Academic Plague in gaming

[Doc_Klueless]

I looked the base material up, and read it. Dancey's essays, the various state of gaming reports, etc etc.

Any of you can do the same. That's what google is for.

Dude, whatever point you're trying to make is being completely drowned out by being rude and arrogant. Please, tone it down. I'm interested in your side, but I'm not about to wade through post after post of you being obnoxious.

Calling someone (essentially) a lazy goof because they didn't scour the internet for essays that agree with your position, isn't exactly gonna win anyone over to your side.

I have a feeling that quite a few others feel as I do.

P.S.: I've read a lot of those various gaming reports also, along with Dancey's essays. From what I remember, the gist of Dancey's essays weren't so much that there are fewer new players because of "pretentious" games, so much as there are fewer new players because of the sheer number of games out there. You're, of course, welcome to pull out a quote that disputes this.

If you're trying to advance a train of thought that you assert is so well documented, it should be a trivial matter to actually quote some of these essays/articles/etc. so that others, who may not have seen the same essays/articles/etc. that you keep obliquely referencing, can have a common frame of reference, otherwise it really is "believe it, because I said so and so does my cousin's friend's uncle's barber. "Heck, a simple pointer towards whatever you're referencing would be enough.

I personally wouldn't think about asserting such controversial notions without the documentation to back myself up.

All agree that in the mid to late nineties two simultaneous phenomena occured:
1. many many people who were playing RPGs stopped.
2. there were way way less younger teens starting to play.

You put one too many "many's" and "way's" in there.

However, fewer younger teens starting to play does not equal fewer new players, if you can see the difference.

I've already pointed out the flaw in your statement about RPGs and Videogames (There exist more variables to be examined besides the basic existance of RPGs and Videogames at the same time). Surely there might be more variables to the supposed decline of RPG players than simply a couple of niche "pretentious" games stealing away tens to dozens of RPG players from less "pretentious" games.

 

[Crothian]

All agree that in the mid to late nineties two simultaneous phenomena occured:
1. many many people who were playing RPGs stopped.
2. there were way way less younger teens starting to play.

And then third edition came out and many people came back to the industry.

pretentious academic plague = Bad game design = weak gaming industry

Thise do not automatically equal each other. I can site many badly designed RPG books that are not part of this acedemic plague. At the same time there are a few of this so called plague that are designed well. And the weak game industry has many other factors that you cannot blame it on just bad game design and the "pretentious acedemic plague".

One of the true reasons for the state we are in today is third edition glut and the 3.5 division and problems it game publishers.

 

[painandgreed]

Now, there are different people who argue different things about the cause of this decline. Many of those who support story-based gaming would like to claim that it was the CCG craze, not their takeover of the RPG industry, that caused this flight. "It was magic cards!"..

I think you're forgetting computer games. Its about the same time that computers are becoming common in every household and games like Doom and Age of Empires are becoming big. networking was finally to the point where peer to peer gaming was possible on machines beside the Macintosh. While CCGs were becoming big and sucking lots of people's money, that, like 40k, still got them into the game store. If anything drew kids away from RPGs, I'd say it was the presence of computer games just as kids are watchign less TV these days because they're spending longer times online.

But instead, the intellectual bankruptcy of most gaming companies (especially WW) and their lack of vision in following trendy models of game design that seemed successful but were really only ever successful in ONE case (Vampire), and there only because it was specifically oriented to PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T GAMERS AND WOULDN'T LIKELY PLAY ANYTHING ELSE EVER, led to a crippling weakness in the RPG market that made a minor problem (CCGs) into a disaster.

Dude, you seem to have some serious issues with WW. From reading what you're saying, you seem far beyond any sort of objective opinion for some reason.

Anyway, I don't think that Vmapire and such was specifically oriented towards non-gamers. My D&D group fell into playing it every week also (and never stopped playing D&D). If anything, I saw it bring in more people to gaming than anything. I lack to see how that could cripple th RPG market. What it specifically was oriented for was the story based game which emphasises role playing and gets away from combat based experience. These are things that had already been around in past RPGs. People who wanted that style of play had already made house rules for such and had been doing so. The gaming industry has always had a continuous stream of new games going this way or that. People vote with their pocket books and by the ones they want and not the ones they don't and each game finds its own market due to its individual strengths or weaknesses. Playability versus realism, an old debate that everybody has their own opinion on. I don't think there is any justification to the "Academic Plague" theory as there will always be a back to the basics game to appeal to people. Hell, a year or two after OD&D showed up there was T&T for people who wanted a simpler, quicker system.

