The Culture: The Costs Of Chasing Commercial Incentives

This past week, Friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison made the implicit explicit.

Designing games to include the bottom quintile was a mistake.

Gamers shouldn't have to live like this. https://t.co/RoSB4yfWul

— Mr. Wargaming (@NotJonMollison) May 20, 2025

He'd go on to explain this in a follow up thread, which I will blockquote here, edited for clarity.

This is not an aspersion on the bottom quintile. God loves them, and so do I, but the time and place for them is not everywhen and everywhere. There are plenty of suitable hobbies for them: window licking, Marvel movies, rap music, climate science.

People who don't care about the hobby (corporate vultures) have dumbed down the wares for $$$, and ok good for them. But it comes at the cost of dumbing them down for the people they were explicitly designed for, which is REALLY annoying.

This is how we got the Theater Kids and other retards that don't belong here and never did. Even the Conventional Play slop channels, in their own way, acknowledge this is so.

Commercial operators can use pricing in various ways to sift out unwanted demographics- just look at CostCo for the most basic bitch barrier that keeps out so many of those wastes of skin. Non-commercial games have another, that's just as effective, and you see its value demonstrated every time some retard whines about AD&D1e: language sophistication.

The hobby must not only cease to be ashamed of being by and for men of better-than-average intellect, it should glory in it and celebrate it with every word on the page. That will filter out a lot of dullards who never should have been here. The next one, playing the game exactly as written, sifts out most of the rest. Braunstein finishes the job.

You can't expect a hobby focused on the Fantasy of Agency to appeal to those that have none, and it should never have been changed to do so. Leave them beyond the gates.