The Culture: Cargo Cult Cancer Is About A Brand, Not A Game

(Continuing from yesterday's post.)

A Broken Frame Turned Cargo Cult

Most of the games in this hobby exist because a Cargo Cult arose blindly aping what Gygax and Arneson created, misunderstanding what they beheld and tossing out what they did not understand in their failures to comprehend what this hobby is.

What is now, by some, referred to as "conventional play" is a broken frame of reference. This conventional style is under increasing stress from competing media, media that do their style of play better than they do across the board- topping it with superior user convenience. Why bother with terrible rules, scheduling issues, and the occassional social misfunction that makes for hilarious black humor ala Neckberdia videos when you get a cleaner, easier, more convenient and--if bought on sale--cheaper alternative that delivers an equal or (often) superior experience via PC or console?

Why deal with ongoing commitments to such a broken medium when boardgames and cardgames have all the same excuses for socialization in person without the ongoing commitment?

Why put up with this, which all its fake non-agency and Illusion Of Gameplay,--

--when you can actually enjoy it by putting it in the proper medium?

Instead, the game needs to be restored to a frame where it is an actual game. Rival media recognized this decades ago, and began eating the lunch of the broken frame Cargo Cult.

But, because the Cargo Cult normalized their dysfunction over the 1980s and 1990s, they remained blind to reality as 2000 hit and the process of bleeding off hobbyists to rival media that actually promised real games accelerated into a landside- with the rise of the MMORPG delivering a Dolorous Stroke from which the Cult never recovered.

The proof? Magic-Users' pivot over the last decade and change from being about Game and instead being about Brand- about a lifestyle brand, and the competition become more pathetic year on year. With the recent signalling that Magic-Users are going all-digital, and Next Edition being a videogame in all but name, the writing is on the wall.

This broken frame has no future, and all the remaining companies that mean jack shit know it- and prove by their actions, daily.

The Only Future Possible

The answer is obvious: to return the focus to proper gameplay.

This means refusing to deny that this is a hobby about wargaming, which means not only to acknowledge the roots of this hobby, but to cut out the Cargo Cult cancer and restore the hobby to good health by refocusing the social environment of the hobby around the basis for the hobby: The Grand Campaign.

The games published for use in this hobby, therefore, need to be refocused around playing in a proper wargame campaign framework. As each campaign cannot help but to be defined by the players that wage it, the games need to be nothing more than vehicles for delivering gameplay experiences- not venues for the development of Intellectual Property defined by a specific Brand Identity (as we see in Setting Bibles, which is why I say that they are separate businesses).

A restored hobby, refocused on player-driven campaign play with and away from Cargo Cult "conventional play" that is proven to be dysfunctional and a loser against competing media, will find their niche in both business and society waiting for them to come home.

Restoring Patients To Health

The games that survive the transition will be fewer in number, and a lot of surviving designers and publishers will confess that they're really in the Brand business and thus go about making Setting Bibles for adaptation by users into whatever suits them: fanfiction, cosplay, scratch-built modelling, indie videogames, or as fodder for fantastic adventure wargame campaigning.

To that end it is time to sift through the desolation that is this field's collective catalog to find what is Game and what is Brand. As I said yesterday, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition fits as Game and far more products than one may suspect are little more than Brands. Brands should turn into Setting Bibles and be used with Games.

There are very few products to denote as Game versus Brand. This week I will focus upon Game, and after that Brand.

Game And Brand Defined

A Game is a complete structure for a specific form of fantastic adventure wargame campaigning. AD&D1e is the example as it covers the majority of products in the field, including many that are considered "science fiction". In mechanical terms, this is all the substance of a vehicle: the frame, the engine, controls, wheels, etc. Branding does no more than to alter the details to achieve specific results within the range that the Game makes possible.

You can see how well over 90% of the products on the shelf are better catagorized as Brands instead of Games now that you have a proper frame of reference to draw from.

Most of the products on the shelf would better off as Setting Bibles for AD&D1e, including well-known ones like Legend of the Five Rings.

But there are a few that merit distinction as Games due to how different they are, while being complete structures for fantastic adventure wargaming. Traveller is a Game (and its Brands include Twilight 2000, Cyberpunk 2020, and Shadowrun). Amber Diceless is another Game (with its Brands including Lords of Olympus and Lords of Gossamer & Shadow). I'll mention one or two more by this weekend.

Each Game, therefore, is defined by not only a separate and unique style of campaign play but by a separate and unique paradigm of play procedure. This is why there are so few Games and so many Brands; the latter can be, and should be, considered as preset packages of options for a Game.

And that sort of things is best done with online media like Wikis- not paid products sucking up space in a warehouse or on a shelf.