ShallowGrifting The Hobby

For various reasons, Venger has quit the publishing side of the hobby, one of which he described as “the Shadowdarking of the hobby”. According to Matt, however, Venger's clarification as to what he meant by that—that the OSR and indie scene is changing—isn't entirely accurate, as “the industry”, such as it is, has always largely been an incestuous mire of untalented, insecure narcissists desperate for validation and money.

It’s just that ShadowDark ironically shone more light on what I thought was a pretty obvious reality.

I got into game design professionally over ten years ago—and by professionally I mean I started charging money for my ideas—because I had been engaging in it as a hobby for much longer and enjoyed it. My wife and I started out with Dungeon World classes and magic item compilations because on G+ people liked our ideas and so we decided to package them up and charge a small fee for them.

Where Matt emulated others that he believed were successful by some arbitrary metric, we instead opted to simply make what we wanted to because we thought it was interesting, and only really looked at existing content as a sort of bare minimum example of what could be done, largely in terms of quality. To put it bluntly, it wasn’t difficult to improve on what was done before, because in most cases so little effort had been put into it in the first place.

For example, your typical Dugneon World class was just two pages, intended to be the front and back of a single sheet, because for some weird reason, your typical Dungeon World hobby tourist was autistically adamant that a class be constrained to a single double-sided page, concept be damned.

But often while creating a class, Melissa and I would routinely conceive of far too many abilities to fit on a single page, and we’d often come up with magic items, the Dungeon World equivalent of prestige classes, monsters and more. Plus, there were some abilities that we felt could use an expanded explanation, so we’d make these “director’s cut” booklets to go with them, meaning our classes would weigh in at around 25 pages.

This rubbed a lot of so-called creators the wrong way. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it was a good idea that they for whatever reason hadn't thought of, and this coupled with our iconic Mignola-esque art added a lot of value that they were unable and/or unwilling to replicate.

Or, worse, they had thought of it but, knowing their expected audience just couldn’t be bothered (which seems to be a pattern for lazy indie hacks).

I also think many were envious of our quality, because on many occasions we were directed to tweets and not-so-secret forum posts where people admitted that, while they thought our material was really good, they refused to support us due to politics (sometimes perceived).

Really though it was merely a flimsy excuse to dismiss us.

Where I think the indie scene has changed is in how forums, social media groups, and whatever the fuck you’d call Reddit communities/groups/echo chambers have become even more entrenched. Youtubers, bloggers, and creators have formed… not friendships, because given how frequently bridges are incinerated over frivolous bullshit, rumors and convenience, I don’t think most, if any, are capable of having real friends.

I suppose it would be more accurate to describe these relationships, such as they are, as purely transactional, which sounds…somewhat sociopathic but also explains a lot.

In any case, it has nothing to do with “noise”. See, Matt believes that “any product, no matter good it is, will be drowned out”, and that, “You can’t just throw it out into the void and hope someone picks it up and starts talking about it”.

Sure you can, it just depends entirely on who you are. If you spent the past half-decade or so telling hobby tourists what they want to hear about Popular Game and/or Popular Creator, building up an audience of lonely losers who crave the emotional validation that only a greedy, uncaring, narcissistic internet stranger can provide? Absolutely you can pinch out your own brand of vapidware trash, slap together a video pointing your audience of brainless bootlickers to DriveThru and watch them do the rest.

Even better, get chummy with other YouTube grifters: get them to blindly praise your heap of vapidware trash, promise to blindly praise theirs whenever they manage to muster up the energy between doses of anxiety meds and antidepressants to invest several years in order pinch out something that should have frankly only taken a few weeks at most because they don’t have jobs or responsibilities and really it’s just a lazy hack of an existing game, anyway, and you’ve got an even bigger audience of stupid spergs to milk.

And it pleases me to see that I’m not the only one with pattern recognition skills:

This guy mostly gets it, though I think he still gives Kelsey far more credit than she deserves (which is, well, none):

I think he’s spot on here, though:

“It's always easier to sell people what they already like, just in new packaging.”

This explains why people like Matt are more than happy to keep buying barely tweaked versions of games they both already own and I would have imagined could have been done himself. I…guess not, though I’m still curious why he doesn’t want some people doing just that.

Personally I’m fine doing what I’m doing. I can make what I want instead of chasing whatever is “popular” at the time. I don’t need to worry about publishing anything on a schedule. I don’t need to pretend to be anyone’s friend, lie about the quality of their games, and wonder when I’ll get thrown under a bus so they can further what they consider to be a career. I don’t need to exchange my integrity for favors that I might not even be able to cash in later.

“Shadowdarking the hobby” is reinforcing cronyism and mediocrity, and stifling creativity. It’s people like Matt telling you to stop innovating because he can’t, the people he supports obviously can’t and the only thing you should care about is attention and money. Just pick what’s popular at the time and churn out third-party and third-rate material for it, network blindly praise the non-efforts of everyone else doing the same, and move on when no one gives a fuck and someone else has pinched out the next arbitrarily accepted, half-assed iteration.

I say play the game that does what you want, or comes close enough that it doesn’t really bother you, and support that one. If that game doesn’t exist, pick the closest one and modify it until it does, then also support it. In either case, make the products that you want to see. If it already exists and is subpar, improve upon it. Unless you’re a lazy, untalented, greedy narcissist in which case you should just do what Matt says.

But if you can set your sights even somewhat higher than less than the bare minimum, create what you want. It’ll take more time and effort, but it’ll also be far more rewarding than merely shuffling from one vapidware trash heap to the next in an unfulfilling, neverending search for insincere praise and “relevance” from people that don’t actually give a fuck about you.