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Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
- dragontamer 5y agoDnd the ruleset can't make much money IMO. But world's,like the forgotten realms or the rival Pathfinder's inner sea make plenty of money. These story settings make more than enough to expand upon rules (psyonics, epic games, etc) in a kinda-sorta story related reason.
- Ambolia 5y agoI've never been a part of any of those fandoms, but it was always curious to me how open-source alternatives didn't obliterate things like Warhammer, Magic cards, or things like that. I guess it being a proprietary IP makes it easier to keep a "standard" version of the game, but there should be some way to agree to a certain rules and avoid paying most of the price.
- gnramires 5y agoMagic is actually really enhanced by capitalism, imo. Trading cards is a really enticing aspect of it (which you can skip entirely if you want), each one having different cards is really interesting (you start with a novice set and can get better by acquiring the right cards). There is always that mystery of someone with really powerful cards, it creates an interesting atmosphere (and makes good cards really remarkable). Teaching children about economics is a good thing for me as well. Games like Dominion (deck-building Magic) are really good, but you don't get this aspect of the game. Now, maybe if everyone were given a random set of cards which you had to trade your way to glory that could be interesting as well. Maybe a victory allows you points or permits trading one of your cards for the opponent. In that case, Magic gets more meritocratic. However, this is essentially a parallel, magic-exclusive economy. And the glaring issue would be preventing the bleeding/interference of the real economy into this lateral economy.
- bodge5000 5y agoI guess a large reason why is because, especially with miniatures, it doesn't require any equipment to actually make the thing. Bear in mind 3d printers (or at least the ones the average person can buy) are still quite new, they were unheard of when I was into warhammer as a kid. If you wanted a miniature, you had to buy it from the people that made it. Even now, its easier, if more expensive long term, to go to a shop and just buy the things than to print one out. As for magic cards, I remember as a kid printing off yu-gi-oh cards, but they never ended up being very good, even with access to a laminater (we had to go to the library to do that). It was a short lived idea sadly
- mgreenly 5y agoIt takes a great deal of energy to create good content. It seems most people are willing to spend money to reduce that burden for their own games or at a minimum willing to spend money to create an elevated starting point for their own efforts.
- CJefferson 5y agoOne big problem with things like Warhammer and Magic (Magic being a more serious example) is there you really need a "dictator" who decides how "powerful" everything is, and can ban / weaken things which turn out to be broken. That type of thing seems consistently hard to do in open-source.
- Jensson 5y agoDota managed to do it though. There were hundreds of dota versions people made and played before the origin of the modern day dota (called DotA allstars since it was a mesh of the favourite things from the other versions) appeared and everyone settled on it. Edit: And the reason new dota versions stopped appearing after that is that the mapmaking community learned how to prevent people from opening and looking at the map source code, so it was no longer easy to change them. Maybe modern day dota would never have happened if that exploit wasn't found. But also modern day dota would likely never have happened if people couldn't easily modify and reupload others maps easily in the first place, since dota allstars drew so much inspiration from all the other wacky versions people made.
- dgb23 5y agoIt was however only after DotA was handed[0] to the design/balancing BDFL IceFrog where it became the competitive game that we think of today. Before that, it was really just another yet popular "fun-map". He took advice from the best players and a trusted circle, but was known to have the last word on things. There is something to say about the quality of a competitive game that is balanced around hardcore play versus a game that is balanced around a profit motive. [0] I don't remember how the transition came to be.
- Jensson 5y ago5.54b was the last version before Icefrog, and then Icefrog took over development and the game slowly became the clean and interesting e-sport it is today. Was still just hobbyists doing it for fun though. People still don't know who Icefrog is, even after being hired by Valve he remains anonymous.
- acdha 5y agoHow many successful open source projects aren't substantially supported by people getting paid to do that work as their job? One of the big challenges for most open source projects is getting enough time to make substantial progress. I think one of the challenges here is that the rules are meant to support a theme and the open nature means there's a lot of scut work building a viable system, testing, and balancing it. As we've seen with other ares like video games which combine the creativity of story telling with relatively high expectations for completeness, that's a pretty challenging combination to get volunteers to support. Companies which do invest the time and resources are going to have a natural conflict about sharing that with potential competitors since they need to make pay and it seems pretty easy to imagine a lot of the outcomes ending up like Elastic/Amazon disputes.
