The Culture: It's Coming Together Into A Breakthrough Moment

When I said yesterday that a lot of Big Picture diffusions are now converging together on the Collapse of Conventional Play in Tabletop, I had something in mind.

First, the SOBS end of things. This video covers how Blizzard Entertainment went into the shitter and wrecked not only its games but entire categories by doing over 15 years ago what SOBS is aiming to do now.

Summarizing SOBS' Aims:

• Throw the legacy business and audience under the bus.
• Move the game online to a Walled Garden.
• Fill the game with Fear Of Missing Out-driven microtransactions by deliberately making things overpowered or nerfing what gets depreciated.
• Use bots to enable players to play on their own (instant gratification).
• Redefine "RPG" as a Gatcha-style business model you can do on your phone, using Revealed Preferences in Current Edition to justify all the changes (which is the insidious part; this is catering to the Tourists and Casuals), and rake in Gatcha-style money.

If you want to know why SOBS' is on this, watch the video: the release of the Sparlke Pony produced more profit in less than a week than Starcraft 2 did. If your C-Suite is dominated by MBAs (afflicted, as usual, with Terminal MBA Brain) slaved to LINE MUST GO UP! then it's a no-brainer to get some videogame/mobile/tech execs into C-Suite to make that shift.

Conventional Play can't avoid getting severely damaged by this.

But there is another angle, and that's where the Bros come in and finish the job.

Conventional Play arose due to Commercialization by people that did not grok the medium and thus did not comprehend how things worked. They took what they could comprehend, aped the rest as a Cargo Cult, and turned that into a business sector. Jeffro Johnson identifies Tunnels & Trolls by Ken St. Andre as the first Conventional Play product, where the break from the real hobby happened.

This new type of game tended to eject the 1:1 time rule of OD&D. It shifted from being a sprawling wargame campaign to focusing almost entirely on the exploits of a single party. Dungeon exploration became the primary focus in this initial phase of rpgs with nearly every other gameplay mode being relegated to handwaving and ad hoc rulings. So many needful rules got thrown out that a very early paraphrase of the idea of “rulings not rules” quickly emerged as a means of holding this new amateurish type of non-game together– typified by the phrase be reasonable. All of the premises and assumptions games like Rifts and GURPS and the B/X branch of D&D can be traced back to this point.

As I have said repeatedly, videogames do Conventional Play better than Tabletop across the board.

The Bros' inquiries, investigations, experiments, and findings thereof have shown that the real hobby--the one Conventional Play forked from--is the very thing Tabletop Conventional Play claims to be but is not and never was.

The rediscovery of the real hobby, memory holed by the Boomers who refused to pass it on (and everything else in the "Muh 40 Years" camp), and then to go on from there to find out how the process of play for the real hobby works until we can find the language needed to explain it conclusively to others means that the real hobby is not in any danger of going extinct.

The real hobby, and the real games that serve it, are anti-commercial in their design by necessity and thus cannot be commercialized without crippling and gutting them--without lobotomizing and breaking them--and thus destroy the culture of the hobby. All this so that they can turn a self-sufficient hobby game into a Consumerist Product Brand and thus turn functional people into mind-broken Consumers (as Pop Cultists are so easy to turn into Dangerhaired Woke Death Cultists), all so that LINE MUST GO UP!

The Collapse of Conventional Play is the point of convergence because the forces from above are making the error of Tabletop Conventional Play a soon-to-be-extinct scene because there will be no commercial viability left. The commericalism will be in videogames, and Tabletop will return to be a self-funding hobby and nothing more. GOOD!

Conventional Play can't cope with this one-two punch. It will stagger, punch-drunk, for a while before tumbling to the mat and getting counted out.

And after that's done, both parties will diffuse again in pursuit of their own agendas.

The Clubhouse awaits for the hobbyists. For the rest, good luck with paying for the chance to pay to win the game.