The Culture: The Cargo Cult Slop Merchant Fears The Collapse

Matt Colville put out a long video about the hobby in the 1970s today.

To which I can summarize thusly:

Why this nearly hour-long diatribe on the early days? Why this promugation of shibboleths and Just So stories?

It's Narrative Warfare. Look at the conclusion you're intended to take away: "Gygax BSed, ergo there is no correct way to play so Conventional Play Cargo Cult is justified."

That still sounds really stupid to say, especially in an otherwise inexplicable and unneeded video that does nothing to promote anything he's pushing, so to find the reason you need to get into what is not said- or named.

There is no reason to cut a video like this unless you're feeling a need to defend your position. Colville knows that SOBS' Big Move is coming and he knows that it's an all-digital, always-online Walled Garden business model. That's an assertion that there is only one correct way to play the game (theirs), but that's not Colville's only target. He's not brave enough to name the leviathan looming above (SOBS) or the behemoth rumbling beneath his feet (the Bros), but he is hoping to stop what cannot be stopped all the same.

As Jeffro has said elsewhere, "The Elusive Shift never happened. People just stopped playing the game."

That's what this bullshit is really about: justifying Conventional Play and buoying the Cargo Cult thereof in the face of an oncoming existential one-two knockout.

And if Colville thinks the Bros are hardline about this, he should sit his contacts within SOBS down and get them comfortable enough to confess that the Next Edition business plan is itself a push far more hardcore than anything the Bros have said or done to ensure that everyone plays the same game exactly as SOBS dictates. That's what being always-online and all-digital does, and the purpose of a system is what it does.

No, Matt, your commercial plans are fucked. So are those of your fellow Cargo Cult Slop Merchants. Walled Garden, Clubhouse, or Quit- those are your options, and you don't have what it takes to follow SOBS' lead into the digital domain, so that route is closed. You can survive by doing like Chris Gonnerman and making your living elsewhere, but you won't do that and neither with all but a few of your fellow Slop Merchants. More likely is that you'll quit, but that's akin to saying that you're more likely to be crippled than killed in a car crash. This means that the Clubhouse is also closed to you and your ilk because you have to abandon the Cargo Cult to gain admittance, and you can't do that either.

So here you are, trying so hard to do anything about what you know is coming but what will actually work. I won't miss you.

(This video also paints the Boomers in a bad light by implying they are, as a cohort, too fucking retarded to read or write technical manuals for shit. Jesus wept, we are dominated by a generation of narcisstic retarded illiterates.)