- HanClinto 5y agoOpen-source still struggles with quality and consistency -- two things important in a medium where aesthetics are important. That said, access to low-cost, high-resolution 3D printers (specifically resin-based printers) has enabled an explosion of the open-source Warhammer community (see https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedWarhammer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedWarhammer/ for one example) -- and oddly, it's exactly the free market that is allowing this to flourish through services like Patreon, where artists are financially rewarded by supporters who receive a steady stream of fresh new .stl's on a regular basis. Open-source Magic the Gathering has struggled a bit, but there are still a good number of fan projects that have done very well. In particular, open-source game clients such as XMage have been open-source competitors to MTGO, and open-source fan-project expansions such as Star Wars: The Gathering have managed to keep a high level of quality and consistency: https://www.starwarsthegathering.com/ https://www.starwarsthegathering.com/
- FjolsvithAase 5y agohttps://www.thingiverse.com/devonjones/collections/openforge https://www.thingiverse.com/devonjones/collections/openforge
- revolvingocelot 5y agoThis is interesting -- quickly browsing through this list, I note that some of these .stls are literal alternatives to "sold" "products", like these legally distinct siege bunnies. [0][1] On the one hand, it's surely problematic for the original modeller, but on the other it's "just" similar (not identical!) instructions to the printer. Has this modeller "stolen" from the paid guy? How about from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? We all know and laugh at "illegal primes", but my intuitions, about how this applies to (what will eventually be, at its final stage) a physical object, are confusing me. [0] https://haylandterrain.com/products/trojan-bunny https://haylandterrain.com/products/trojan-bunny [1] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3916454 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3916454
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 5y agoD & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon, Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign. With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug. D & D is the one game I absolutely won’t run because people get attached to the characters and will argue with you. In Paranoia I will play without a campaign and kill them 4 or 5 times before they ever get to the briefing room and they will come back for more. Gygax liked the improvisational acting aspect of the game but the rules were so Byzantine that all that got lost. The next generation games boasted simplified rules and directional bias built into the structure of the game that forces people out of the ‘accumulate stuff’ mindset they spend the rest of the week in.
- vollmond 5y agoThat seems like just a difference in campaign styles. Paranoia is designed for that sort of play, isn't it? My RPG group that has played for 15+ years has only played D&D a couple times, and only in the past 5 years, but the style in terms of attachment to long-lived and growing characters isn't any different from our previous campaigns (Shadowrun, Starfinder, homebrew Fallout, probably some others I'm forgetting). Just an odd criticism to hang on D&D specifically. Half-agreed with the bookshelf argument, though you can certainly get by with just the open SRD rules - most of the book content is just adding more and more options you can pilfer without having to homebrew it all.
- saalweachter 5y agoThere's also the sad fact that the more source books you add, the les distinguishable it is from homebrew -- they just can't play test the interactions between 72 different additions well enough to weed out the absurdities and balance everything well.
- Jensson 5y agoI read this and was very confused until I realized you weren't talking about a package manager, the statement almost work for package managers.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago> While it eventually became just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital’s clutches. So it obviously didn’t point out a very good direction, hence hasbro’s commercial exploitation of it…
- smitty1e 5y agoPlease. Art is as dead as it wants to be. There will always be a spectrum in the market. A D&D will always taget the gourmand, no the gourmet. The gourmets require education. Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.
- roenxi 5y agoThe thesis in the title makes no sense. There really isn't anything so special about the D&D systems that mean one person working from home couldn't come up with an artistic competitor. You don't need to spend any money on TSR books to run a campaign if there is an imaginative DM handy. The only reason D&D is so big is that the profit lets it advertise and have a presence, so more people know about it. That is a benifit to the genre and encourages creativity.
- dogma1138 5y agoAren’t some of the game systems like D20 patented/copy written
- Jensson 5y agoD20 is released under the open game license, so anyone can use or modify it. License here: https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm Basic rules, classes, monsters etc are included: https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm
- zcdziura 5y agoI don't actually believe you can patent game mechanics. Specifically for D&D, there's nothing novel about rolling a polyhedron and adding the resulting value with some other static value on a piece of paper.
- DerekL 5y ago* copyrighted
- CompelTechnic 5y agoCouldn't agree with this more. The idea that D&D has hoovered up so much of the world as to deny people of their own creative expression is absurd and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without thinking the author is off his rocker.
- CactusOnFire 5y ago
- bencollier49 5y agoOkay, so while Westerners were playing D&D, socialists on the other side of the iron curtain were playing Zarnitsa and Orlyonok, where you attack your opponents, capture spies and interrogate them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarnitsa_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarnitsa_game I mean, horses for courses, but you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place.
