I did not back the Avatar RPG. Not my thing at all, but good luck to them.
I have, however, heard on the grapevine that the creators' latest wheeze is to charge people money ($24 a 'ticket', for 8 hours, I believe) to take part in playtest sessions with "approved GMs".
I get it - Magpie Games run a business, and whatever people want to spend their money on is their own affair. Any anyway, it's just for playtesting - not a permanent business model.
But all the same, my initial reaction to this was still: pass the sick bucket. Something about charging money to take part in what should quintessentially be free - sitting around doing something profoundly uncool with your mates for the simple reason that you enjoy it - sends shivers down my spine; it makes all of the most pessimistic critiques of 'neoliberalism' seem positively breezy by comparison. What do we marketise next? Friendship itself? Pay me $24 and I'll hang out with you for two consecutive Saturday nights, four hours a session?
But it is worth dwelling on the reasons why exactly the idea of 'pay-for-play' makes my skin crawl. It can't be that moneymaking in connection to RPGs is wrong. Clearly, it isn't. If you create something that people enjoy there is absolutely no reason why you should not wish to make it your profession, and, broadly speaking, that is indeed a public good - it is how we get great novels, films, music, poetry, art, sport, after all. Anybody who doubts this should watch a rugby union match played prior to 1995, when it was still an amateur sport, and compare it to a rugby union match played in the year 2021. Professionalisation produces excellence, and that is to be welcomed, and I applaud Magpie Games for their success.
Paying to play, on the other hand, is something else. Ultimately, I think, it is wrong for the same reason that I believe paying for sex is wrong. (It should go without saying that I am not suggesting Magpie Games are somehow "prostituting" themselves - I'm just reasoning by analogy.) What is play, and why do we do it? A biologist would no doubt have a more instrumental answer to those questions, but in the end I give it Michael Oakeshott's definition as something that is enjoyed for no ulterior purpose. It is an activity that "begins and ends in itself". And it is only in play therefore that we are truly really free: it is the only thing that we do that is not designed ultimately to satisfy a material need or meet a material want of some kind, but is done purely for its own sake - because we choose it.
This definition is broader than games specifically, and would include other leisure activities like, I think, hanging out with friends or family, sex (at least sometimes), taking a walk in the countyside, swimming in the sea, reading a book, listening to music, and so on. And it certainly includes RPGs. We play D&D not because we have to, or feel we have to, and not because it is tied to some material desire, but because we choose to do so. The moment we do it in order to make money, we diminish it - we cease to be what Oakeshott called homo ludens, and instead revert to homo laborans, a lesser being, who performs his activities because he has to or believes that to be the case, or has urges or desires that need to be fulfilled; who acts for purposes other than mere choice alone (to pay the bills, pay the mortgage, go on holiday, buy a bigger house/car/TV....).
The other point, of course, is that morality is at least in part a recognition that other human beings have an intrinsic value and are not simply materials to be used for the meeting of needs, wants or desires, and this makes play a fundamentally moral act when done with others. It is something that allows us to recognise our fellow beings as moral agents in their own right - participating for no other reason than out of choice. Paying for sex is wrong in my view because it instrumentalises the participants; it is not done purely out of choice but partly from (real or perceived) necessity or the satisfaction of an urge, and it thus transforms the other into a mere tool for the meeting of a need. It would be melodramatic in the extreme to mention paying to play the Avatar RPG in the same sentence, but at root the problem is the same; it is the transformation of something moral into something that is fundamentally amoral - the fulfilment of a need (the making of money) replacing the choice of doing something purely for its own sake.
I mostly agree with you, even if I would choose different analogy. But to play the devil's advocate - wasn't it already normalized to pay-to-play in conventions? And isn't playtesting a new RPG (with or without an "approved" GM) essentially a way to get a product earlier than it is released to the general public?
ReplyDeleteBasically, I think it would be completely moral to sell playtesting kits of the avatar RPG, even though I would not buy one. Hell, I've seen (much smaller) kickstarters doing similar things in the past.
I also think that conventions are awfully similar to pay-to-play, with some middleman. The model I'm familiar with, which might not be the standard everywhere, is that while the GM isn't payed for running a convention game, they do gets benefits (such as free entrance to other events) and the players do pay. Again not exactly the same, and I could see the argument that this is amoral as well, but it's definitely more common and serves a greater good (presumably the players paying allows for the convention in the first place, which is good for everyone involved).
