I am ambivalent about the lionization of the entrepreneur which has been a growing feature of British society since as long as I can remember. I am half-persuaded by the view that the end state of modern neo-liberal capitalism is a society in which all of the behaviour of homo economicus becomes subjected to market rationalities and theories of exchange until there is nothing left except rational (or irrational) actors existing in atomised isolation - a society in which everybody is an entrepreneur because human social contact is only competition and exchange and nothing else.
But I am also half-persuaded by the idea that it would be great to write RPGs for a living. What would I need to be able to do this?
I stress that this post is not serious. I like the "proper" job which I have and I'm not about to quit it. And I think a life of sitting alone at a keyboard trying to create things would quickly turn me into some sort of long-bearded, filthy weirdo. Human company and variety are important.
However, the freedom to just do something you enjoy, free from the constraints of management or control, sounds very fulfilling. I have worked out that I would probably need to produce a Yoon-Suin every two months in order to be able to live in the manner "to which I have become accustomed" based on prior performance. If I got better with pricing, budgeting, marketing and all of that jazz, then who knows? Could be every three or four months.
Could I do that? Perhaps I could. Free from all other time constraints, I might be able to write things that quickly. On the other hand, the model is based on the heroic assumptions that I could write things that are consistently as good, that the market could bear a new thing by me every three months or so, and that my financial circumstances wouldn't change. Perhaps the most heroic assumption of all is that the pressure to produce wouldn't play on my mind until I was living like a crazed rat. And I want to be a crazed rat even less than a long-bearded filthy weirdo.
We think about money a lot. The requirement to make it limits our freedom. But at the same time, freedom and money are inextricably linked - the more you have of the latter, the more you have of the former. It is because I have money, at least a reasonable salary, that I do not feel the pressures and worries that might very well cripple and restrict me from doing anything creative at all. It is because I have the freedom that comes with money that I can create. By some strange perversity, if I had more freedom my capacity to create might be critically undermined.
"I listen to money singing. It's like looking down from long french windows at a provincial town, the slums, the canals, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad."
Employees of the world, atomize! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
ReplyDeleteThat future is coming, whether or not people are ready for it. That is, in large part, what America's elections are about this year. >.<
The thing is, the future could basically be Star Trek. We are getting so good at sating our material needs that it may be the case fairly soon that we only need to work, say, 10 hours a week or whatever. This is what Keynes thought would happen.
DeleteI am not sure it would be all that great for everybody.
Kevin Crawford writes about this a lot on RPG.NET. He always sounds a little bitter about the amount of shit he has to do to get by.
ReplyDeleteHave you got a link? I haven't been on rpg.net properly in literally years.
DeleteHe's Cardinal Ximenes at the bottom of this page. This was the most recent comment about this stuff I could find but I do remember him making others.
DeleteI'll have a search for them. Kevin is one of the good guys, so I hope he's not all bitter.
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ReplyDeleteI believe that good creative work, including writing, research and craftsmanship, requires a mindset that can balance rigour and contemplation. The circumstances and pace of the working process can differ, but it cannot be done well by people who are harried and distracted. Professional RPG writing doesn't provide this luxury, and increasingly fewer occupations do.
ReplyDeleteWhat is now called the 'creative economy' broadens the 'creative class' but devalues creativity: an increasing number of creatives earn less and less in ever more precarious and stressful positions in ultra-saturated, cut-throat markets. Everyone can be a writer or game designer but very few people can make an honest living as one. The world is filled with frustrated and unsuccessful people who were told to follow their dreams, only to be told they would never get paid honestly for it.
The alternative model is hobbyists who make a living elsewhere (as long as their days job doesn't get the axe), develop things in their free time, and don't have profit expectations that extend to daily concerns such as eating, having a place to live, and luxuries such as travelling or having a family. This is fine... almost.
Big ideas mostly come from people with free minds, who can focus their whole attention on a specific question. I believe there are important ideas which can't be arrived at through routine work, questions which can't be answered by a team chipping away at it five days a week and overtime. This means there will be a lot of functional stuff in our life, and a few labours of love, but very few big ideas like tabletop RPGs.
