 |
| "There is no such thing as society." - Margaret Thatcher, Halloween (1978) |
A quick caveat before we begin: During the controversy (?) over a couple of Magpie Games blog posts a couple of years ago, two separate people told me they considered my statement that there was no RPG community to be a direct threat to them. More than one person has confirmed this feeling to me in other contexts as well.
Well, sure. If you're walking down a street and a guy with a butcher knife walks up and shouts "you know, the laws don't apply to me!" that can be scary.
So if you're someone who needs there to be a tabletop RPG community to feel safe, don't read what follows. Even if I'm right, it doesn't matter. (Perhaps that should say "especially if I'm right, it doesn't matter".) This blog only has 6 readers (including 2 dogs) so nobody is actually listening to this, and, if you hadn't already noticed, there's literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year trying to convince you, me and everyone on earth that I'm wrong. I don't stand a chance, and neither do you or the rest of the world.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't only want to convince you that buying a thing, and then talking about that thing online is sufficient to form the basis for a viable, positive community. They are working to convince you that the "communities" formed by doing so are actually much more meaningful than participating in communities which aren't based on buying things and talking about them. Compared to that kind of ridiculously over-funded opposition, blog posts like this one have no power and do not do anything. Aren't you glad you read this far? "Yeah, time well spent," is what you're thinking right now. Anyway, you will be safe and happy forever if you don't read any further, and there will never be any impact to you for deciding not to read this. So if that's what you need, then stop here.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't only want to convince you that buying a thing, and then talking about that thing online is sufficient to form the basis for a viable, positive community. They are working to convince you that the "communities" formed by doing so are actually much more meaningful than participating in communities which aren't based on buying things and talking about them. Compared to that kind of ridiculously over-funded opposition, blog posts like this one have no power and do not do anything. Aren't you glad you read this far? "Yeah, time well spent," is what you're thinking right now. Anyway, you will be safe and happy forever if you don't read any further, and there will never be any impact to you for deciding not to read this. So if that's what you need, then stop here.
My Racist Neighbor Hits The Same Potholes I Do
A hypothetical that I often serve up in these discussions is simple:My neighbors and I are in a community. (Most would agree with this.) Now, assume that I have an extremely racist neighbor. Are we in the same community?
Perhaps I don't associate with him as friends, or invite him to events at my house. Perhaps I caution other neighbors about dealing with them. Perhaps I even confront them or (times being what they are) talk shit about them online. But even after all those things I do, are we still in a community together?
Yes, of course we are. The determining factor, in my view, is that, among many other things, communities share needs. If the streets in my neighborhood are run-down and full of potholes, or if a traffic light isn't safe, or if the schools are in crummy shape, that affects all of us in the community. Our community has joint needs that are more important than many of our differences. My racist neighbor might propose horrendous ways of dealing with the community's needs, or grossly misdiagnose the community's needs, but ultimately my neighborhood community isn't a social club. A community is not a group of friends. (Not even "Facebook friends", or, as they used to be called, "enemies.") We share the use and need the support of a physical space and that's what makes us a community.
My neighborhood also holds resources in common. We're covered by a court system, policed by a City agency, we have trash pickup through a City contract, and if the air is smoggy my racist neighbor has to breathe it too.
Of course, it would be ideal if my racist neighbor would fuck off. If they would drive on their own roads (bumpy as possible, please) and breathe their own air (scented with farts, one hopes), of course I would be happier. But exile from my neighborhood is controlled by many mechanisms and institutions, with protections both for my racist neighbor and myself. The police might arrest them for burning tires on their front lawn, or for the inevitable public defecation charge that seems inextricably associated with displaying the Confederate flag, but if they do, a lawyer will be appointed, which I help pay for, to help them out. My racist neighbor might not pay their rent, or their mortgage, or their taxes, and in such cases their landlord, bank or government can turn to the courts to expel them from the community, if they follow the rules for doing so. The same protections extend to both him and I, whether they be robust or anemic.
