Lost in the Ruins

I know, I know. I’ve been gone for a little over to years. I may explain that in a post later this week. But what brought me back now is James Maliszewski’s recent post on Grognardia about all the Ruins of ancient old school gaming blogs, sad remnants of what our community once was.

And Nine and Thirty Kingdoms was name-checked. Damn. Now I feel ashamed.

It’s not that I didn’t miss blogging, or didn’t think about my large to-do list of RPG projects I was working on. I definitely missed the community. As I said above, I’ll probably talk more about this in another post. But one reason for my absence may also be a reason why the community dwindled: keeping in contact became more difficult.

A History of the Ruins

First, they came for Google Reader. I did switch to Feedly to keep up with the blogoverse when that shut down, but I never quite liked that as much. No matter! We could all switch to Google+ and keep up that way!

Yeah, that went away, too.

People tried to do Discord next. I think there were two competing OSR Discord servers, with OSR politics swirling around them as well. Not sure which, if any, is still active. I mainly stopped using Discord because I didn’t really like it as a communication method.

I imagine some people tried to keep the community going via social media like Twitter or Facebook. I don’t think I have any old school contacts on any of those. I stopped using Twitter, although technically I still have an account, and Facebook is completely unusable, especially since their AI moderation will flag longer comments or more than two comments in a short timespan as “bullying”.

Aside: “Bullying” is probably just an excuse. I think the real reason Facebook squashes longer, deeper discussions – the kind we had in the old blogosphere days – is because people who do that tend to focus on only a few interactions and don’t spend as much time on their platform, which means fewer ads. What they want is a lot of shallow exchanges, because people lose track of time and just keep scrolling forever.

Monetizing Your Treasure Trove

Another problem some people have mentioned is the rampant commercialism. People having fewer discussions and only posting ads or updates about their upcoming products. Even I could be considered guilty of that; although I have yet to sell any of the stuff I published and wasn’t planning to do more than “pay what you want”, I got too serious about too many projects and things became less fun.

The thing about turning the creation of supplemental RPG material into a job instead of a hobby is that it makes you focus on generating hype instead of communicating with others. You read less and post more, but your posts aren’t meant to start discussions. They are just marketing.

And even if people do start discussing your product, the endless flood of product gossip tends to turn some people (me) off. Every few months, some new product becomes the darling of the community and gets talked up endlessly, which means no one’s spitballing ideas with their colleagues anymore… and we are all subconsciously aware that K-Rad Game #2376 is going to vanish in a few months, anyways, because have you even seen K-Rad Game #2377? It’s k-rad!

Conclusion

What can we do about this? Not really sure. We can try rebuilding the community, somehow, but how? The problem is that people need to

• ( a ) Go to blogs and read stuff, and
• ( b ) Post links and their reactions to their own blog, but
• ( c ) Their own blogs need other people to be doing (a) and (b) to those reaction posts as well.

We need blogs to be a web again, instead of a forest of trees.

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