D&D General Nerd Rage, Taste Mongering, & Fan Culture

[payn]

Fair enough. I like your thinking.

I would add the caveat that I am not sure that Dylan taking the stage with the Butterfield Blues band needed to be perceived as an "eff the queen" type moment. Those players were present because they were already part of the bill. Also, Howlin' Wolf had performed with a band, and at times Muddy Waters performed with a band at Newport. I think Newport becomes an adequate test case as a moment when unreasonable expectations escalated to the point where the anger that was released was (in good part) an example of people raging against their own confounded expectations.

The confounded expectations were compounded! Dylan came on the scene of this folk revival as the real deal. He wasnt just a folkster, he was seen as the paragon of this movement that held steadfast to the old traditions. I mean, Guthrie gave Dylan his old suit which is a torch passing like a crown. He wasnt just some folkster plugging in, it was Dylan the prince of the folk music revival pulling some rock 'n' Roll sh#$!

Again, silly to read about, but if you examine the impact to the culture, its massive.

This has me thinking that I should clarify what I mean by "nerd rage" (an expression I was never happy with) and some other form (or forms) of outrage, for example: "productive rage." I didn't mean to suggest that every expression reacting to injustice is impotent. I do not believe that at all. Moral crises require moral responses. Perhaps outrage is not always the best response, but I did not mean to suggest that outrage to social injustice is inappropriate by any means.

I didnt take it as such and figured as much. I've been trying to contemplate a better description of nerd rage myself. I think its an inarticulate, yet popular refrain, that catches on. There might be some semblance of pseudo-intellectual thought that inspires a concept for folks to latch onto. Culturally, in the U.S. anyways, there seems to be a rabid anti-intellectual movement that has made the above process very effective. The lines between productive rage and non-productive rage have never been blurrier.

You have me intrigued, Payn. If you have the interest and energy, if you could elaborate on how you see the creator-critic-consumer triad relating to the effort to move the iceberg? No obligation of course, but I find the observation interesting and would like to hear more
Cheers, mate!

Absolutely, let me stew on it a bit and ill respond soon. This has been a stimulating conversation so far.

Cheers!

 

[Pedantic]

I respect the urge to stay out of the OGL topic, but I really don't think it fits neatly in the broader point here. Part of the whole "permissive use of copyright" was an explicit promise not to change that permission.

Nerd rage, as you're using it, seems to be about the audience creating a social contract that gets pushed on the creator (possibly even retroactively) without their real involvement or consent. The OGL situation is missing the salient feature there, both in that it's not really a creative work/choice that's prompting the response, and in that the contract is quite literal and comes from the company, not the audience.

 

[Hatmatter]

I respect the urge to stay out of the OGL topic, but I really don't think it fits neatly in the broader point here. Part of the whole "permissive use of copyright" was an explicit promise not to change that permission.

Nerd rage, as you're using it, seems to be about the audience creating a social contract that gets pushed on the creator (possibly even retroactively) without their real involvement or consent. The OGL situation is missing the salient feature there, both in that it's not really a creative work/choice that's prompting the response, and in that the contract is quite literal and comes from the company, not the audience.

Hi Pedantic, so I thought about this for a bit to make sure I understood.

The poor communication skills often exhibited in places like ENWorld, wherein some people seem either not interested or incapable of communicating about ideas and only seem to be able to express value judgments -- perhaps not unlike inarticulate infants who are able to merely coo or cry -- is mostly what I was responding to. The negativity that pervades fan communities like the RPG community (one could also include the Star Wars fan community) is not entirely the result of the OGL, as one could observe from many of the forum posts here pre-2023.

Yet, at the same time, in order to be able to move forward with my argument in an intellectually honest manner, I had to acknowledge that much of the dissatisfaction since January of 2023/December of 2022 is the result of the proposed change to the OGL. To leave that out would have been mystifying.

Further, it is my contention that the obsession with Dungeons & Dragons as a "product" produced by a corporation (as if that was ever not the case), so often occludes discussion of the artistic merit of RPGs as an art form. That is what I am really trying to address.

Therefore, I attempt to address the OGL as relevant to my argument, but to tread lightly because the issue is easily obsessed over here (witness it being the item that people seem to want to discuss when I give it 98 words in a 4720 word article).

By the way, lest anyone think I am addressing my thoughts on the low-level of RPG-fan discourse to them, I would say, Pedantic, that your comments are quite thoughtful as have been those of Payn and I am not addressing my impression to discourse of this quality.