 

[3catcircus]

Well, if you've read Ryan Dancey's essays on the subjects, he explains that D20 was designed (as a system and as a marketing tool) as a kind of vaccine against these very kinds of games.

This was in a time (don't know how young or old a gamer you are) when the RPG industry basically crashed, D&D had failed, and a slew of games whose chief characteristics were pretentiousness and lack of profitability had led to a mass exodus from gaming.

D20 was a specific response to the crowd of failed novelists, failed grad students and all around pretentious twits who were hijacking gaming to the grave.

But if its a vaccine, its not a cure (well, there's some indication that Dancey hoped it really would be a cure, and everyone would just play D20, but that didn't happen and was never really realistic), and one has to watch out that the disease doesn't adapt and strike again.

Figuring out a new booster shot every once in a while is a good idea too.

Nisarg

The problem is that d20 has become a cure that is worse than the disease.

 

[Crothian]

The problem is that d20 has become a cure that is worse than the disease.

Huh? What exactly do you mean by this??

 

[3catcircus]

Huh? What exactly do you mean by this??

Third Edition D&D was designed to gain (or re-gain) market share lost as a result of TSR's troubles and to build the hobby, ensuring a steady future revenue stream. Due to the explosion of 3.x edition and the opening of the 3rd-party market due to D20 and OGL, the "cure" had produced a rash of really bad D&D/D20 products. How many D20/OGL publishers have come and gone? How many truly awful 3.0 products are languishing on shelves at your FLGS? How many times have you picked up WOTC's latest offering,thumbed through it, and said, "Huh, they had similar rules to this way back when in the Dungeoneer's Survial Guide," or "This looks incredibly similar to the ship-board rules from Pirates of the Fallen Stars," or "WTF?!?!? Why was Purple Dragon Knight updated in Player's Guide to Faerun? They already updated it in Complete Warrior - which one is correct?"

 

[Crothian]

Third Edition D&D was designed to gain (or re-gain) market share lost as a result of TSR's troubles and to build the hobby, ensuring a steady future revenue stream.

And it did do just that.

Due to the explosion of 3.x edition and the opening of the 3rd-party market due to D20 and OGL, the "cure" had produced a rash of really bad D&D/D20 products.

And also look at all the great books that have come out for it as well. d20 has shown us a lot of things. There are many creative people out there that can write a really good book and that writing game books is a little tougher then people thought. This is not a bad thing. It has really allowed new talent to come into the industry.

How many D20/OGL publishers have come and gone? How many truly awful 3.0 products are languishing on shelves at your FLGS? How many times have you picked up WOTC's latest offering,thumbed through it, and said, "Huh, they had similar rules to this way back when in the Dungeoneer's Survial Guide," or "This looks incredibly similar to the ship-board rules from Pirates of the Fallen Stars," or "WTF?!?!? Why was Purple Dragon Knight updated in Player's Guide to Faerun? They already updated it in Complete Warrior - which one is correct?"

Does it matter how many companies have come and gone? Does it matter that some really bad products still rest on the store shelves? As for the similarity to past editions, well it still is D&D and many of the customers don't have D&D libraries that incvlude books from 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

And as for the last question on which version is correct: Whatever version the DM wants to use.

 

[painandgreed]

Third Edition D&D was designed to gain (or re-gain) market share lost as a result of TSR's troubles and to build the hobby, ensuring a steady future revenue stream. Due to the explosion of 3.x edition and the opening of the 3rd-party market due to D20 and OGL, the "cure" had produced a rash of really bad D&D/D20 products. How many D20/OGL publishers have come and gone? How many truly awful 3.0 products are languishing on shelves at your FLGS?

The longer this goes on the more and more it reminds me of the comic industry. Two main leaders and lots of smaller competition to fill niche markets. Sales go up or down, woory over attrackting new readers, and then somebody hits on somethign that works and over markets it till it doesn't work anymore. Which is sad, because by then, they've all but banked their company on it. Still, the business has been around for almost 100 years and while it sees its ups and downs, I don't think it's ready to disappear anytime soon. I don't think tabletop gaming is either.

 

[Maggan]

Dancey and other theorists

I looked the base material up, and read it. Dancey's essays, the various state of gaming reports, etc etc.

