So, it’s Thursday. The latest I’ve gone in a week without writing a post. No Mechanic Monday, no TTRPG Tuesday, no General Checkin Wednesday. I didn’t end up drafting any of my planned ideas for those. At first I thought about not doing a post this week, because I didn’t want to distract from the, you know, crisis of police violence against black people finally culminating in any sort of consequence. But I didn’t do a Black Out Tuesday because I think that’s mostly cheap easy nonsense, and I think I was just looking for an excuse not to write, and that kind of thinking is bullshit. So precedent or no, I’m getting a post out today. And I think I’d like to wax on a little bit about capitalism and the chokehold it’s placed on board games. So you can just stop reading here if that’s not your bag.
A larger piece that I’m still trying to put together in my brain is an examination of what art could be if it were freed from needing to be profitable. The thing that has bounced around my brain the most? What would a Kamen Rider story be like if it didn’t have to sell toys? What aspects of the formula constrain it, and where would it go without those limitations? Continuing along that thread: what other formulae does art follow, that we have held up as good when perhaps we just mean successful? And before these recent thoughts, I’ve long wondered about what the board game industry would look like were it freed from the behemoth market share that is Kickstarters For Cheap Plastic At An Outrageous Markup. I promise this isn’t *just* my crotchety bias against miniatures. It’s easy for the argument to become one about mechanics, gameplay, and individual taste, when my core aversion to that entire side of the hobby (and which I have, obviously, fallen prey to myself at times, as boxes of unopened X-wing will attest) is the global-scale matter of waste, and the intentional cultivation of the mindset that games are made better by being more luxurious.
Luxury. Deluxe. Premium. Words that my cynical Thursday brain sees as doubly insidious, for being markup that adds to the product but not the game, and for lacquering on layer upon layer the belief (in the minds of consumers, studio heads, media, and distributors alike) that board games are for the rich, a class of people that self-regulates to fall along certain timeless demographic lines. And here’s another edge to this already unwieldy sword: The more expensive (and therefore inaccessible) a product is, the riskier it is, and the greater the chance that the experience in question must be watered down to the least common denominator for the sake of its investors. And alongside the clamp that places on innovation, there’s the bottleneck of who gets to take that risk. Established publishers and trusted designers, or the amateurs for whom failure has no financial consequence.
What conclusion do I draw from this? That the more expensive the production of a game gets, the less accessible it is to consume or to create, and the more unlikely it is to be by, about, or for anyone who’s not rich.
I’m going to continue to draw a distinction between the game and the product because I think it’s a particularly important one to highlight for the purposes of this accessibility argument. Game design, speaking of the craft or art aspect of creation, can be more or less difficult depending on the designer’s resources. Mentorship, playtesters, and peer review are not accessible to all designers, and just the time to participate in the hobby, to consume existing games (which you do need to at least a little to avoid reinventing the wheel and to expand your repertoire of what’s possible), Hell, having any free time at all, are additional barriers to entry. But all of these factors are exponentially greater when the discussion (and attendant budget) moves from design to production. That bottleneck just squeezes almost entirely shut. And any student of evolutionary biology (okay, I’m cribbing from high school freshman Bio here) will tell you that this will ultimately hurt the gene pool as the lack of diversity leads to terminal inbreeding. I know it’s dicey to apply super-simplified evolutionary concepts to social discourse, but I think it appropriate here for the discussion of the designs themselves; when the “free market” is only free to a subset of the population, it’s not really free, is it?