Now, could there be a community with anti-racist values that included me but excluded my neighbor? Of course. A community working towards a particular goal can take on board values that include me and exclude that scumbag next door. A community's values can be quite important, and make a big difference to who is allowed in. But there isn't a community that doesn't have both:
- Jointly held needs and goals; and
- Jointly held assets directed towards those needs.
General Delivery: The Community
Where, broadly, is the online tabletop RPG community? Well, I am told, it is situated on many different platforms and has shifted over time. In the 1990s it was on Usenet, then it went to web forums, and now it is on social media. Thus, the community has shifted from existing in media controlled by nonprofit entities (Usenet servers were controlled by universities, for the most part) to those controlled by enthusiasts (web forums) to those controlled by increasingly large for-profit entities.A few slivers remain where this isn't true, the collapsed, fading remnants of another time: the mailing list, a web forum or two (often a subforum on a web forum about something else) the shared livejournal, the curated blog with a hundred people who read it. Does Dragon Magazine still have a letters column? But overwhelmingly, today, Google, Facebook and Twitter control the means of the tabletop RPG community's communication with each other. Importantly, those entities are under significant financial pressure to constantly bring new people into these platforms and never, ever kick anyone off. Their entire business model (to the degree they have one and aren't just frantically staving off a crazed, thinkpiece-spewing collapse) depends on a constant stream of people joining their platform and sharing commercial opinions and preferences. As someone memorably said, when you use a free service like Facebook, you are not the customer, you are the product and the advertiser buying your information is the customer. Worse, those controlling the platforms will simply never share the power to exclude someone from their platforms with anyone else. What does this mean for the online tabletop RPG community?
It means that the community cannot screen the values or priorities of the constant stream of people who arrive. It means the people who are aggressively pushed into this community have no common assets or needs, and so cannot organize to achieve common goals even if they had them, which they don't. Importantly, it means that so long as for-profit corporate entities control the entryway and environment of the tabletop online RPG community, nothing can be done to change this. What tiny waves of influence tabletop enthusiasts might try to exert will be suppressed, as much as possible, by multi-billion dollar corporations and their massive financial partners. I think I know who will win.
Without shared values and priorities, the online tabletop RPG community can't exist, or if one momentarily flutters into existence, it will quickly be intentionally drowned. To put it another, more direct way:
- Can a racist buy a RPG supplement? Of course they can. Amazon makes a lot of money selling tiki torches to racists, why not RPG supplements? All the money in the world is presently working to find a way to sell RPG supplements (and baby food, vegetable oil and golf clubs) to racists (and others) faster and easier and more efficiently.
- Can a racist organize a RPG group? Empirically, of course they can! They don't need anyone's permission. Lots of racist people out there, and plenty of milquetoast "Your Racist Friend" people who don't mind hanging around them.
- Can a racist come online and talk about RPGs? Yes, certainly. The gatekeepers of the discussion spaces are desperate for them to, in order that they can take that tiny fraction of a percent of information from the discussion and sell them to advertisers. If someone doesn't decide to come online and speak their opinions, the people who process, repackage and sell those opinions will find those temporarily silent people and figure out some way to get them to share.
Nowhere in this process is there even room for any leverage to keep them away. You couldn't slide a piece of paper between the needs of our new racist community entrant and the goals of the corporate entities desperately trying to extract money from their opinions. One gear turns the other.
The pipeline of online capitalism will serve racists the product, then that same pipeline will serve those racists up to social media as a product for advertisers, and social media will always, always, always deliver them to interactions which serve the interests of the advertisers purchasing the data, not the interests of the other people using the social media channels. The material conditions of social media interaction mean there can never be a community there - if one temporarily arises, those that control the interactions of that community will sluice millions of eyeballs and words onto it until the community is destroyed. Usually it takes less than a few months. At times you can see it happen in days. Soon technology will advance far enough to make it possible to destroy a burgeoning online community in hours! ("The best of all possible worlds!" says a computer programmer in a gated development with an AR-15 next to his desk.)
As bad as this sounds, the reality is even worse. Aren't you glad you're still reading? The financial pressures of the tech sector are going to make these conditions worse, not better, as those same technological pressures will make delivering the RPG products to the racists easier, cheaper, and faster, and erode every ounce of structural power in the hands of the users of social media.
