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

So where do we want this hobby to end up?

Next door to these hobby-enjoying Chads.

Why?

No one cares, one way or the other, about model trains and railroads. Every once in a while you get someone who made a great train diorama get a Local News segment, but otherwise no one cares.

That, folks, is the mark of a low-status hobby pursuit. No one cares; Normies avoid it. This is where wargaming was before Gary and Dave came along, and if not for that lightning in a bottle it would have remained there. That's where the hobby came from, and that is where it must return.

Going hard on being non-commercial guarantees that we get there as soon as possible. Reintroducing friction also guarantees that we get there as soon as possible. Combining the two means we can achieve this return to the hobby's original status in months, not years, and make it stick.

Remember that killing the ability to farm clout gets rid of the dangerhairs and the gross nerds alike, as both of them are doing the same thing from different angles. The former are using the clout to push Death Cult dogma; the latter are doing it to satisfy their Narcissisism because they're Gammas and Gamma Gotta Gamma.

A low-status hobby pursuit that no one cares about is one that is aimed at Delta Males. It is there for men to cultivate, refine, and demonstrate their skills and acumen in something other than what they do to pay the bills and provide for the household.

A high-status hobby exists for the purpose of social signalling and status affirmation- a demonstration of surplus wealth by definition. What skill or acumen are required are secondary to the use-case of displaying one's status and signalling social cues. This is why, traditionally, they are expensive to pursue and can be deleterious due to risks to life, limb, or liberty (legal, financial, or social).

Fishing is low-status. Dressage is high-status.

Hunting deer in the Autumn is low-status. Hunting lions in Africa on safari is high-status.

Look at how the commercialization of the hobby is scrambling to find ways to turn the structure of the hobby into something that signals high status: ever-increasing costs (high barrier to entry), adherance to Luxury Dogmas (that's the Death Cult stuff), shifting to Lifestyle Brand business models as soon as possible (viable or not), shove as many Acceptably Attractive Actors as possible before a camera to shill for it, etc.

Commercialization incentivizes going where the money is, and that always means going high-status as soon as possible to maximize the revenue. This is especially true given that corporations are mandated to maximize shareholder value, taking the baseline incentives of commercialization and throwing it into turbo.

While there is only so far you can go with fishing, hiking, biking, camping, hunting, knitting, etc. the limit is far higher with gaming. What we already know about Sorcerors By The Sea (with Hasbro's approval) transitioning The Only Game That Matters to an all-digital business model will be followed by other heavily-corporatized commercial actors in the hobby.

Those insufficiently competent or capitalized still want to follow the incentives to go high-status, but they run into problems that they need to change their offers to conform to Normie expectations about what entertainment media is and how it works (i.e. to make it (almost entirely) passive entertainment where swiping to win works, like how videogames have Gacha, with Magic: The Gathering leading the way).

"But that's not-"

Silence. Reality already shows that this is how it works; videogame business models took what was already apparent in tabletop and got ahead of the game.

Tabletop has already gone the same route, regarding those slaved to SOBS and tied to its business. High price points for coffee table publications, and that's for the ebooks; the physical products are already into Conspicuous Consumptive Collector Crap pricing.

The way to change this trajectory is to change the incentives. This is no different than changing the environment to be more suitable for your kind and not for another. Going non-commercial, with all that entails, changes one incentive. Reintroducing friction changes another. Combined we'll take this hobby back to the quiet social neighborhood it came from, back to the house next door to the model railroaders, and go back to being ignored because there's nothing for outsiders to gain from low-status hobbies.

Become unenviable.