The Culture: Panning For Gold

(Following from yesterday's post.)

What can be done to salvage what value there is from the trashfire of product in the hobby?

Most of what is on the shelf is unfit for purpose and should be trashed. These are ill-fitting matings of Brand and Game, and most of them should be split back into their components.

Games

You can count these on one hand. Dungeons & Dragons, Runequest, Traveller, Amber- these are your Games as they encompass the four viable paradigms of play.

Most publishers should abandon all pretense of publishing games. Skip the rules entire, focus on the Brand, and redefine the Brand's Setting Bible. Sell that, and go hard and deep into what the Brand is about. Do not talk about tabletop games, videogames, comics, movies, TV series, or any other media.

This means culling the Brand product from the shelves because "(Game) but (Brand)" is all you have going for you. That is why so much out there is unfit for purpose, and in this hobby what is unfit for purpose is also surplus to requirements and thus cannot justify its existence. You suck at Games. Stop doing them.

Brands

This is what the majority of product ought to be condensed into.

Your business is already, as shown by your actions, about the Brand. I'm just demanding that you commit to it like Sanryo does with Hello Kitty. Let the competent game designers design and publish Games. You focus on defining your Brand, writing that down as a Bible, and cultivating Brand interest via what fan creations your audience makes. For written work, buy it.

But this is a hobby game post, so that merits more effort. When someone's got a popular Game adaptation, analyze it; if it actually conforms to the Brand, take some space on the official site--and you will have one--to post a (cleaned up, professionally-presented) mirror of that adaptation. If it damages the Brand, shut it down.

Now keep an eye on the carefully curation efforts. If those adaptations that your Brand Management Team highlighted increase in popularity past the critical threshold to make it commercially viable that is when you cut a license deal with a Game publisher to put out one with the Stamp of Brand Approval on it- and no sooner.

You're in the Brand Management business. That threshold is going to be far, far higher than any hobby game scene will allow; I mention it only because Black Swans happen. In practice you'll license out far more films, TV series, comics, merchandise, and videogames well before anything like "Brand Adventure Game!" will ever be uttered in your offices. Why? Because you're a business, not a charity, and there's sweet fuck-all money to be had here. (Yes, when you have to rely on neo-patronage, which is what crowdfunding is, to get things out the door there isn't enough money.)

Gold & Pyrite

A short list of Brands to keep around in some capacity:

• Heavy Gear (until VOTOMS has a Bible in English)
• Jovian Chronicles (until UC Gundam and a few of its ACs get their Bibles in English)
• Legend of the Five Rings
• TORG
• BattleTech
• Gamma World
• Call of Cthulhu
• Pendragon (and with it Paladin and Prince Valiant)
• Exalted (and use a better Game this time)
• Car Wars (because that's a future worth believing it)

Yes, you can argue for some additions to that list, but most of them can be safely excised from the shelves entirely and nothing would be lost. As with actual gold-panning, very few get rich and most would be better off selling pans than using them.

That's what happens when a critical mass of acceptance of just how anti-consumerist this hobby scene really is and has always been hits. Strip away the trappings from so many products and it does come down to "(Game) but (Brand), but its done by people who try to fit square pegs into round holes."

Which leads to the question of "What sort of Brand fits best in this hobby?" We'll hit that tomorrow.

Yes, this means entire companies should just shut down or scale back to Gonnerman-style self-funding hobbies in their own right.