And there's still more bad news looming. Let's consider the new broadcast potential of streaming and the desperately aggressive jockeying for each set of eyeballs connected to a Patreon account or unique Youtube hit. You won't change those dynamics because those eyeballs and hits each are a chunk of data and money and there are a limited (though very large) number of them. Commercial motivation becomes the pressure not just for purchasing, but for play itself. Now not only can you not hold back your own commercial opinions, now the money urges you to perform for it, not for yourself, but for the spare change of millions, and to perform louder and louder and louder, forever. Death is the only escape. Hail Satan.
 |
| One of this blog's most stylish readers |
A Case Study In Frustration
Let's hark back to a controversy from a few years ago. Wizards of the Coast announced the release of the 5th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Guide. Two people were listed as consultants, and some believed those two people had harassed and attacked people in "the community" (or intentionally provoked it to happen), so they naturally became upset. Those accused denied the accusations, and - equally naturally - became upset that they had been accused.It mattered a great deal (so it seemed!), and not just to those directly involved - the accusers and the accused. Many involved felt vulnerable to harassment or attack as a "community leader" (WOTC) had seemed to bestow their blessing on dangerous people. Lots of people even formed and expressed a quite strong opinion about it. It absolutely consumed tabletop online discussions in every channel that it was permitted to spread to - Twitter, Facebook, G+, even those creaky old blogs and web forums!
But what actually changed?
 |
| "The Community" Responds To A Major Happening |
If there were a tabletop online RPG community, controversies like this would be considered, empirically, its most significant conflicts. They frantically consume all avenues of conversation for days, months or even years. You'll note that even I, a hermit who lives in a cave in the desert, a foolish recluse who doesn't even think there is a RPG community, knows about the "D&D consultants controversy" that shook that phantom community to its core. Yet despite the supposed importance of these controversies, "the community" has no means of resolving them, or enforcing their resolution, or using that resolution to advance their goals or spread their values.
If I accuse my neighbor (even the racist one!) of stealing my barbecue grill, and they deny it, there are many mechanisms by which this controversy can be resolved. The police can investigate; if they can't puzzle it out, I can sue my neighbor myself. If all that fails, perhaps my insurance company will reimburse me; not full justice, but certainly more than nothing.
If I volunteer at an organization and have a conflict with another volunteer, we have a supervisor to resolve it, or (ultimately) the organization has a board of directors and they will resolve it, whether to my benefit or not, and the organization will have policies and procedures both formal and informal to be sure that the organizations' goals are served by both the method of resolving the conflict and the resolution itself. We spend our days in communities of all kinds, surrounded by these sorts of mechanisms, visible and invisible, commonly used and rarely deployed, formal and informal. I'd write more about these types of systems but that's my day job and as lovely as you all are, you're too broke to hire me.
So when this consultants' controversy arose, and people with increasing franticness accused and denied and counter-accused, there was no result - the controversy collapsed from exhaustion, not from resolution. And let's be clear, I don't want to blame the "tabletop online RPG community" for this inaction because what possible thing could "the community" have done? What shared resources does it have, to direct towards which shared need?
No community mechanism existed to resolve the D&D5 consultants controversy. Plenty of individuals announced which side they believed or where they came down, but, bluntly, so fucking what? I am allowed to believe Nicole Simpson was killed by her husband all I want. I can even say so on social media if I wish! But it's a jury that decides if the police have enough credible evidence to convict her husband, or to take away his money.
There is no such mechanism for the supposed "community" of RPG gamers - not even a show trial at GenCon in which we are all invited to denounce the accused as counter-revolutionary. And individuals acting alone, even by the thousands, will never cause a material change in how a community operates so long as their actions take place in an environment where their only meaningful action is the production of consumer data and the only thing that may be meaningfully expressed is a personal consumer preference. Nobody, on any side, in the D&D5 consultants controversy organized to obtain a particular material outcome they felt was just.
