Polygon: Indie TTRPG Companies are "sitting in their own little corners of the internet and wringing their hands"


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Rascal has a very strong point of view, including a strong "why the hell isn't the world run the way, I, a world-weary 23 year old, sees that it clearly ought to be?"
Honestly if a journalistic outlet doesn't have a strong point of view that it's fairly open about, I don't think I trust that outlet, because it just means they've got a point of view they're not willing to admit, or that, at best, means they're so clueless they don't realize they've got one because they think they're "normal" or something.

If there is a better way to say a point of view should be discarded immediately, I dont know that I've seen it for some time. Well done. :LOL:
Nah mate. You'd actually agree with them more than you think.

Having a point of view shows integrity and clear-sighted-ness, frankly. And there's nothing wrong with that view being youthful.
 


Well, let's deconstruct the article.

The opening paragraph is pretty boilerplate - the author immediately falls back on a cliched metaphor in comparing D&D to Kleenex because both are ubiquitous. It concludes with a vague claim that D&D is "on the threshold of something new, but still not fully realized." Okay, thanks. That tells me nothing. So the initial tone is a kind of vague clairvoyancy: "I can see the future," so trust my opinions here.

Curiously, he then goes from describing WotC's two recent, flagship publications as "excellent," to claiming that "you can’t help but smell the enshittification of the beloved role-playing game" on the horizon. So it's on "the threshold of something new," heralded by two "excellent" books...and thus you can smell "enshittification"? Huh. So...not exactly a super rigorous argument being developed. Also,"enshittification" is Internet speak for "I want to criticize something but don't have reasons that I can clearly express, so I'm going to appeal to Cory Doctorow's meme word." The paragraph finishes with some strong evidence, "There just aren’t as many books coming out this year as I was expecting." Because WotC has altered its typical four D&D publications per year to...four publications per year. There is a point that Project Sigil seems stalled, again based on little evidence, and set against WotC pushing Maps instead. So basically the WotC half of the article is trendy thesis vaguely supported by impressionistic evidence, often self-contradictory, masked as informed opinion.

I have to start work, so I'm not going to unpack the back half of the article right now, except to point out that, once again, we have a bit of actual reporting on the Mothership Backerkit...or at least some quantifiable numbers, but really it's more opinion supported by vague assertions, all leading up to the author offering some boilerplate advice to Indie publishers: "Ask yourselves: Who is your audience, and what is your audience looking for? Where are they looking for it, and how can you best give them more of it? And what does success look like?"

Wow. I bet they never thought of that!

I suspect the author was given the assignment, or had the idea, of doing an article on Mothership, and then was looking to sexy it up by stirring the pot a bit. Poke the bear, drop a catchphrase, get some clicks. And this is reporting in the Internet Age: impressionist assertions based on a few anecdotes, wrapped in cliches and written to basically troll readers, rather than inform them. To create a controversy rather than add insight. To get clicks. To get people talking on sites such as this one.

It seems to have worked, so I guess...mission accomplished.

"Enshittification" indeed.
 

The "enshittification" of D&D in the article refers not to a decline in quality of the actual game, but rather the poor business decisions Hasbro and Wizards executives have made around the wider brand.

And while Wizards is releasing four books this year, one is the Monster Manual, which really should have been released in 2024 during the game's actual 50th anniversary and that they constantly refer to as the 2024 Monster Manual.

You could argue that the four new products should include the brand new Starter Set, but again...I don't disagree with the article that the 2025 slate seems underwhelming when first announced.
 

Polygon's video content was great for years but I don't know that they ever recovered from losing BDG.

I don't read the site all that much but they pumped up 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim when it was still having trouble finding an audience so it can't have been all that bad, at least back in 2020. Definitely never looked to them for TTRPG coverage though.
 

As I said on BlueSky, I generally like Charlie Hall’s work. In this case, I agree that pointing the finger at indie publishers for their lack of coverage is a tonal misstep. We all want Polygon and other sites to write about our games (and Polygon has covered A5E in the past, but most aren’t so lucky).

I get it. Nobody reads the non-D&D stuff. Even here they don’t. We continue to publish non-D&D articles and shows nevertheless, but we’re fortunate in that the news business doesn’t have to pay the bills as it’s subsidised by the publishing business. We can afford to publish niche content. Not every outlet has that luxury.

Still. The tone was unfortunate.
 


Given how many points of view are ignorant and/or corrupt, the truth of this assertion is highly questionable.
Nah.

The issue is a journalistic outlet pretending they don't have a point of view (PoV), and people believing that.

All journalistic outlets have a point of view. Even if that PoV is a confused and contradictory one, or quite a complex one.

Without delving into the politics, because this is ENworld, for the majority of mainstream news in the English-speaking West has a very specific viewpoint that it attempts to present as "unbiased" or "neutral" or "impartial" or "fair and balanced", but it is in fact extremely partial towards one specific political philosophy (that starts with neo but we won't otherwise go into it) and extremely partial towards individuals of high social standing and superficial academic achievement, regardless of whether those individuals are in fact dimwits or full of terrible ideas. The more mainstream and "respected" the outlets tend to be, the more unwilling they are to state uncomfortable facts, and the more prone they are to using wildly euphemistic or even borderline propagandistic language to support this false idea that they don't have a PoV

One of the defining problems of modern journalism is that this viewpoint is presented as "neutral" or "unbiased" or "fair and balanced" or "even-handed" or the like, when it is certainly none of those things, but rather a highly specific PoV that is relatively normalized within said media.

The same is true in different ways for all news media, including that covering videogames, TTRPGs, and so on. There's always some kind of PoV behind a site. And that's not a bad thing. You can say "many PoVs are ignorant or corrupt", and 100% that's true, but most news media that represents itself as not having a PoV or being "impartial" in fact is strongly pushing what often amounts to a corrupt or ignorant PoV. Indeed I'd argue the very pretence of having no bias or partiality is itself inherently corrupt.

Thus I would strongly argue that it's better that a journalistic outlet is clear about its "mission" and thus PoV, rather than trying to do a little dance and pretend it doesn't have one. Particularly as this makes it much more obvious when such outlets are failing at their own mission (for a recent example see the WaPo's "Democracy dies in darkness", which is particularly laughable right now).
 
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