A family member recently returned from an extended trip abroad and our conversation about her experiences got me thinking about the strange (and, in fact, melancholy) fate of popular tourist destinations. Travelers seek these places out because they're unusual, striking, even mysterious. They promise something rare or difficult to find elsewhere. However, the act of going there, especially in large numbers, begins to erode the very qualities that made them appealing in the first place. A scenic, secluded village becomes a commercialized maze of souvenir shops. A beautiful natural site is hemmed in by railings, signage, and crowds. A place that once felt secret or sacred now feels almost contrived, curated, or even artificial.
Whether we like it or not, popularity changes things.
This paradox – the destruction of uniqueness through attention – is not limited to travel. Grumpy old man that I am, I’ve long wondered if the same thing hasn’t happened to our shared hobby of roleplaying, especially in recent years.
When I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons over the Christmas break of 1979, the game was still pretty obscure, though it had become a little less so in the aftermath of the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August of that same year. The blue rulebook I rescued from the hall linen closet had almost the air of a grimoire. What advice it offered me as a newcomer was sparse and scattered across its 48 pages, requiring careful study and a lot of inference. Most people I knew at the time had never heard of a "roleplaying game" and, thanks to the aforementioned "steam tunnels incident," those who had regarded it with a combination of confusion and mild suspicion. Because of this, there was a strong feeling among my friends and I that we were discovering something odd and special. Gathering in one another's basements, we did our best to piece together an understanding of this new hobby from obscure rulebooks, rumors, and the occasional older kid who claimed to know how it all worked. The end result was messy, anarchic – and thrilling.
Over the decades, especially in the last few years, RPGs seem to have become much more mainstream. Celebrities openly talk about playing them. Big box stores carry them. There’s an abundance of support material, both official and unofficial. Rules are more clearly presented. The art is slick. Everyone seems to have a better idea of what a roleplaying game is. Dungeons & Dragons is now a brand name in every sense. On the whole, this is a good thing: more people are playing, and that means a larger pool from which to draw new players. But I’d be lying if I said the hobby still feels quite the same as it did before it achieved its current level of popularity.
What was once a secret door into another world is now a well-lit, signposted thoroughfare. The sense of personal discovery, the need to make rather than simply consume, feels less urgent. Much of the weirdness, the danger, the raw possibility that drew me in has been sanded down in exchange for broader appeal. It's easier than ever to play, but in some ways harder to find that old spark that made it feel so alive.
I don’t mean this simply as a condemnation, but rather as a recognition of the very real cost of popularity. Something rare becomes common; something personal becomes cultural property. There’s nothing sinister in this, only inevitable change. The same pattern plays out again and again, whether in travel, music, or games. Once you’ve found something wonderful, it’s only a matter of time before others find it too and the thing begins to change, often to the point that it's no longer the thing you fell in love with in the first place.
For those of us who remember the early days (or who simply seek to emulate them), it can feel like returning to a once-sleepy village only to find it transformed into a bustling tourist trap. The outlines are familiar, but the mood has shifted. The magic isn’t gone entirely, of course, but it’s harder to reach, buried beneath the noise and polish.
As an avid hiker I have seen an explosion of new hikers in the last ten years. Some trails popular for their photographic qualities can be swamped in people. Most of them ill prepared if anything that happens like injury or wild animal. For a more solitary experience I find myself digging deeper into the trail listings or doing remote trails that don’t offer sweeping views but more simple experience in the forests. Which gives me what I want for just a bit more effort. Those super popular trails though tend to be easier to revisit when the weather is wet or snow and ice require better gear to obtain the destination. For travel I tend to go in the off season and while many shops and cafes are closed. I find myself hanging out with local tourists on their own holiday. But really is travel about seeing the iconic things or the experience of seeing new places and having new conversations? Cause your weekday waiting for a bus and chatting with the local elderly couple in another country can be an unforgettable moment. There are a lot of people and a lot of them are trying to experience life. Few hobbies are hidden in obscurity with all the sharing on the internet. As small spaces become multiple rooms we should bear in mind we only have control over our personal experience and space. And that the world as a whole is free to enjoy and identify with a hobby as they see fit. It is not our journey. I see a lot of “not my way” or “what was lost” bullying and negativity against other perspectives and adoptions of the craft in a lot of my hobbies. From hikers, art, music, to tabletop, and worst of all video games. Perhaps it is human nature to be so possessive of these personal things. Wanting it to stay in this one place and time that means so much to us as you mention. Or wanting it to be special to only us. Since that makes us special in relation to it. Visiting punk shows with younger crowds the one thing that sticks out to me is that it has become a LGBT space and that I don’t recognize the social cues of fashion. Things twenty years ago that would have marked someone as a mainstream outsider is now adopted by the younger generation as something fashionable. Which is great since I felt punk had become so codified by the 00’s it had become a fossil. But in the last few years what I seek is the energy of the experience in my hobbies. Not my expectations of what the experience I think should be and who is there.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a combination of two factors, particularly for those of us of a certain age.