I feel like I got a little muddled toward the end of that previous paragraph, but whatever, this is my first pass at a bigger concept I hope to devote more time, care, and research to as time goes on. Let’s place what I’m talking about in some context by looking at some adjacent industries to boardgames: RPGs and Digital Games. Now, while adjacent, those industries are apples-to-oranges to boardgaming in terms of scope, marketshare, creatorbase, audiencebase, media coverage, etc. But there is still overlap, and both the creation of the game and the publication of the product have things in common with the process for boardgames. Also, obviously, they’re all games. But I’d argue that RPGs, in a time where the hobby is flourishing but the monopolies are smaller and more consolidated, have seen an explosion in independent publications because the largely profit-driven barriers to entry are lower than they are for boardgames. The fact that so many RPGs are free of physical components, and therefore the exchange of goods for money is more nebulous, has allowed a much wider and deeper diversity of creators and offerings. Print and Play aside, there’s relatively few pay-what-you-can boardgames, whereas RPGs have actually succeeded (at least partially) at creating an unregulated competitive marketplace for their non-physical products. Now, as with boardgames, the option of devoting your time to creating a product where profits are at the discretion of your consumers’ generosity is limited to a privileged few. So there are still creators and creations locked out by that barrier to access. And now we also see the other end of the luxury-deluxe-premium argument earlier; the less risky it is to create the product, the more people are allowed to partake in it. But that looser bottleneck still lets in the same rich people while the least advantaged are still locked out, and those in-between have a wider field of competition for their offerings. Is it a better market? It’s a different market, but as long as it’s a market, it’s not really free.
I’m winding down for this draft, but I think that digital gaming offers analogous (ha. ha. ha.) lessons as well. The barriers to production are more front-loaded, in the form of the education required to build digital games, which is probably a greater filter than hosting or distribution, though that’s not to discount the focused expertise and financial resources required for digital publication. But I’d say that the time and money (the means to live and build a digital life) to learn to code are the primary, or at least best-documented, hoop to jump through. Now, with the biggest, widest market of the three, another problem is likewise more pronounced; no one can find your game without people talking about your game. And putting aside the spurious, vile takes on games journalism that I’ve already written an actual play about, we’re living in a time where news publications and media orgs have either been looted by private equity and vulture capitalists, led into oblivion by the Facebook-orchestrated pivot to video, and/or eaten by multinational conglomerates. The ways in which we find and learn about digital games are as fraught as the ways in which they are created; and thus any subsequent discussions of the merits of games, and value judgments on their comparative quality or value, should by necessity address the factors and biases that informed which games were selected for judgment and which creators were deemed worthy of review.
Alright, that’s, uh, two full pages of rough sketching out, I think we can stick a fork in that for now. I stand by none of this and all of this, it’s definitely still a work in progress, but I think there’s worthwhile arguments in there if I can just clean them up, connect them, and make them coherent. Happy Thursday. Black Lives Matter. Capitalism relies on racism. Bye now.
A larger piece that I’m still trying to put together in my brain is an examination of what art could be if it were freed from needing to be profitable. The thing that has bounced around my brain the most? What would a Kamen Rider story be like if it didn’t have to sell toys? What aspects of the formula constrain it, and where would it go without those limitations? Continuing along that thread: what other formulae does art follow, that we have held up as good when perhaps we just mean successful? And before these recent thoughts, I’ve long wondered about what the board game industry would look like were it freed from the behemoth market share that is Kickstarters For Cheap Plastic At An Outrageous Markup. I promise this isn’t *just* my crotchety bias against miniatures. It’s easy for the argument to become one about mechanics, gameplay, and individual taste, when my core aversion to that entire side of the hobby (and which I have, obviously, fallen prey to myself at times, as boxes of unopened X-wing will attest) is the global-scale matter of waste, and the intentional cultivation of the mindset that games are made better by being more luxurious.
Luxury. Deluxe. Premium. Words that my cynical Thursday brain sees as doubly insidious, for being markup that adds to the product but not the game, and for lacquering on layer upon layer the belief (in the minds of consumers, studio heads, media, and distributors alike) that board games are for the rich, a class of people that self-regulates to fall along certain timeless demographic lines. And here’s another edge to this already unwieldy sword: The more expensive (and therefore inaccessible) a product is, the riskier it is, and the greater the chance that the experience in question must be watered down to the least common denominator for the sake of its investors. And alongside the clamp that places on innovation, there’s the bottleneck of who gets to take that risk. Established publishers and trusted designers, or the amateurs for whom failure has no financial consequence.
