Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 4746929" data-attributes="member: 554">Since we're all talking and thinking about piracy a lot right now, I'd like to see what people think about a question I've had for a while. Suppose that, over time--within five or ten years, say--most RPG developers came to believe that the RPG industry's traditional business model was unsustainable. (By "traditional business model," I mean the system where RPG content is generated through a game company's internal development process, generally sold in the form of books, and only (legally) available to people who pay for the content.) Instead, under this scenario, almost anyone who produced RPG content would do so with the expectation that the content would be freely available, to anyone, online. (Maybe some people would still profitably print and sell books, but not enough to support a substantial development house.) RPG content would be freeware, or open source, by default.If this happened, what would happen to the hobby? More specifically: who, if anyone, would still produce RPG content? How would that content be disseminated? What, if any, mechanisms would be in place for helping gamers find and recognize quality game content? What would be the consequences for the more social sides of the hobby--for attracting new players, building communities of existing ones, and enabling groups to settle on content with flavor and mechanics that worked for them? Would there be a place for any careers in the RPG world?I suspect some readers will be more sympathetic to this possibility than others. I personally think there's a lot of room for optimism, but I want to ask these questions as impartially, with as open a mind, as I can, and I'd like people to answer them in the same spirit.Again, from my perspective, this doesn't seem so bad. This is because of what I take to be two essential facts: <ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The hobby invites the best kind of amateurism. Smart people will willingly produce RPG content for free.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Many of the most important criteria for good RPG design are pretty objective, yet still complicated and difficult to obtain. As such, peer review and experimentation can and should play a large role.</li> </ol>(1) is pretty obvious. I've spent hours at a time on amateur design projects, with no expectation of actually playing with material I've designed, just because they present me with challenges and puzzles I have fun toying with. Seeing other people engage my design seriously enough to offer a thoughtful, detailed critique is probably the best part. I'm sure I'm far from alone in this! (2) should be almost as clear-cut: at least within a particular game, like D&D, most of us want rules that facilitate a certain kind of play. We all want rules that are balanced, flexible, and fluid, and we all mean pretty much the same thing by those things--even if we disagree about the right way to get there. Because getting there is hard--and rules can have complicated implications that are easy to miss at first--collaboration can make all the difference, and getting things right can take the efforts of a whole community, not just one or a few people. For most RPGs, open (but structured) critique and exchange is probably way more important than preserving a particular designer's creative vision. These two traits aren't unique to RPGs--they hold for academic research and software development, among other things. Open-source software development clearly works, so why can't open-source RPG design?If it CAN work, though, I think there need to be some big structural factors that just aren't in place yet--primarily, some kind of effective structure for collaboration and peer review. Right now, we have a lot of smart people writing a lot of great house rules and homebrew systems, but none of these have gelled into an actual SYSTEM, coherent enough for others to recognize and play with, the way a collaborative coding project gels into a program that others can download and run.I think getting people to work together, produce coherent, comprehensive game systems, and make those systems available to a mass audience is the most important role the traditional business model plays, and it's the role that amateur designers have the most trouble emulating. That is, I think the good thing about professional game design studios isn't that the designers they employ produce better content than most amateurs, either because they've been selected for their talent or because they can do it full-time--instead, it's that design studios get people to collaborate, and give players a brand to organize around. They set in place a structure where designers are responsive to other designers and to playtesters, and give the whole community game content that everyone can learn and play, and use as a basis for further modification. When you pay for a professionally-produced RPG like D&D, what you're paying for, I think, isn't for the talent or creativity of the designers (you can get comparable talent or creativity for free) so much as for the institutional factors that give you a particular set of rules that your friends are likely to know, and likely to be willing to play and enjoy. D&D is worth the money because that money buys a corporate structure that gets designers to work together, a brand that gets people to recognize their decisions as authoritative, and distribution and marketing that get a lot of people to pay attention.I think the big question is the extent to which an open-source RPG design movement can duplicate those institutional factors, and, if it can, what steps supporters of such a movement can take to facilitate its doing so. Can amateur designers find a way to organize themselves that's structured enough to produce a balanced and unified system, but open enough to get a whole community to participate? If they can't, then a future of profitable design is vital to the success of the hobby. If they can, then maybe we as both consumers and amateur developers stand to gain a lot if current trends continue.(But maybe others have completely different predictions!)</blockquote>

Verification