The Business: The Problems Beyond Conventional Play Are Now In Conventional Play

Louis talks about technology and legality issues. As Conventional Play is increasingly digital, those issues are Tabletop issues.

That video does get into having access revoked due to either human or machine error, but we all know that there is also deliberate malice.

Always-On Connection requires means that things you paid for (a) are actually glorified software licenses that can be revoked or altered at any time unilaterally and (b) because of that what you bought can be bait-and-switched out from under you without you knowing until it's too late. (The Stellar Blade incident is just a blatant example.)

Some publisher gets pozzed? Now your all-digital library gets "updated" to whatever stupid shit they decide to push out there.

Get some Death Cultist functionary mad at you? Your library access gets yanked, or your account yeeted; even if you reverse that, it's still time and money wasted so the process becomes the punishment.

Now consider that as many publishers as possible want to do like Sorcerors By The Sea and shove their users into an all-digital walled garden where you have no local files, nevermind physical products, so what you're paying for is a subscription to a service that has all the stuff needed to play and matchmatching capability to boot: no access, no game for you, no refunds fucko.

I'd been saying that this is the play for a while. So far only SOBS has the means, but others want the same power and for reasons I'd mentioned previously: to finish creating a cult compound, albeit a virtual one in two respects, and then once cult psychology has become wholly normalized wield the fear of explusion to compel compliance to Death Cult dogma. Like Scientology, but lamer.

You laugh. There are sites devoted to making that happen.

SOBS wants that for itself. So does Stupid British Toy Company and the other bad actors running publishers in the Tabletop medium. This is serious business, with millions to be earned training others to do this, and I remind you that SOBS (and Hasborg) has former MS and Zynga executives in C-Suite (i.e. other successful business cults).

There is, ironically, a way out of this: The Clubhouse.

The irony is that the image of the Cult Headquarters (in the form of a Lodge House) is now the image for freedom from that very cult madness.

None of the Bros intended it, but by eschewing Consumerism and CONSUME Product and the pursuit of commercial gain in Tabletop in favor of mastering the (very few) games that are already out there- and culling the vast majority of product out of consideration due to be excuses to extract money from suckers long accustomed to solving problems with products by buying more products to fix the bad products.

Insisting upon physical products, using free resources, playing the actual game and not some Just So Mother May I theater kid bullshit, and enforcing those norms. Will this result in a lot of people getting filtered out? Yep. There's similar things brewing in videogames, and my reaction to that is the same as it is here: GET FILTERED, POSEUR!

We survived just fine that way before. https://t.co/Q7KmCRfsR5 pic.twitter.com/VhHRdDsBC7

— Mr. Wargaming (@NotJonMollison) May 15, 2024

The Clubhouse can accept anyone. The Clubhouse does not accept everyone.