The Business: Turns Out That Abandoning The Clubhouse Was A Delusional Play

Jeffro's been revisiting GURPS Second Edition recently. He has two great posts on his findings and observations on his blog. Go read https://jeffro.wordpress.com/2024/05/19/falling-short-of-11-time-and-braunstein-play-in-1986/.

There are several interesting elements that Jeffro put down in those posts, but what I want you to notice is how fast Conventional Play spread its Cargo Cult. 1986 is about the point where the Cargo Cult threw proper play down the Memory Hole and replaced it with this Narrative faggotry, a process that began by 1980 (there's that year again) when dreams of commercial lucre possessed everyone that matters and many more that don't because they thought that this would be bigger than it actually was.

In short, Conventional Play is borne of a delusion. Go figure that it would also become a Cargo Cult and a Pop Cult front; if you're already breaking from reality, what's another step away from sanity?

Yet, despite all attempts to kill and unthink it, the real game--and thus the real hobby--kept poking through. You can see it in the quotes by Steve Jackson that Jeffro posted, and that confused influence remained evident in GURPS through to the present.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

This is why more and more post-1980 products turn out to not be real games, but instead non-games by and for spiteful mutants, anti-social losers, frustrated novelists, and Theater Kids instead of actual gamers.

GURPS could be unfucked without much issue if it just had that Narrative framework ripped out like you carve off a gangrenous limb. Take it from someone who's had to do that in a literal fashion; it's worth the hassle to chop it off and relearn how to do things.

The same goes for a lot of afflicted products out there suffering from that cancer.

The rest? That's a matter borne of Mammon instead of Molech, and as such there needs to be a disavowal of treating this as a commercial pursuit. It has to be a hobby pursuit, as it once was, because that's where the real games all come from.

The only way forward for Tabletop is back to the past, back to the Clubhouse, back to being a hobby- and abandoning all pretense of maintream visibility, acceptance, approval, and status.