What conclusion do I draw from this? That the more expensive the production of a game gets, the less accessible it is to consume or to create, and the more unlikely it is to be by, about, or for anyone who’s not rich.
I’m going to continue to draw a distinction between the game and the product because I think it’s a particularly important one to highlight for the purposes of this accessibility argument. Game design, speaking of the craft or art aspect of creation, can be more or less difficult depending on the designer’s resources. Mentorship, playtesters, and peer review are not accessible to all designers, and just the time to participate in the hobby, to consume existing games (which you do need to at least a little to avoid reinventing the wheel and to expand your repertoire of what’s possible), Hell, having any free time at all, are additional barriers to entry. But all of these factors are exponentially greater when the discussion (and attendant budget) moves from design to production. That bottleneck just squeezes almost entirely shut. And any student of evolutionary biology (okay, I’m cribbing from high school freshman Bio here) will tell you that this will ultimately hurt the gene pool as the lack of diversity leads to terminal inbreeding. I know it’s dicey to apply super-simplified evolutionary concepts to social discourse, but I think it appropriate here for the discussion of the designs themselves; when the “free market” is only free to a subset of the population, it’s not really free, is it?
I feel like I got a little muddled toward the end of that previous paragraph, but whatever, this is my first pass at a bigger concept I hope to devote more time, care, and research to as time goes on. Let’s place what I’m talking about in some context by looking at some adjacent industries to boardgames: RPGs and Digital Games. Now, while adjacent, those industries are apples-to-oranges to boardgaming in terms of scope, marketshare, creatorbase, audiencebase, media coverage, etc. But there is still overlap, and both the creation of the game and the publication of the product have things in common with the process for boardgames. Also, obviously, they’re all games. But I’d argue that RPGs, in a time where the hobby is flourishing but the monopolies are smaller and more consolidated, have seen an explosion in independent publications because the largely profit-driven barriers to entry are lower than they are for boardgames. The fact that so many RPGs are free of physical components, and therefore the exchange of goods for money is more nebulous, has allowed a much wider and deeper diversity of creators and offerings. Print and Play aside, there’s relatively few pay-what-you-can boardgames, whereas RPGs have actually succeeded (at least partially) at creating an unregulated competitive marketplace for their non-physical products. Now, as with boardgames, the option of devoting your time to creating a product where profits are at the discretion of your consumers’ generosity is limited to a privileged few. So there are still creators and creations locked out by that barrier to access. And now we also see the other end of the luxury-deluxe-premium argument earlier; the less risky it is to create the product, the more people are allowed to partake in it. But that looser bottleneck still lets in the same rich people while the least advantaged are still locked out, and those in-between have a wider field of competition for their offerings. Is it a better market? It’s a different market, but as long as it’s a market, it’s not really free.
I’m winding down for this draft, but I think that digital gaming offers analogous (ha. ha. ha.) lessons as well. The barriers to production are more front-loaded, in the form of the education required to build digital games, which is probably a greater filter than hosting or distribution, though that’s not to discount the focused expertise and financial resources required for digital publication. But I’d say that the time and money (the means to live and build a digital life) to learn to code are the primary, or at least best-documented, hoop to jump through. Now, with the biggest, widest market of the three, another problem is likewise more pronounced; no one can find your game without people talking about your game. And putting aside the spurious, vile takes on games journalism that I’ve already written an actual play about, we’re living in a time where news publications and media orgs have either been looted by private equity and vulture capitalists, led into oblivion by the Facebook-orchestrated pivot to video, and/or eaten by multinational conglomerates. The ways in which we find and learn about digital games are as fraught as the ways in which they are created; and thus any subsequent discussions of the merits of games, and value judgments on their comparative quality or value, should by necessity address the factors and biases that informed which games were selected for judgment and which creators were deemed worthy of review.
Alright, that’s, uh, two full pages of rough sketching out, I think we can stick a fork in that for now. I stand by none of this and all of this, it’s definitely still a work in progress, but I think there’s worthwhile arguments in there if I can just clean them up, connect them, and make them coherent. Happy Thursday. Black Lives Matter. Capitalism relies on racism. Bye now.
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