Any of you can do the same. That's what google is for.

Nisarg

I've actually over the years read all I can find that Dancey and others have written about the state of gaming and why rpg's took a dive in the 90's. There are some who disagree (most notably John Wick, who vehemently claims that Dancey is flat out wrong).

I myself think Dancey is on to something. RPGs took a hit because they didn't feel much like games people played, at least not to people outside the hobby.

But as far as I remember, Dancey also said that proliferation of systems was a huge factor in the decline of rpgs, and as far as I remember my readings he didn't paint the storytelling trend as the only big bad guy.

In Sweden we had the same crash during the 90's. I attribute it partly to the fact that rpg's were huge, gargantuan during the 80's, so big it would classify as a fad, in fact so big that we had delusions of grandeur. When the gamers who started in the late 80's (lots and lots and lots of them) grew up to become adults, most of them just left their hobby behind, as often happens.

And the fad was not sustainable at the high levels that we saw during the 80's. There were other hobbies to chose from such as CCG's, computer games, stuff like that. It wasn't new, and it wasn't exciting the same way as it was during the 80's. It wasn't shiny new.

And I think that's one contributing factor. RPGs aren't shiny and new any longer, so their appeal to new generations are less than when they felt... well...erm... shiny and new...

Cheers!

Maggan

 

[king_ghidorah]

Nothing has to.
Its not like in the 80s and early 90s the video game didn't exist.
In fact, video games and rpg games have both been around for almost exactly the same length of time.

The problem is that back then, RPGs knew what they were: games, meant for some good social fun, capable of being relatively quickly learnt, and quickly played, and made in such a way that it was of wide appeal to the same 12-16 year olds who were playing the video games and reading the comic books.

Nonsense. Games like Empire of the Petal Throne and Runequest were trying to change that nature of RPGs as early as the mid-to-late 1970s. D&D and its imitators were like that, but the fringe of the hobby was exploring other facets of Role-playing games since early on.

Today there are people who see RPGs as "art" or as "literature", failed novelists and failed grad students trying to make RPGs into something they aren't, killing it for everyone.
There is also a very very insular and selfish mainstream of gamers, who want games made for THEM.
i.e. most gamers are in their mid to late 20s, and want games that appeal to THEIR generation, THEIR sense of style, THEIR education and THEIR views of the world.
Meaning the average RPG of today will turn off today's 14 year old.

This is nonsensicle. Should gamers insist games not be made for them? Buy product they don't want? It's selfish to write RPGs that reflect what you would like, and instead you should churn out product aimed at teens?

The RPG of my youth-- AD&D 1st edition-- wasn't written that way. And the original D&D wasn't written that way. While it was arguable that most of the Basic-Expert-etc. D&D line and D&D second edition were, that's a questionable argument. In fact, I have seen plenty of RPGs aimed at younger or new gamers fail miserably, from Prince Valiant to Everway, and not all of them because they stank.

I'm not saying that games have to be limited to a teenage audience, but if we want RPGS to still be around in 10-20 years we have to start making some RPGs that are specifically geared to them, and accessible to them. And with as much ease of playability as there once was in the good old days.

We need a really workable basic set, and well marketed.

I doubt that's a worthwhile path, especially since it has been walked again and again without success. RPGs are hard to teach out of the box. Of course, I came into the hobby the way most people seem to-- being recruited by friends.

The only way I see the hobby expanding is by interpersonal networks, and from what I see, the lack of face-to-face interpersonal connection and bonding between teens is what is killing the hobby. And most incoming college students' social and communication skills.

And the average gamers have to start caring a hell of a lot more about getting 13 or 14 year olds into hobby. Imagine what would have happened if the guys my age had held this "this isn't for kids" attitude back when you were all starting out...

Nisarg

Guys my age had an attitude of D&D being a stupid kids' game. Adult gamers had nothing but negative interaction with me. And I double there would have been a way for them to recruit me or any of my friends. The hobby tapped into a need for a group of us for social interaction and adventure. And, quite frankly, I'm not sure how, given the work and effort that RPGs require to run and coordinate, how we can compete with network games-- especially MMORPGs-- which don't require a kid to come up with adventures, figure out transportation, schedule a time with buddies-- or even find people to play with.

The issue of "fringe game" alienating potential audience seems at best vastly overblown.