ReplyDeleteWe experienced the birth of the "industry", or at the very least the immediate postnatal moments, and as such we get the thrill of discovery and the wonder of the childhood of (mostly fantasy) RPGs. Now, though, the "industry" is much older, more mature and less magical. It is in the process of being codified, dissected, optimized and pasteurized. While those are probably necessary for the growth/survival, they seem to such some of the magic right out of things...kind of like the teen years of a third child, to extend the analogy.
Also necessary for growth has been the drive to appeal to greater and greater numbers of consumers. This aligns perfectly with the "quaint village" with the "peaceful lake" and the "wonderful homey restaurant". Now that has to be retooled to manage a much larger - and more importantly, broader - audience. Concessions must be made to attract the new crop of disposable income, and to maximize that revenue we need to make it palatable to as many consumers as possible. Gone are the days of a target audience with a shared experience, shuffled away in exchange for mass-produced burgers, t-shirts and package deals. The RPG now needs to fit a tap world (not even point and click, that's too complicated!) and even if there are still many that don't, there is a feel of inevitability. At least some days.
It is a rare and wonderful thing to find the magic again, perhaps in a new and unexpected place. Too bad we no longer have the seemingly endless hours we once had to try and find that place.
Right you are, hence the litter atop Mount Everest. As for RPGs, there's nothing like playing 1e AD&D with the 50+ crowd in my backyard shed!
ReplyDeleteAnd attempt to generalize this into - admitedly vague - sociological theory: I think that is the paradox of counterculture. On its inception, counterculture is an active negation of "official", "estabilished" culture, priorizing everything that the "central setup" is not - escapism plays a big part in its ethos. Time passes and two things happen in a connected way: first, counterculture percolates and starts to be a marketable thing. Thats is the point where you get "fake" marketed attempts at it (the big record company paying for the hippie concert festival - they want the cash, if they need to merket the flower power, who cares? Well, the grognards do, but thats a different can of worms.).
ReplyDeleteThe second is the "internalization" of counterculture AS the estabilishment when enough generational transition happens: this is carried out both on a simply commercial level (the clothes manfacturer notices the income of the record company and starts selling hippie Jackets), gaining momentum to the point of eventually "overwhelming" the marketed culture landscape (leading to saturation and diminishing quality), but also to a different, more complicated social-historical phenomenon: the amassed quantitiy of experiments in counterculture, sucessful and failed, commercial or genuine, eventually add to a "explored" landscape (no matter how earnest the drive to actually produce something of value inside it). It ceases being escapist: the frontier is mapped.
What you are grappling with is, in a way, "the death of the novel" - a new medium emerges, it is explored, debated, fought against, fought for and eventually...becomes as dreary as the stuff it was trying to brake free from, because the people making it are now estabilished as the producers of market culture, not the rogues braking form it anymore. RPG has got to that ending scene in "Once Upon a Time in The West" with the trains urbanizing the desert and the bounty hunters disappearing one by one.
Failure to properly keep watch at the gates eventually allows the barbarians to storm the gates and ransack the city.
ReplyDeleteAre the barbarians the marketers who are turning a niche hobby into a mainstream business? Or are they the consumers of that new business? Or both?