All that being said, perhaps I never needed to mention the OGL episode? Certainly, I do agree with you that the discourse around the OGL is the result of the attempt of a corporate maneuver. But, then again, it quickly becomes the justification to attack the work being done on D&D itself by the game designers, which is why I ended with the celebration of the work of Crawford and others.

I hope that addresses your point. I do agree with you that a corporate decision deserves to be treated in a commercial context and that is not really relevant to the dissatisfaction with Dylan's mid-Sixties work from some of his fans. Thanks for creating the opportunity for me to clear that up. Astute reading!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think you obfuscate a general point with specific examples.

I think this is a major problem with @Hatmatter's otherwise very erudite and thoughtful piece.

Also there are a few comments which illustrate a fundamental failure on your part, @Hatmatter, to actually understand or even seemingly honestly want to understand the people and phenomena you're describing in such detail, and ironically those comments are precisely of the "judge"-y kind you complain about. They're not the bulk of what you're writing, but they're interspersed in there, like that the grievance-ridden comment about how terribly unfair it was that Christians got called judge-y in the past (!!!), given people today are sometimes judge-y, with a bizarre and intellectually unsupportable "these are the children of the people who said Christians were judge-y!". Genuinely vandalizing your own work with personal grievance comments like that! Especially as all it can lead to is people pointing out you're being judge-y too, into an infinite circle of "No u". Better to excise that element entirely. I mean, know hypocrisy as an effective critique died after 9/11, but you don't want to create infinite loops like that!

Finally, you seem to rush to the conclusion re: Crawford and totally fail to support it with any examples or even argumentation, just asserting it as if it were fact that we must accept. For example, I think the claim that Crawford is maximizing accessibility is prima facie laughable but you seem to think that element is inarguable and don't even attempt to support it. It's a pity because otherwise you were saying a lot of interesting things and had quite developed ideas.

Also, kind of an aside but passively accepting a description of "maliciousness" for what you've quite clearly and carefully shown isn't malicious but is instead very complex behaviour is also deeply unhelpful to your own argument. Yet you did precisely that at the end, seemingly merely so you didn't have to argue the point re: Crawford and D&D. It feels like a let down. I hoped for an analysis of D&D "haters" of all kinds on par with the Bob Dylan discussion, but it was not to be.

 

[Hatmatter]

I think this is a major problem with @Hatmatter's otherwise very erudite and thoughtful piece.

Also there are a few comments which illustrate a fundamental failure on your part, @Hatmatter, to actually understand or even seemingly honestly want to understand the people and phenomena you're describing in such detail, and ironically those comments are precisely of the "judge"-y kind you complain about. They're not the bulk of what you're writing, but they're interspersed in there, like that the grievance-ridden comment about how terribly unfair it was that Christians got called judge-y in the past (!!!), given people today are sometimes judge-y, with a bizarre and intellectually unsupportable "these are the children of the people who said Christians were judge-y!". Genuinely vandalizing your own work with personal grievance comments like that! Especially as all it can lead to is people pointing out you're being judge-y too, into an infinite circle of "No u". Better to excise that element entirely. I mean, know hypocrisy as an effective critique died after 9/11, but you don't want to create infinite loops like that!

Finally, you seem to rush to the conclusion re: Crawford and totally fail to support it with any examples or even argumentation, just asserting it as if it were fact that we must accept. For example, I think the claim that Crawford is maximizing accessibility is prima facie laughable but you seem to think that element is inarguable and don't even attempt to support it. It's a pity because otherwise you were saying a lot of interesting things and had quite developed ideas.

Also, kind of an aside but passively accepting a description of "maliciousness" for what you've quite clearly and carefully shown isn't malicious but is instead very complex behaviour is also deeply unhelpful to your own argument. Yet you did precisely that at the end, seemingly merely so you didn't have to argue the point re: Crawford and D&D. It feels like a let down. I hoped for an analysis of D&D "haters" of all kinds on par with the Bob Dylan discussion, but it was not to be.

Good points...I'll take another pass at it; I can still revise. Thanks, Ruin.

 

[Yaarel]

Every institution reaches a point where tradition overtakes functionality.

It might be the other way around. At a certain point, the functionality of the institution begins to disrupt the ideals that founded it.

At this point, new idealists emerge and either reform or replace the institution.


The term "nerd rage" is somewhat neutral, in that the ragers might be conservatives championing the institution or progressives reforming the institution.