This gal came across my feed a week or so ago. She's a professional freelancer in the fiction world. She upset the OldPub hive.
While she's worth your time if you care at all about Men's fiction and men writing fiction that gets and keeps an audience, that's not why I'm pointing this video out.
No, it's this Comment:
@Stinky-Pete 2 hours ago
This problem is going on in almost every form of male escapism for the past 15 years. The only male dominated entertainment/hobbies left untouched from colonizers are ones that take mechanical or technical skills (cars/wood working/model making/etc.).
I've bolded the important part.
Consider the changes in The Only Game That Matters over time. What has been done with every edition? A slow degradation in the necessary technical skill and literary acumen needed to play the game properly. The latter was the first to go, and with the last two editions the former fell away too.
It is no surprise that the things that took away the need to be technically proficient--Virtual Tabletops on the tool end, disdain for procedure on the cultural end--coincided with the feminization and infestation of the hobby by the Death Cult due to Mammon Mobsters doing things to make Line Go Up.
This squares with my position that the Real Hobby is an inherently occult practice best suited for the Clubhouse and its fraternal environment, and it explains the hostility for the positions that the #BROSR advocates- especially Rules As Written. It's a revulsion at the idea that there is a technical skill requirement to use the machine properly. It betrays a failure of the objector to conceive of something entirely in the unseen realm as being real- it is the rejection that Ideas Are nouns, ARE THINGS!
The machine that exists in the manual is still a machine even if no one builds it. That is what a Tabletop Adventure Game is. The fact that several of them have been turned into literal machines--videogames--proves this.
The way out is to RETURN HARDER to games and game design that demand the cultivation of technical skill and acumen to successfully participate. Returning to the wargame roots is a necesary element to achieving that end, and in so doing the cultivation of fraternal bonds is going to happen because without that you don't have a viable Clubhouse for long.
The Clubhouse is the Dojo.
Start demanding technical competence!
Hobbyists also need to demand better game design, and be willing to hold the designers to account. Pundit recently did a video where he said 'game balance' was a dirty word, I disagreed.
ReplyDeleteWhat is really wrong in the hobby is the unreal tolerance for bad game design. And there is a lot of it!
To the point that even newer games like WHFRP 4e ship with known mechanical issues on release. Same with CPRed.
But like you have pointed out: in RPG land, RPG's can exists on a lot of sizzle, relying on the GM to smooth over the mechanical rough patches on the system steak.
Game balance, is Good.
If an essentially one man shop like Alexander Macris can make a balanced game like ACKSII; there is simply no excuse for anyone else.
Game balance is demonstrably achievable.
Game designers that are not up to the task are the ones that need to be held at fault.