And once you really start to think about it, it's impossible to even imagine what a community mechanism to resolve this type of controversy would be if we remember the structure of being an online RPG person. Remember, the pressures of the money will always be towards delivering more new RPG aficionados to RPGs, delivering those people online, and asking them to share their opinions, then to share them faster, more shallowly and with less consideration for others. That's what the pressure will be, that's what the money wants, and the money will want it forever, the pressure constantly mounting and the technology to inflict that pressure becoming more and more inexpensive and effective. Designers, publishers (like WOTC, in our example), big-time streamers, big conventions, social media influencers and others in that monetary ecosystem have no financial incentive to do anything but accelerate it, to jam on the gas as hard as possible. If they have any hesitations that this is what must happen, the next business behind them won't, and will run them right over. To put it in video game terms, if PewDiePie doesn't scream racial slurs enough, another streamer will replace him who will. It's what the money wants.
Nobody responded to the WOTC consultants controversy by saying "Well, of course WOTC can't be trusted, of course they are the enemy of the RPG hobby, even if everyone on the credits page is as pure as the driven snow! They're a publisher! Of course they won't ever do anything good for their customers without a gun to their heads. They're an American business! They were never, ever, ever, ever our friends! They never will be! They want our money!" Well, I mean, I did, but it was not exactly what you'd call a welcome message. People just yelled at me and a sneering kid in a Critical Role hat pushed me down a flight of stairs, where I died instantly.
This disconnect between a perceived community and its illusory nature also suffices to explain why many among those that complained the loudest about Wizards of the Coast's actions were never going to buy a new D&D edition in the first place, or had only passing interest in it. Announcing that they weren't going to buy this particular edition literally had no financial impact (though it was also not a boycott; see part two, coming When It's Ready.) They had no leverage to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish, but they felt they should have that leverage. They felt they should hammer on a button on their phone that would tell everyone that they weren't going to do a thing they had never intended to do in the first place, or that they felt strongly about a thing that they absolutely, positively knew nothing would be done about. This must have been a sickening feeling: to know while shouting that it was into a void. But social media demanded it, and because social media is in control of the "community"'s means of communications, it got what it demanded: weightless opinions, another sliver of a sliver of a percentage point that one day might be sold to an advertiser.
To put it another way, consider those who made the accusation that the consultants were poorly chosen, and the "community" they thought they were defending. What was the goal of this supposed community action? Was it to cause Wizards of the Coast to break their agreement with their consultants and cut them from the credits? No - surely the crime wasn't the credit, but the agreement that produced the credit, which itself was already carried out completely by the time the public found out about it. Did "the community" want an apology from Wizards of the Coast? No; giving and receiving apologies is derided and degraded these days, but more importantly, an apology wouldn't be enough, since Wizards already profited from its association with the consultants. ("I'm so sorry!" says the embezzler, as he lines his pockets with your money. "Well, okay," nobody ever says. "He said he was sorry.")
Even worse, what if Wizards didn't directly profit from that association, but felt the consultants' contributions were helpful to their creation of D&D5? (Isn't this the most likely scenario given how few people actually read the credits page of roleplaying game books or have even the slightest familiarity with the material conditions of their production?) Perhaps the ultimate goal was to compel Wizards of the Coast to announce they would not work with those consultants again - but they only put out a D&D book a couple of times a year these days, and a team of dozens works on each one (according to the credits), so how much of a sacrifice exactly would that be? And how would such a promise be enforced? How would we know if it was broken? What could be done if it was? (The answers are "it couldn't", "we wouldn't" and "nothing", but nobody even bothered to ask!) Was the goal to require Wizards to find the consultants' feedback and go through D&D5 expunging the ideas or changes the consultants suggested?
If so, we should be able to identify an organized group putting forward their idea. But we can't - all we have is social media - all we have is individuals saying "I like this" or "I don't like this" or "I like that you like this" or "I don't like that you like this" or "I don't like that you like this" or "I don't like that you don't like this", forever giving a preference, or a preference about preferences, or a preference about having preferences about preferences, but desperately avoiding an action.
