The Culture: Towards A Hobby Without Commercialized Predation (Part One)

A non-commercial hobby scene will not, and cannot, be the same as the commercially-driven "community" we have now.

What the commercial side has going for it is not legitimacy. It's convenience. You want a thing? You can swipe your card and buy it now. If it's a digital thing, a legal copy is in your inbox right away. If it's physical, you either take it out of the store or you wait for the package to arrive at your mailing address.

Convenience is a powerful asset because it's an enabling force, but convenience is not an unalloyed good to a hobby scene. Commercial pursuits play off conveience to make it easier for predatory actions to be done upon the customers, either by the business or by other parties exploiting for their own end.

Most people follow what is most convenient. Commercial pursuits do the same, after a fashion, deciding what wins and what loses by enabling the convenient pursuit of this and not that. Network Effects, Mastercard forcing processors to (not) allow things, creating Brand Cults, using your card for everything- all of this works off enabling convenience in some fashion to push people towards or away from things.

What you need to recognize is that you can do this too.

Convenience is a useful tool to employ to filter out those that don't want to be here, but instead are in the scene for reasons other than the hobby itself. Specifically, by inhibiting it in various ways. In the business, this is "introducing friction", and the MBAs in the corporate offices have piles of data all about how adding or removing it has big effects upon a business.

Yes, there is evidence that even the smallest amount of friction can get a critical mass of people to bounce right off a game. The proof is in every edition of The Only Game That Matters after AD&D1e, which consistently dumbs things down and reduces the friction in the game to make it easier to sell as a commercial product because the product became convenient to buy and use.

Once something gets that easy, you are just a few steps away from our present madness. You'll notice that you don't see this with Gunpla because you have to not only assemble the parts into the final unit, you have to take the pieces off the sprues and clean them up before assembling them into the subcomponents that assemble into the final unit- and Gunpla is a massive commercial pursuit.

The way forward is obvious: introduce friction.

A healthy hobby has a certain inherent filtering process to it. Friction--deliberate inconvenience--is part of that process, but not the whole of it.

The way you use friction to filter out those who should not be there is by imposing inconveiences upon people seeking admittance, inconveniencs that can't be swiped away with a card or discharged with cash. In short, you need to introduce friction only solvable by demonstration of skill, character, or both.

In the context of tabletop adventure games, that friction comes from undoing all of the changes that come from accepting the lie that this is a Narrative medium and thus needs to conform to Narrative norms. Tourists, colonists, Death Cultists- they all accept the Narrative framework, so they have expectations set accordingly, expectations that are false.

This is part of why AD&D1e is a good game to use for a hobby Clubhouse. It has a lot of friction in its rules and procedures, in different ways, all of which are proven to filter out those unwilling to put in the effort to learn and master them in order to become a winning player.

Other games with this quality, such as Classic Traveller, have similar levels of friction to them.

But there is one more thing that should be noted: a prospective hobbyist should be compelled to confront the friction, but also be permitted the means to develop the habits and acumen that overcomes it. That's where we today are much better off than in yesteryear; it is far easier to find hobbyists teaching hobbyists how to do hobby things.

You'd think this wouldn't work. Oh no, it's very effective. So many people will flat out throw tantrums and refuse to Git Gud if told to do so that they will run right out of the scene if they can't skip it or make someone change it to accomodate them. Notice all the complaints over the decades to the commercial pursuits about their products, especially TSR and Sorcerors By The Sea; this is more obvious in videogames, but just as bad there.

Friction works for gatekeeping purposes, and those filtered out by friction have a very predictable freakout reaction which we can also use to our advantage- which is tomorrow's post.