The Culture: The Boomer Problem

Joshua Hiles lays out the Boomer Problem in the hobby:

Every interaction I have with “original D&D guy” is just an unappealing sludge compounded of boomerism, greed, and lack of self-awareness.

It started with; “you’re not even allowed to talk about this or we’ll sue you” and has moved on to complaining about young’uns being rude because they won’t obey some decrepit dude who refuses to directly address them.

DO NOT go to the old heads if you want to run and play games. Read widely. Experiment boldly. See what works.

I thing has to be worthy of respect to be respected. A thing has to be despicable to be despised. I’ve seen plenty of the latter since entering this space and none of the former.

My elders should be respectable.

This is what the Bros have run into when recovering what the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play threw into the Memory Hole.

I cannot explain to you why Boomers are like this. I don't know. All I can say is that it is fortunate that we don't need to pick the brains of these people because they hold on to that knowledge--if they actually have it--with white-knuckle intensity and vice-like grips. I'd like to say that this is some aberration, but as others who've tried to get Boomers to pass on anything--tangible or not--they've received from their predecessors, it is not.

We have had to reconstruct everything the hard way, walking the same paths that those same predecessors did generations before, to reconstitute a deliberately broken medium back into a functional state.

No thanks to the Boomers, who refused to teach or hand down a damned thing as they had taught or passed to them, and then wondered why their little social clubs dwindled over the years and "those damned kids" kept pestering them.

Yes, I am again pointing out that Boomers and Boomerism are the cause for the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

Fortunately such an obstinate cohort is already on the way out and will soon be gone. I would like to say that they would be missed, but that would be lying. Instead, it now the Bros that are the cornerstone of the hobby and the medium. As the publication of BROZER shows, they are not going to be so miserly because they understand how culture works.

The Boomer Problem is now solved.