The Culture: The Past Is The Future (What Hobby Games Will Be After Wizards Leaves)

Wizards of the Coast is abandoning the tabletop medium, taking its properties with it- including Current Edition.

This is the existential threat to Conventional Play from above, from the macro-level of considerations, as Wizards abandoning tabletop also rips out everything that everyone else relies upon to make their own publishing viable (or give the illusion thereof) and--as I said previously--there was not then and is not now any attempt by anyone else to take up that slack.

The #BROSR has recovered from the Memory Hole what the Cargo Cult buried: the truth about what RPGs are and how they work.

This is the existential threat to Coventional Play from below, from the micro-level of considerations, as it upends all of the Just So mythology about the hobby promulgated by the Cargo Cult to justify Conventional Play. Everyone that engages with the Bros in good faith ends up converted to its position because it approaches the game as a game to be won (something Normies think is normal because it is) and not some form of Art Therapy for failures and fuckups.

What, therefore, is the result of these two trends as they reach their culmination in the form of converging upon Conventional Play and the Cargo Cult within it?

Put simply, it is the return of the past as the future.

The reason is not hard to comprehend. The conditions that allowed the Cargo Cult to usurp the hobby have dissipated over the last 25 years from above and below, accelerating over time. Environmental conditions are as real in economic, social, and political contexts as they are in environmental ones. The historical moment that let the Boomer's character flaw (the inability to see the value in passing on the patrimony that they inherited, so they don't) become the opportunity to install themselves as gatekeepers is over, and now the foundation of that position shifts away from them as if they built their castle on sand.

The result is as predictable as the tides.

As this is now an inevitable event, it is no longer worthwhile to argue about if it will or won't happen.

It is now time to discuss what will fill the gap, and how it will replace what Wizards' actions will wreak upon the hobby and its associated cottage industry.

For the rest of this week I will talk about Life After The Wizards Go Away.