at Hasbro, et cetera (and as I tried to say, no particular criticism is warranted).
But D&D – 3.0 or not – was the odd thing out. It was not a distinct playable thing, but a subcultural object of worship, literally an icon, rather than a distinct playable thing, and as I see it, Hasbro knew it for the fossilized fruitcake it was. We can all see the decade-long bobbling as they tried to figure out what to do with a fervent culture in a bottle rather than a steady middle-class customer base for profitable media (e.g., Barbie, Star Wars).
I think the latest revision of the OGL is the signal that Hasbro has completed its long process of finally arriving at what it does with its property. It’s no surprise that the gamer base was outraged. They were thrilled at their inclusion in Mother Church and they’ve discovered (but probably not realized or understood) that Hasbro’s goal all along, or insofar as Hasbro figured it out, was to turn it into something completely not at all a role-playing game and not to need them any more. (I discussed this aspect in February 2023 Q&A, split across parts 4 and 5).
Oh, absolutely understood. I was just riffing on the fruitcake. (We all talked about the old fruitcake jokes while we were eating it.)
Good point about the ultimate goal of Hasbro being to turn D&D into something more like Barbie, an intellectual property they can use to sell whatever related consumer objects they want. And the latest moves just being their attempt to effect what they’ve wanted all along. Computerized tabletops and rented electronic rulebooks being the current gambit to move D&D from being “something you do” onward through “something you buy” and all the way into “something you rent.”
As far as serotonin 2A goes, there’s something appropriate in the fact that whenever I browse into the latest research, I immediately find something distractingly important and forget about what I was looking for. I just spent too much time reading about its morphogenetic role in the rapid (i.e. big-making) development of the human cerebral cortext in utero and infancy.
Anyway, the literature seems sparse to me regarding what a person can do which might enhance and increase their own cerebral serotonin 2A activity, but it might be because the answer is so obvious: doing things which apply multiple variables at once and modify our understanding of things, well, modifies understanding and conceptual frameworks. Which seems circular until it’s stressed that the second half of that sentence is not traditionally psychological at all, but neurological, describing microanatomical tissue and cellular remodeling.
Apparently, the endogenous (self-produced) substance doesn’t “make you do the thing” so much as it makes doing the thing consequential to literally organic (“organ-based”) mental function.
I don’t know whether there’s any aspect of disproportionately increased response via more common and intensive activity, or even any investigation of different baseline levels compared across people with different activity levels of this kind. There might be. But even if both of these displayed no consistent difference, the connection between behaving like this (example: role-playing as expression) and amplified serotonin 2A effects seems direct, and maybe a simple 1:1 for any/all of us is good enough to be happy about.
That’s a good enough explanation for me. So it was less “this is how you get dopamine hits, this is how you get serotonin 2a hits” and more “these two kinds of drug effects involve and illustrate two different kinds of brain function which already exist, ,without the need of particular drugs, just as part of being a person with a brain. You can see them in different kinds of activity and interaction with the world and thought. One of them really sucks. Let’s recognize when we’re in a heroin-addict-like dynamic in our lives and activities and subcultures, and get the fuck out of it, because there are better ways for brains to operate”?
Yes, just about (which is the standard reply when talking about brain activity).
I do want to avoid totally demonizing dopamine, especially since we’re talking about endogenous function. Dopamine isn’t all suck. After all, stress and pain do factor positively as well as negatively into important things we want to do, and it’s a good thing to feel pain relief or stress relief. (I recommend learning about the details on the slide, which I only mentioned in passing in the workshop.)
I don’t know whether it’s ever possible to feel the difference or even physiologically distinguish between “not feeling the pain” and “feeling no stress about the pain.” Or for that matter, between anticipating vs. experiencing pleasure, although in that case I fancy I can tell the difference, but I might be wrong. For all I know, life without the meta-feeling, as it were, would be pretty awful: e.g., eating something would merely feed me and there’d be little or no experience of build-up, commencement, and sense of completion. And I’d probably starve, too.
The advice given by anyone of any profession is totally predictable: do the things which are good for you and enjoy the cycle as it stands. Eat right, exercise right, sleep right, be more mutualistic, play hard, work hard, deviate however you want within your management limits, et cetera. These include all sorts of build-up and relief based on dopamine without being addiction. Not exactly surprising, also unfortunately difficult to do in our offbeat economic and technological and sociological circumstances.
Two more things. First, I want to repeat just for the general readership that the dopamine function is not in any way a “pleasure cycle” like people keep wrongly calling it. Second, that there was no pre-tech or naturalism-based social-human nirvana in which no one was addicted or miserable due to these brain operations. Technology like mass marketing or Twitter/X merely amplifies or dramatizes what our ordinary socializing was always and still is vulnerable to.
Another great workshop! I was often vigorously nodding along – or sucking in breath in remembered pain!
Regarding Kickstarter bringing back deadlines, a focus on production values and inclusionary hype, I’m happy that I did not opt for crowdfunding for my game:
1. Deadlines would have added stress to something I love and do in my freetime. No thanks! I *already* felt some pressure from self-imposed, largely invisible deadlines as it was…
2. My production values are low by Kickstarter standards but actually made me very happy: I found and licensed a perfect cover image ($20), purchased and learned to use a nice mapping software (another $20) and massively improved my MS Word skills so a layman asked whether I was using Latech or InDesign (much more powerful and reasonable choices, no doubt, and no, it doesn’t look anywhere that good).