However I did feel uneasy when I saw ads online for a pay-to-play campaign, so I definitely agree with your point to some degree. Maybe the only difference in my mind is simply how common it is, which doesn't say much about morality I guess.
Maybe if there's an added benefit (after all, you *couldn't* playtest the avatar RPG with your friends at home if you wanted to, that's what they're selling) it's better? I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it more.
The added benefit you mentioned at the end is undoubtedly how people are going to rationalise paying the money. But I don't think that makes it better or really changes the fundamental ickiness, at least to my eye. It's still instrumentalising something that should quintessentially be free. (I'd put convention play in the same category when done for the reasons you suggest.)
DeleteMight consider the fact that some people don't have whom to play with and paying for it might be the only option. Or, they choose to have someone run a game for them on a "professional" level.
ReplyDeleteAlso, running games and charging nullifies your claim that the GM doesn't "choose" to be there. Clearly they do, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
The point is that the GM's "choice" to be there is not a pure or genuine one - it's motivated by the chance to make money. It is done for an instrumental end, rather than play for its own sake.
DeleteWould paying for something skew the results of a playtest?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure they've focused group the hell out of the issue and whenever they have movie test audiences its always free. Of course those are people dragged randomly off the street and not volunteers, still it makes me wonder.
Yeah, I had the same thought. To be frank, it suggests to me that "playtesting" is less important than the chance to squeeze more money out of the whole thing. Call me cynical.
DeleteI'd be deeply concerned that any playtesting done this way would be worthless. People willing to pay this way are either going to be unduly critical (if they feel they didn't get their money's worth in terms of entertainment) or unreasonably generous (since they're already literally invested in the game).
DeleteI agree.
DeleteA "controversial topic" to be sure. I don't agree that there is a clear distinction between play and other activities, or that there's a moral/amoral binary between unpaid and paid activities. I'd go so far as to suggest that both those lines of argument are red herrings. Provided that no one is harmed or exploited, what does it matter whether money changes hands? Time is another commodity we have precious little of, and although I don't think I would ever directly pay to play, I've been in enough badly-run games to see the value in playing something run by a "professional" who has put the time and effort into prepping. We pay to go to the theatre, to restaurants, to theme parks. We pay artists and artisans for their time, creativity and skill. I don't see how DM'ing sits outside of all that.
ReplyDeleteDo we pay people to hang out with us? What's wrong with that, "if no one is harmed or exploited"? I don't mean that facetiously - I'm interested in the moral distinction.
DeleteThere isn't any moral distinction. You don't pay people to hang out with you, but some people do. Hell, being paid to hang out with people is a major part of any caretaker type job, be that working with the elderly, disabled, orphans or any other group. Neither of these become immoral the moment money enters the equation, but all of them do harm or exploitation comes to pass.
DeleteIn turn I am interested in why do you think there is a moral distinction between being a professional sex worker, and a professional rugby player, as they both get paid to do an activity that should ideally be enjoyed for free with those you are close with. Why is a rugby player not instrumentalized he same way a sex worker is?
I didn't say anything about "immorality" - I made the distinction between morality and amorality, which is a different thing entirely. And yes, I think being paid to care for the elderly, disabled, orphans, etc., is amoral on these terms. It is done not for its own sake, but to satisfy one's needs. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, has no value, or is anything to be ashamed of. It's important. But it's not moral. Indeed, in an ideal moral universe it would be unnecessary because care would happen within the family/community where necessary.
DeleteA professional rugby player is instrumentalised, sure, but I'm sitting here at work being instrumentalised too. Anyone who has a job is. Does that mean we should welcome more of it, especially into the sphere of sex? No.
I'm aware I don't have the theological or philosophy chops to argue this properly, but I think I see where you are coming from. Something done for its own sake is different to something done for pay. I'm not sure I agree, because I think money is only one commodity that can be exchanged. Time, expertise and even emotion are perhaps others. I also think it would be incorrect to say that, for example, the work of a carer who puts their heart into their work, respecting their charges etc, has the same moral worth as the work of the carer who does the bare minimum not to get fired, assuming they are paid the same.
DeleteThere was an interesting TV documentary 10 or 15 years ago about the social care side of sex work: they followed a disabled man (or possibly several men?) who visited Amsterdam regularly (I think even accompanied by their social worker?) because it was recognised that they wouldn't get that sort of contact any other way, and it seemed to benefit them. I don't have strong views either way - I have known people who've been exploited into prostitution, but also those who claim they are proud and very happy to be able to make their money that way. And, "oldest profession" and all that, it ain't like it's going away. Ditto paid for DMs, I figure.