DeleteThe last campaign I ran, I had a few completely new players who'd never played a tabletop RPG before, and the chief thing I found odd about it was how much their experience with MMOs influenced them -- a problem we surely didn't have in the "old days!" :-)
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Could you elaborate on that? How did their MMO experiences influence their gaming/behavior?
DeleteThis kind of highlights one of the joys of RPGs, in my opinion. Unlike actual physical places, which can literally have something important erased by over-traffic, RPGs can be played any way you'd like no matter how many tables are out there or what the majority of them are doing. It's almost as if you could take the scenic forest trail home with you and walk it whenever you wanted in its original quiet majesty, without worrying whether anybody had cut down your favorite trees or spray-painted graffiti on the boulders or littered or the like.
ReplyDeleteIf enough people walk the same forest trail, someone will do that eventually -- but because they're not at your table, they're not doing it to your forest.
Perhaps the real danger here is not that you can never walk the same path twice, but that even the most perfectly-preserved path can never be walked twice by an unchanged you.
Reset the clock! I have been running games for my 10 year old son and his friends, they have no conception of an RPG. Cue 1979 by the smashing pumpkins! :P
ReplyDeleteThe video game and anime influence hard to ignore in the newer RPG’s. Lot of players coming from that background and idea of fantasy. I know my personal journey back to TRPG started with me wanting to get off a computer for my free time. That led to board game nights with people I played with online and then to a campaign. One other thing I also noticed and it is something I haven’t seen since the 80’s. Our local game stores have a whole section of small publisher games. Mostly zine quality in production. Some even in small bags.and I see postings in local LFG listings for them. So it isn’t like that D&D going mainstream hasn’t created its own alternatives. The Grognard’s recent posts about Traveller revealed to me that multiple editions and chasing the trends isn’t new to TRPG space. Even in the 80’s we had a glut of splat books and editions depending on the system. Champions comes to mind easily. And if your favorite game goes that route. Time has shown that some editions of a game manage to keep their legs over the decades. But yeah growing older or familiar with something is a long journey from starry eyed discovery of a new thing and becoming immersed in it. As for the crowds. Most of the world barely recognizes that D&D is popular. The same way I would struggle to recognize the latest developments in pop stars.
ReplyDeleteMost Fridays a bunch of us from the neighborhood gather at the house across the street from mine. Those neighbors have a big front yard shaded by a tree and several benches and they're also nice people.
ReplyDeleteLast Friday a guy who lives down the street who is around 40 told me he'd played D&D for the first time with five other people, two of whom had also never played before.
Turns out there's an experienced DM who lives a few blocks away, and offered to host a game in which only two players had ever played before. He said he had a blast. Apparently they'd met once to discuss the game and then were sent off to roll characters much like James discussed recently as a session zero. Their first real session was full of beer and snacks and went for three hours.
He was telling me this without knowing I played; he said something like, "You're not going to believe what I did last week!" He doesn't really *look* the part.
It took me a few questions to puzzle out that they were playing 5th edition, because he wasn't familiar with the rules or the terminology. He knew he was playing a bard, and he had a concise backstory and character.
I thought it was pretty cool, and I don't think he'd have had the experience if RPGs were still a niche hobby. I guess where I come down on it is that we have more new games and players than ever; so what if you or I think a lot of it is dreck? If you think gatekeeping is important just put a little gate up around yourself.
It seems odd to me to send off three people who have never played before to create characters on their own. I haven’t looked at any version beyond 1e, and maybe 5e is simpler, but I wonder how they created their characters without rules in hand.
DeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the beauties of OSR, it's still "ours." (Or again ours.) We're both retro and maverick, hiking a trail others have forgotten, returned now to nature after once being popular and tromped down.
Exactly. I've dropped modern versions of D&D since 3e came out. When it became more mainstream, it lost its edginess and fringe appeal. I latched onto HM 4e early on and the larger OSR community right from the beginning. I'd rather be on the fringe than popular. It promotes more creativity, rather than toting the corporate line. I'm 100% into the OSR and never turning back.
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