3. I’m not ‘connected’ (via prolific posting histories across the internet, let alone in the ‘right’ places) which sadly means few people will ever play my game. However, the direct feedback I – whether it was people volunteering to translate or writing an enthusiastic AP report – makes me feel all warm & fuzzy inside! The post-game comments at Cauldron 24 almost made me choke up with emotion…
After watching this workship, I feel like I ought to put it up on itch.io, too (and I never gave DriveThruRPG an exclusive deal anyway), but doing that … seems like work, not fun. So, not today.
*-*-*
Regarding dopamine: Does that mean one should (1) generally not seek social inclusion as such and (2) – where RPGS are concerned – instead focus on the enjoyment of the activity itself (and thus seek people to maximize that enjoyment with, i.e. good co-participants with, say, compatible goals and useful skills)?
Regarding invisibilty: At a certain threshold of visibility, capitalism and fandom descend upon us. After this workshop, it seems like a circle: get recognized, get corrupted, continue ‘underground’, repeat.
Roleplaying as a medium of expression is irrepressible. And it’s good to have a place like Adept Play: easily visible, welcoming and helpful *to anyone who’s looking*.
I glad you liked it, or better, found it worthwhile. I also appreciate that you cite Adept Play as a positive presence, which is better than what I sometimes think, that it’s a brief bit of waving and thrashing before the waters close overhead.
Here’s another aspect of your choices about publishing: consider if you did in fact spend hours and hours every week presenting and polishing your brand via X and Facebook and Reddit and who knows what else, and indeed gain a zillion likes and pledges and downloads … what real play might ensue? My observation of the past decade suggests that it would be very little. A lot of money gained-and-spent, and time, to put a lot of objects into recipients’ unpackaging videos and onto their shelves so they can get a zillion likes … and that’s it.
At Gothcon last year, I spoke briefly with a person who writes and publishes RPGs with a strong track record of distribution, hobby recognition, and perceived profits (in reality, sometimes managing to break even and often in danger of closing, but no one knows that). He told me outright that he doesn’t care about play any more, that play is ephemeral and invisible, that books are real, so all he wants to do is to produce and move high-end books. I stayed entirely quiet, especially regarding my thought that it explained why his books of the past decade have contained nothing of imaginable interet to me.
To clarify one topic a little, I don’t know enough to have much judgment about itch.io. It might be good, it might not, or in either case, for reasons which people might debate. Some people use it whom I know and whose work I pay attention to, and that’s all I can say.
I broke this out into its own reply.
Maybe replying is a bad idea. I am not good at “should,” so I can answer only for myself, and as you say, this is about role-playing alone and not life-in-general.
Clearly my personal reply is simply “yes.” Social inclusion seems to me an outright mugs’ game: no actual benefit and the general disintegration of the activity itself. Aside from being profoundly incapable at it (ask anyone), I don’t see it as worth doing.
Here I’m thinking not of a single, small, closed playing-together group, but a more general, not always-together, variably-together set of people loosely associated via an activity. Any of us is technically “part of it” just because the play occurs. It’s rather nice not to be concerned with inclusion beyond that level.
I can focus my efforts on the people I find most compatible or whom I want to play with for any reason at all, and not with anyone I find less fun (or who finds me as such). I say whatever I want to whomever I want, for whatever consequences may ensue – those can’t be predicted, but I can tell you it’s not as automatically bad as inclusion-anxious people always seem to fear. Sometimes, I get invested in some collective goal or aspect of the activity, and so that’s another level of socializing (“leadership,” whatever, which is its own topic), but sometimes I don’t and that’s OK too.
Regarding more formal things than role-playing, I know people who consider this viewpoint entirely naive and intrinsically offensive, because they’ve told me so. To them, I will always ultimately be rejected from the “body” as a foreign object. Some of these people have been determined that I understand that I deserve this, and they are very angry when it doesn’t happen. But I want to stay focused on role-playing, and for that, there is no exclusion possible: I don’t have to play with people I find incompatible or uncommitted to the activity, I’ve never had trouble finding people to play with, and no one can make me stop.
What any of this might mean to anyone reading this, I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to remain a private reflection.
Thank you for this personal response — it strikes a chord with me, not least because I, as you know, struggle with a strong reflex to try and please people.
I’ve gained a lot of confidence from my game and am setting out to roleplay with different people more often. To that end, I have cut down my roleplaying involvement in my regular group of friends by 50% at the beginning of the year, i.e. I am moving to biweekly offerings and skipping the complementary D&D 5e nights. Last fall, I already helped create a monthly splinter-group playing mostly GMful one-shots I bring (*A Quiet Year*, *For the Queen*, and *Fiasco* so far).
With a biweekly slot freed up, I have already begun to step out and approach new people (e.g. the local gaming club) and plan on doing a lot more of this (including ‘in the orange’, as per your diagram, though my plans are rather vague here).
One of my first impulses was to call up all my old gaming buddies for my new projects … but on reflection (even before the workshop) I will pick more carefully. As I have found out the hard way, you cannot convert people. It’s a fool’s errand.
Regarding serotonin vs. dopamine:
What I ended up chewing on later (and I understand now why you said it was the slide for me) is how serotonin is both facilitates pattern-forming and creation of meaning through neuroplasticity, but also is produced as a response to doing these things, creating a positive cycle.
I’ve already reoriented my approach to existing activities to maximize serotonin production, by focusing on exactly those two things, and I’ve seen an immediate improvement in focus, positive mood, executive function, craving my addictions, and lack of depressive states. Just by doing the same things but focusing on exploring the patterns and connecting the dots.
And I’ve realized now that the craving I have for inclusion is triggered by dopamine, not serotonin, and it’s part of that addiction cycle.