DeleteI think as long as we live in a society where scarcity is a thing, we can't afford to be moral in your terms, and trying to be moral is just going to hurt us. And if doing something hurts us, it can't be considered a positive thing.
DeleteThere is always going to be scarcity. But I don't really understand your comment. I'm not saying nobody should be a paid carer. I'm just saying that in an ideal world it would not be necessary.
DeleteThe comparison with RPGs is not really a valid one, anyway, I think, because being a carer is actually very important, whereas publishing RPGs is not. It's not as though people will die if Magie Games doesn't charge people $24 to take part in online "curated play".
I'm saying that moral behaviour and an ideal world as you define them are not useful categories in the real world, and instead of striving for them we should base our moral judgement of an activity on whether it causes harm or not.
DeleteWell, we're not talking about the distinction between carers and RPGs, as I was trying to make clear. I agree that an "ideal world" is not really a valid comparitor when it comes to being a paid carer. But we could live in a society in which nobody pays anybody to be a DM. I mean, that's actually achievable - nobody is going to die if nobody is paid to DM games of D&D, are they?
DeleteThe issue of whether or not it causes harm is the real question. I think paid DMing is harmful to the soul. Not in a big way, sure. But tiny harms to the soul gradually add up.
I hate sounding like a broken record, much less a political reactionary, but your prostitution analogy is perhaps closer to the mark than you appreciate. There is, shall we say, A Certain Online Subculture that endorses all of the following propositions:
ReplyDelete1. All sex is / ought to be purely transactional, and hence "sex work is real work", young women selling themselves on OnlyFans is healthy and ought to be normalized, etc.
2. Routine social interactions are "emotional labour", and hence in every social interaction one person ought to be paying and the other ought to be getting paid.
3. All art needs to represent every identity group or it is "erasing" those it omits; however, if you depict any identity group in your art and are not a member of said group, you are morally obliged to pay one or more "consultants" holding themselves forth as members of said identity group to so-sign your creation or risk being accused of "appropriating" the "cultural property" of said group.
4. RPG creation is work, and hence all people who hold themselves out as "RPG creators" MUST be able to support themselves financially with the proceeds from selling their creations, and hence anyone offering RPG content free of charge is essentially a scab undercutting these struggling RPG creators and taking bread out of their children's mouths.
Again: I regret that I sound like a grumpy old man, but the pattern is too conspicuous to avoid pointing it out. "All social relations must be monetized and rendered purely transactional" is an odd rallying cry for a movement that labels itself as concerned with the liberation of the downtrodden, but here we are.
Very well put. I have nothing to add, except that I have now reached the stage of embracing being a grumpy old man and political reactionary. All the trends you identify are terrible and should be reversed.
DeleteI see a lot of where you're coming from here, but your argument would be a lot more effective if you didn't get sidetracked by a lot of obvious straw men.
DeleteThe real travesty is that Avatar made over 9 million dollars when I would pay good money NOT to play it.
ReplyDeleteHa! On that point...whatever floats their boat. I don't get it either.
DeleteI looked over the Avatar playtest. It seems to be all about PbtA-style relationships and personal hangups with very very few rules about, you know, Bending. Seems like they're missing a big chunk of the target audience and the books are going to be far more likely to be bookshelf decoration than actually played much...
DeleteThis is a tough one. My mind immediately turns to the rising number of “DMs for hire” (including someone I know) who get paid per hour or participant for running RPGs. In fhe case of my friend, he’s running games for teens and tweens and their parents are the ones paying, making him essentially like a paid birthday party entertainer. I’m sort of envious of fhe money to be made here, and I know he must be good. But (1) I don’t know if I could do this as a DM, it makes the power relationship seem weird and (2) as an adult, I would NEVER pay for this because it is SO easy to DM a game myself, and I just feel it shouldn’t be something you pay for.
ReplyDeleteOTOH some people whose motives I can’t fathom pay major money for celebrity signatures, so if they are willing to pay money to spend time with people, and perhaps have those people DM a game for them, it at least makes more sense than *that*.
Yeah, the thought of doing that makes me feel really uncomfortable.
DeleteActually, what it brings to mind is going to the cubs and scouts as a kid. We just used to pay 20p in subs to pay for the renting of a church hall and refreshments. It was otherwise free and the adults were there on a voluntary basis. What happened to adults doing stuff for kids just because they wanted to be a positive influence in the community?
