thread: 2012-03-04 : Anonymous Followup
On 2012-03-05, Evan wrote:
A fascinating roll in the muck of overdetermined discourse, this controversy.
It's virtually akin to job market panels at academic conferences. The space is charged with people jockeying for power, prestige, moral superiority and (most importantly) money. All it takes is for one person to bulldoze into the space with a somewhat crude position (i.e. Herr Lehman) in order to set it ablaze with jockeying activities. Everyone turns toward a quest of proving either righteousness ("This is libel!" "People are being robbed!" "I'm boycotting X!") or professionalism ("Well, the industry works like this." "The industry ought to work like that!" "Vincent and Ben are SO unprofessional about this!") The result is a "he said, she said" scenario that produces only evidence of our own career-based anxieties rather than a political economy of the issue.
Frankly, this is second-tier RPG vs. indie RPG discourse. The limits of what we can say about this topic are that which capitalism allows us to say, that is, the ways in which our material and emotional investments are tied up with reproducible fetishized objects (here, tabletop RPG books). Ben has thrown a dynamite stick of language into a sphere both A) underwritten by nursed conflicts and jealousies under the happy creative surface and B) charged with anticipation about an upcoming product (Marvel) that symbolizes a shift in personnel and mechanics from indie to second-tier.
Many of us are gamers who know about what it means to frame stakes and conflicts. But this teakettle storm demonstrates that sometimes we just let the terms of conflict be set for us by others seeking that primal plane where moral absolutes really do rule and we aren't just economically disenfranchised relativists seeking cool relief from the scorching frictions of capitalism in the hobby game industry products we buy.
Speaking of purchases, I intend to buy indie AND second-tier games in the future, just as I acquired an iPad made by disenfranchised laborers in Kowloon and sip fair trade coffee shipped fresh from Colombian farmers who have read up on their rights. 'Tis complicated, our lives as consumers, and woe to he who accepts a binaristic view of it all.
