DIY RPGs and the Future of Work

A familiar recurring theme on my favourite podcast, Econtalk, is the future of work - how technology, particularly but not always the internet, is changing the job market and how work gets done. This week Adam Davidson discusses what he calls the "Hollywood Model" - a working life structured around "short-term, project-based teams, rather than long-term, open-ended jobs". (You can read the article he wrote for the NY Times magazine here.) The conversation covers a lot of ground, and contains a lot that's relevant to the DIY RPG business. In particular it seems to provide a pretty cogent narrative describing the way the RPG industry has evolved and will evolve in the future: in short, the model of an RPG company with permanent employees is likely to diminish even further than it has up to this point, to be replaced by ad hoc, short term arrangements composed of groups of freelance specialists.

If you can't see that happening already, you probably haven't been paying attention. Consider the way the DIY D&D movement has developed. You have the writer/publisher, or in very specialised cases (i.e. LotFP) a publisher who isn't necessarily the writer. You have the layout people. You have the artists. You have editors. Very few of them exist in permanent arrangements and there are no OSR firms in the sense of a company with employees. Instead there are short-term teams who may work together frequently but not in fixed arrangements. Much the same is true of the story gamers. This evolution is not complete, of course, and there are still RPG companies out there. But it seems likely they may well end up going the way of the dodo.

To put this into a cod laymen's economic analysis (because I am a cod layman - a laycod? - when it comes to economics), the traditional Coaseian explanation for why firms come into existence is basically to do with transaction costs: the cost of doing everything through contracts arranged via the market, in terms of time and money, is less than the cost of creating an organisation with permanent employees. It is cheaper for a book publisher to hire a permanent staff of editors rather than go out and look for a freelance editor and arrange a contract with him for every single book that he wants to publish. So book publishing firms come into existence. But as technology improves - particularly as the internet develops - the transaction costs associated with finding freelancers diminishes. You can do it for next to nothing.

I can't speak for others, but I suspect my experience with Yoon-Suin is similar to a lot of people. I wrote it. I advertised through the blog and G+ for artists. I quickly found Matthew Adams, the genius behind that cover you can see if you direct your eyes slightly to the right, and Christian Kessler, the mapper, and then arranged the publishing through RPG Now and Lulu. A loose conglomeration of people and entities which may or may not work again brought Yoon-Suin into existence, not an RPG firm, and this is going to be increasingly the case when it comes to RPG products. Now, that isn't to say that the limited liability company will cease to exist in any form - One Book Shelf and Lulu will, I suspect live on. But the world of monoliths is undoubtedly being replaced in part by the Hollywood Model - perhaps the only thing that the world of RPG nerds and film stars has in common.