I know the answer to that question, but I think something important has been lost.
I run some games for my son and his friends and it can really be rewarding. More reliable schedule, no rules lawyering, or random table talk and just seeing them REALLY get into it really puts a smile on my face.
DeleteI'm also not a fan of the pay-to-playtest idea, but I don't follow your analogies here. If this were professionalising the hobby in the same way as a sport, then surely the players would be PAID to play, not PAYING?
ReplyDeleteI'm not even sure the sports argument holds up entirely. I know nothing about Rugby, and barely any more about Soccer, but I'm pretty sure that in the latter case over-professionalisation has killed the sport (if not the spectacle).
I've no problem with people being paid to DM a game - it can be a huge time-sink, and requires a certain level of skill. In the same way, I've no problem with people charging for escape games, wilderness adventures, etc.
I had some vague thoughts the other day about how the desire for ever more detailed RPG rules is really just a corollary of how crap adults are at play - actual play, not sport. If, like me, the main thing you want from an RPG is group creativity and surprising new experiences, you will find that young kids do this amazingly well with no explicit ruleset. Adults however need the fallback of something to scaffold their play.
You've got no problem with people being paid to DM a game? OK - it's a tenner a session for you from now on!!!
DeleteSorry, just realised I was a bit unclear on a couple of points there: the phrase "wilderness adventure" has a rather different meaning in the context of our hobby, what I meant was extending your going-for-a-walk analogy, paying somebody to take you out in the countryside, foraging, bivvying, climbing, whatever.
ReplyDeleteAnd the relevance of the last paragraph: the whole "professional DM" thing is really another case of adults (and teenagers, which is where this behaviour seems to start) paying for the security of knowing that they'll be doing things right. There's more to it than that, sure, but that seems to be a big part.
(Not unrelated: I've been dreaming of pimping myself for some professional DMing - although I'm well aware that I need more practice amateur-DMing first. But my conception of the "job" is more a combination of professional DM and the aforementioned wilderness adventure: come to my crazy off-grid house and spend a weekend playing games by candlelight, with perhaps some Milky Way-gazing thrown in. Also, although a part of my thinking here is "what the hell kind of monetiseable skills do I actually have any more", a bigger part of it is that, where I am, I think I actually stand more chance of finding players this way than I do by being an "amateur DM")
You would find a market for that for sure.
DeleteYou can do yoga for free, or pay an expert that can guide you and give you a better experience (especially if you're new to yoga). What Magpie Games are doing doesn't look really different to me.
ReplyDelete> Pay me $24 and I'll hang out with you for two consecutive Saturday nights, four hours a session?
If you find customers, why not? But you should ask more: time is precious for everyone and 3$/h sounds definitely below minimum wage.
> paying for sex is wrong
One person is willing to pay for a service, the other person is willing to be paid for that service. Sex is morally different than a massage or a haircut only because our current culture is prudish. What's immoral is the situations of abuse and loss of choice that many prostitutes must endure, but unless something horrible is happening to those "approved GMs", I doubt this applies here.
> This definition is broader than games specifically, and would include […] listening to music
Bingo. Professional musicians (and producers, songwriters, sound engineers, publishers, …) usually don't play for free, by definition. Maybe you don't pay money for the music you listen, but there's most probably some form of transaction going on that pays for the music you enjoy. Or maybe you only listen to buskers without ever shelling out any tip.
Haha! Paying for a DM: terms and conditions apply. I have to admit many's the time I've felt incredibly privileged playing with (at least) two of my favourite writers, and at any other time in my life I'd have gladly coughed up a tenner. Now I'm facing old age in poverty: less so.
ReplyDelete(Weird, my phone autocorrected "poverty" to "Liverpool")
And, yeah, I'm certain there'd be a market for the "D&D rural horror experience". I'm just (as with most of the good ideas I have) terrified of dipping a toe in until I've tried it with plenty of safety ropes. And none of my bastard friends can get it together to gather a group of people and bring them here for the weekend.
On the original topic: the more I think about it, the less sense I think it makes. Strikes me as a bit of a case of "in my day we did things the RIGHT way". I too get a slight bad gut feeling about it, but if every other form of joy can be monetised, why not gaming? And after all, if nobody's turning a profit off you in your leisure time, why are you even EXISTING? Like you said, something something Neoliberalism.
You said it: "If every other form of joy can be monetised, why not gaming?"