Nobody actually organized "the community" to attempt to press for any particular response from Wizards. Individuals talked about it on social media, sometimes quite influential individuals. People with lots of Twitter followers wrote lots of tweets and people posted about it on rpg forums. There were even some blog posts! (Though not one from me - I already treat everyone I buy things from as if their moral standing was approximately midway between a poisoner and a blackmailer, so there is nothing worse I can do to someone than be their customer, and nothing worse I can do to an audience than tell them honestly how I feel - aren't you glad you read this far? "yeah, time well spent") But nobody organized a community action. Nobody mobilized a community towards a goal. The only actions taken were ultimately directed to Twitter, Google, and Facebook, handing them just another little sliver of opinion that might one day result in an advertiser getting an ad to be just a sliver of a percentage point more effective.
 |
| Exactly the right amount of justice |
With no organization around a goal, the outcome - nothing - was inevitable. "Nothing" is not only what could be expected, but was the only possible outcome, and, crucially, it is the desired outcome of the social media companies who want you to be passionate enough to share your opinions about products in their channels, but not so passionate that you actually organize to improve the material conditions which produce those products.
Assume for a moment there was a group of people concerned by Wizards' selection of consultants and decided they wanted a written apology. Those people could organize to get it. They would have a goal. They could even, if they worked at it, try to form a organization or (perhaps) even a community based around the idea that RPG producers should act a certain way, and if they don't, the organization can work together to get a written apology from them. People that didn't want a written apology wouldn't be a part of that community - people who didn't have any assets by which a written apology could be obtained couldn't. This community could decide to do many perfectly legitimate things: not just "raise awareness", but organize a boycott, obtain support from others at Wizards, or others in the industry with contacts there, work with secondary markets (retail, etc.) to put pressure on Wizards, hell, they could picket GenCon if they wanted, or ask a convention to ban the product from sale there, all to the goal of getting that written apology. When they got it, they could high five each other; if they didn't, they could keep working, and if Wizards' stubbornness outlasted their determination or if not enough people supported them, they could fail.
Importantly, if you didn't think a written apology was valid, desirable, justified or useful, you could ignore what they were doing, or organize against it. The community would have its entry controlled by whether or not potential entrants shared their goals.
And it is the same for all the kerfluffles that sweep through our communications channels. An accusation of harassment, a piece of racially stereotyped art, a white supremacist nominated for an award - no matter what the controversy is, nobody is able to do anything in this supposed community. That's because there is no community. There is no repository of shared values. There are no shared needs that aren't held by financially-hostile third parties who benefit from the way things are now (publishers, designers, social media companies, etc.) And there are no shared material goals. Some of us might like each other, but a community is not a group of friends.
That's not to say all hope is lost. If a group determined that they wanted a particular outcome, they could organize, and work for that outcome. By selecting a goal, and subordinating their own preferences to a common goal they stop being just a bunch of customers, stop being just a bunch of online friends, and take the first step towards being a community. But social media and public-facing Internet communication channels consist entirely and only of the performance of individual preferences, and as a result, no organization and no community can survive there. You would have to write someone an e-mail, call them on the phone, talk to them in person - go into some form of communication where you have the control over what can meaningfully be said and not the platform. It's scary to do so, because you don't have control over what the other person might say to you, and you can't be guaranteed that it will be an anodyne, performative "opinion". When you talk privately to someone, what comes from it might be real. When you try to organize, what comes from that might be painful and your attempt might fail. (Not like social media, where you say the thing and you did it!)
And if you begin to think about communities in terms of needs, goals and resources, you can identify places where a tabletop RPG community might exist - the group that organizes a long-running convention, for example. A club whose goal is public outreach, or whose goal is improving GM-ing, or practicing and improving their streaming skills, or whose goal is introducing indie games to established roleplayers. I'll go into that more next time. You're probably not in a tabletop RPG community, but you might be.
Well, that's my post about why our situation is bad, it's worse than you thought, and even worse than that - but guess what? The future will be even worse than the present. Aren't you glad you read this far?
Continued in Part Two: Self-Deportation, The Social Media Non-Boycott And What Can Be Done (Nothing). To be posted probably in like 2020 or something.
Appendix to Part One: Today, Google announced that Google Plus would be shut down for consumers over the next 10 months. As the kids say, "Welp"