D&D came from people who had the tremendous luxury of almost imaginable amounts of free time to think, read and play. They could afford to be idle and spend their time irresponsibly. That doesn't mean they were rich people; on the contrary, both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were misfits of a kind... but they lived in an economy where someone making a living as an insurance agent and shoe repairman could support a family, and spend the rest of their time daydreaming and playing wargames. Old Economy Steve, basically.
Well, that way of life is going the way of the dodo, fast, and that's why there will be no new D&D again.
Unless a member of the idle rich wants to do it - the son or daughter of a billionaire who happens to be into gaming? That is I suppose how philosophy, art etc. mostly developed prior to the 1960s.
Delete==that's why there will be no new D&D again.
DeleteThe wheel doesn't need to be reinvented. Or. The cat is out of the bag.
The great delusion of the OSR was that *D&D* became understood to mean *D&D product*. In fact D&D is a toolkit of ideas and principals, once learned you can discard the books. D&D is what three or four pals can achieve pooling their imaginations on a saturday afternoon sharing their interests and judgments abstracted into a make-believe world. Paying for third party exhibits of goblins, snails or gorgons should not be part of that.
Anyone hoping to make a living as a writer can write stories and see if the market cares. At least the market for stories is large and not filled with the helpless and needy.
Here perhaps is a related question considering i) small genre ii) scraping a living iii) qualified excellence:
DeleteIs it not true to say that in their own small genre, a tiny circle of weirdo writers, RE Howard, CA Smith and HP Lovecraft are far more impressive artists by any definition than anyone writing rpg material today and yet they struggled to make ends meet as writers. I don't think they are the best writers that even fantasy has offered (nevermind literary writers) but they are titans of the imagination and prose style compared to everyone in the OSR, and they operated in a tiny genre and did not earn much. Using these writers as a gauge there is no talent in the OSR worth nurturing.
Isn't this obvious?
Kent, how about we take it as read that every time this topic comes up, you comment to the effect that nobody working in 'the OSR' has any talent. That will save you the bother of having to write it and the rest of us the bother of having to read it.
DeleteIn my mind, it comes down to this distinction: gaming makes for an excellent hobby, a poor industry, and very lousy art. Sensible people have already given up on looking for art in their gaming, and it is time for the next group to let go of their ideas about creating a lucrative business model among hobbyists.
DeleteThat doesn't apply to hobby publishing with marginal profitability and one or two one-man outfits. But people should spare themselves and their loved ones the pain and forget about becoming the next Monte Cook.
As for the idly rich, I suspect they are unlikely to come up with a something like tabletop gaming, for the same reasons they are incapable of writing good pulp fiction. The Brontës almost came up with a proto-RPG, and I could see it becoming a popular parlour game among the rural gentry of the time (the key is the right combination of free time and boredom), but I doubt it could ever possess D&D's vitality and its ability to create its own mythology. Somehow, that needs a different ethos than educated navel-gazing.
==how about we take it as read ...
DeleteOkay, but let me know if any new people arrive so I can tell them.
I'm a big believer in doing something uncreative in the gaps between your creative things, and ideally setting it at the level where you do just enough of it to make money tight, but basically fine.
ReplyDeleteThen whatever money you gain from creative work just makes your life easier and more full of interesting things, which is a sort of virtuous circle. If you're not in the frame of mind for doing interesting creative stuff, burnt out, bad mood whatever, then just don't for a few months. Do cheap stuff, like playing in other people's rpgs! I'd love to get into the position where about 2/3 of my income comes from something simple, and the last third from crazy experimental stuff.
That reminds me of Nassim Taleb's rule for investing: you put 90% of your wealth in cash or some absolutely ultra-safe instruments, and with the other 10% you adopt the most high-risk, high-payoff strategy you can. He has this concept of "convexity" - low-risk, high-payoff - that you can also use in other fields. It is low-risk, high-payoff to spend much of your time in a boring but safe job and spend your free time doing wildly inventive things.
DeleteThis pretty much explains Einstein.