DeleteI don't dispute that all forms of joy can be monetised! I'm saying some shouldn't be.
It doesn't follow that just because everything can be monitised there's nothing wrong with it.
DeleteTesting (i.e. playing) computer games or software in general is a paid profession. Why not for tabletop rpgs?
ReplyDeleteBut in software, it’s the players who are paid, right?
DeleteJason beat me to it.
DeleteNot only are software playtesters paid, they're not *playing* the games they test. It's work, best performed by experienced professionals. They're not in it for fun, they're actively trying to break the game or find that there's nothing left to be broken. Their feedback on whether the experience was enjoyable is of some use, but it's so subjective that it has little use to the programmers.
DeleteThat sort of model doesn't work well with a TTRPG. Deliberately savaging the rules at every opportunity will spoil the game experience for everyone involved - and you can't do that with with paying customers, can you?
You need to test tabletop rpgs or even settings or modules the same way, looking for exploits, loopholes, bugs in the system or the narrative - hence the long "playtesters" section on the opening pages of most rpg products. That includes deliberate attempts to wreak havoc with things, and having participated a few sessions in this vein, I'm not convinced it wouldn't be fun, not the least. I'm sure most rpg playtesters are unpaid only because the profit margin in the industry just isn't that high, otherwise it would be a burgeoning profession like software testing. Comparing that to prostitution is, erm, juvenile - you're a lapdog of the corporate bastards or even a prostitute if you have a day or part-time job. Right.
DeleteI bent over backwards to make clear that I wasn't directly comparing prostitution to DMing-for-pay (or doing a job for that matter) but I'd be interested to hear your justification for why such a comparison would be juvenile.
DeleteExplain to me how exactly it's illegitimate to argue that prostitution and DMing-for-pay are fundamentally different. Because it seems to me that your argument rests on them being the same. This is, both involve somebody consenting to pay for something that they enjoy, and somebody else consenting to offer the service, and there being nothing wrong with that.
Usually DMing works as a kind of apprenticeship. You get recruited as a newbie and play under a DM and after a while you figure out how it works and start DMing yourself, maybe for some other newbies. In time periods where there are few newbies coming in there are more than enough DMs to go around and often there is a wait list in an established group for players to get a shot at sitting in the DM chair (at least that's how it happens in my own group). But in time periods where D&D is really booming like the 80's or recent years there is a real glut of newbies and sometimes not enough experienced DMs to go 'round.
ReplyDeleteDMing for a group of newbies when you've never played yourself is really intimidating for a lot of people and a lot of people fuck it up badly. I know I was a terrible DM when I started off at age 10 trying to wrangle the Rules Cyclopedia for a bunch of newbies when I knew barely anything myself.
Of course these days having the internet makes a lot more resources available so people these days are less in the dark than I was as a newbie but I could see paying for a DM to show me to ropes just until I could figure out how to play since it's hard to figure out how to play without a DM and if there aren't enough to go around then I could see paying for one in a pinch.
But I see where you're coming from. It wouldn't feel right to do a long campaign with a paid DM.
I actually think it is quite OK to pay a DM for a game the same way I can pay someone to guide me around a city or a mountain.
ReplyDelete- it is useful for people who have never played or who want to check someone's style
- it is useful for people who are socially awkward and want someone to deal with this aspect. Manage the schedules and the group dynamics
There are indeed lots of analogy to draw from paying for sex and I also disagree with you on that topic. One thing is that the hired DM must present clearly what is he offering and lay down some basic boundaries. But appart from that you can have a perfectly fine experience (if the DM is actually good).
I think paying for somebody to guide you round a city or mountain is fundamentally diminishing in the same way paying somebody to DM is. I understand the reasons why somebody does it, and it's not like I think it's the crime of the century, but it diminishes what travel is all about in the same way paying a DM diminishes what D&D is.
DeletePerhaps you just haven't had a good city or mountain guide? I avoided things like that for most of my life, but then I went on https://theworsttours.weebly.com/ and it's one of the best experiences I've ever had on holiday, plus it helps put food on the table of unemployed architects. There is no way in a lifetime that I could ever have learned about Portugal some of the things I learned on that tour. Plus I would never have dreamed of breaking into an abandoned shopping centre to visit old shops full of rehearsing punk bands if I had not had a local with me.
Delete(Dear MM, there's still a note from me regarding playtest awaiting approval. Is it rejected or just unseen? Thank you.)
ReplyDelete