- itronitron 5y agoThis might be of interest as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
- Kaze404 5y ago> you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place. This is a fascinating thing for me to read because it is brought up every single time someone points out how capitalism encouraging the profit motive over anything else negatively impacts something. It's also incredibly sad though, as the concept of creating things out of pure joy seems like such an alien concept to some people. What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't? Conversely, it could be argued that in a system where people don't have to be coerced to do things they despise out of fear they won't have a place to live, they would have the time and mental energy to spend creating things they enjoy, actively including the billions of people who are too busy doing meaningless jobs to create anything in the equation.
- Jensson 5y ago> What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't? Pretty sure he would have created D&D anyway, yes. But if not for capitalism he likely wouldn't have done the work to standardize and share D&D with the world and instead just kept it as his own homebrew campaign rules. Today it would be easier, but back then? No way.
- spicyusername 5y agoThis sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general. When your company isn't beholden to shareholders, you're generally more welcome to do anything you want with it, including focusing on "artistic integrity" for as long as you like. However, you also don't have access to the monopoly money that seems to get generated when taking your company public. I suspect the sirens call of "infinite wealth" eventually wears down even the most principled, and the artist themselves chooses to let their art take a backseat. An unfortunately part of the human experience that I think most people don't want to acknowledge.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago>This sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general I don't disagree, but it's sort of difficult to disentangle the incentives to take a company public from "capitalism in general", at least as it's practiced in the world today. I'd point to Valve as the paradigmatic example of "not-evil corporation", precisely because it's GabeN's private hat empire and he can do things like fund the big unwieldy rocket of Steam Machines, which can then jettison the much more capable craft of Proton -- neither of which The Shareholders would have been comfortable with. Would there have been pressure to go public and become normal if Valve didn't have access to Steam's money-printer? How about if Valve's charismatic hat-emperor was no longer at the helm? Maybe so, but I think that suggesting that "the sirens call of "infinite wealth"" can corrupt anyone is capitalist apologism when there are strong counterexamples in similar forms of expression. Moreover, suggesting the mere act of going public generates "monopoly money" and "infinite wealth", suitable to corrupt even the most principled, strikes me as parroting a just-so story about vulture capitalism's obvious unstoppable dominion.
- spicyusername 5y agoI don't mean to suggest that the process is inevitable, just frequent.
- Slippery_John 5y agoNothing in this article justifies the title. Broadly their primary complaints seem to be that Hasbro is selling anything aside from a core rule set (or really anything), and that the founders of TSR were slowly pushed out. These somehow means that art is killed. The D&D founder weren't gods. If they wanted complete control, they could have not sold their company. Or once they were out of it, they could have filed off the serial numbers and made a new system (like Paizo did years later) having learned how to protect themselves from being pushed out. The complaint that Hasbro sells things is asinine. Sure the digital dice on D&D Beyond are tacky, but you can just not buy them. The same goes for all the toys and trinkets that they sell on the side, like pins and minis. I especially don't understand the complaints about the OGL because it seems like exactly what they want. That's what led to Pathfinder, a competing system that Hasbro doesn't control! (Unless they bought out Paizo when I wasn't looking.) This article fundamentally doesn't demonstrate how capitalism had any marked impact on D&D as an art form. And there are some things they could have talked about that might have landed. For instance, the need to be pushing out new content all the time resulting in lower quality or the inability to fundamentally fix real problems. They could have brought up how 4.0 pulled the rug out from under people with the way more restrictive GSL. Or how in 5.0 the only option to make money off of more than just the SRD is to use a specific site and accept a 50% cut.
- isleyaardvark 5y agoThe article is just a mess and contradicts itself. The “main game itself remains largely moribund” even though it’s more popular than it’s ever been. What definition of “moribund” are they using? If it’s “moribund” because of lack of updates, that is first of all not true, but also would just be criticized by the author as “extracting as much money from consumers as possible through… constant upselling”. A comment the author made literally the sentence before the “moribund” comment. The whole article smacks of gatekeeping on the part of the author, like they miss how it used to be a niche hobby.
- dsign 5y agoI stopped reading here: > Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the creative work that made D&D a reality. If any of my endeavors gets me a lifelong income, it frees me to pursue other endeavors in financial peace. Recognition is overrated.
- savanaly 5y agoYeah possibly this is oversimplifying but you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to be Bill Watterson, be Bill Watterson. But you have to accept he's financially worth 1/10 of what his comic-creating peers of similar stature are.
- ur-whale 5y agoI stopped reading here: > (jacobinmag.com)