Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step One: Show How It's Been Done)

The Point of Contention

As noted yesterday, the objective is to unshackle the Brand from the Publisher. It is to take a specific term and to genericize it, like what happened to "Xerox" and "Kleenex"; these are now (try as the corporations concerned might, and do) generic terms taken popularly to mean "photocopy" and "tissue paper"- a thing nearly accomplished with "Dungeons & Dragons" as it is to mean "Tabletop RPG".

We are going to genericize "Warhammer" to mean "Fantasy/SF Wargaming" in the minds of the general public, as "BattleTech" is already on the way to mean "Mecha Wargaming".

To that end, the plan is to dilute all association between the Publisher and the Brand to the point of irrelevance.

The Method of Contention

First, a recap of the usual responses to such matters.

• Buy Used: Proven effective for BattleTech. For Warhammer, and some other Brands, less so due to the nature of the business model.
• Clone: Proven effective, but for a limited purpose, for D&D and other tabletop adventure games; the clones lost their utility once what they cloned became readily available again and only those that took the extra step of becoming full and complete products on their own remained relevant. We'll come back to this later.
• Pirate: Very effective, regardless of the couch-fainting going on from time to time, and impossible to stop.

That works well enough for the games themselves, even some of the tie-in media, but what about Muh Lore?

Gamer, please! That's ripe and fertile ground for memetic conquest- conquest that has already proven itself viable and effective WITHOUT INTENDING TO DO SO.

All of this, to date, has had some retarding effect on the Convergence process. Some. Not much, but enough to be noticable.

Recall that I said on Twitter and elsewhere that IPs are not cars, but instead are Open Source software, open to forking at any time.

Recall that I said that we are going with the Informal Fork route where we conduct an insurgency against the party that did the dumb.

What do you think a forking process is going to look like?

We are, quite literally, going to do the meme.

"But that can't be done!"

I have cited several examples of Prior Art to date. Did you think I wouldn't have one for this? Not only do I have one, I have previously posted it MULTIPLE TIMES!

There it is, gamer. That, right there, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.

Now expand on that. Make Star Wars videos, comics, audiobooks, videogames, novels complete with all of the trade dress, trademarks, etc. but carefully selected to show that you do not adhere to the Pozzed Fork.

This means selecting carefullly what specific iteration of the trade dress you use, curating your presentation to match, and--and this is the critical part--doing a better job than the Publisher. Don't think so? Go ahead, take your time reading REUP; it exactly mimics the West End version of the game, trade dress and all.

This is better than a retroclone. This is better than buying used. This seizes the Brand in a vice grip, yanks it out of the Publisher's hands, and puts it back into the hands of the Hobbyists.

And you not only don't give money to people who hate you, you also deny them your time and attention- and that's where the Fabian Strategy element comes into it.

With every single creation, you take that energy--that time, that attention, that money--away from the Publisher and undermine its claims of legitimacy over the Brand. You put that energy back directly into the hobby itself, and you call what you do and enjoy by that Brand so that they associate your good works and the good times you had (and create) with that instead of the Publisher. The legitimacy goes to the Hobby scene, and not to the Publisher.

Done correctly, this creates a virtuous positive feedback loop where hobbyists enjoy the hobby for what it is and thus create more stuff to have fun with it over time.

Now that you have the idea that it has been done, and therefore it can be done, we'll spend the rest of the week on more specific details.