Transcript
Gravity. The gravity of space-time and the gravity of fame. I think they’re the same thing. Or at least function the same, despite one being physical and the other metaphysical. A large mass bends space-time, like a bowling ball on a trampoline, causing smaller masses to fall into orbits around it. And really large, or extremely dense masses simply pull in surrounding information at a rate that disables any of that information from escaping it’s event horizon – a la black holes. Gravity is a fundamental force or feature of physics in our universe. And I think the concept of gravity exists metaphysically in our social and mental space as well. And it means that, logically, Indy and Alternative tabletop games will never be able to compete with Games Workshop or Wizards of the Coast.
Greetings, good humans, and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we get jiggy with the woo-woo concepts and irresponsibly, and perhaps ludicrously, apply them to our tabletop gaming hobby!
So let’s get ludicrous.
We live in a universe of paradoxes and strange symmetries. A world where someone can manufacture their own success … or their own demise. A world where seemingly totally unrelated events or laws of physics match patternistically – patternistically is not a word, I know but remember, I’m a wordsmith … I’m smithing words left and right – but in our world it’s metaphysically logical that smaller, alternative, indy, whatever the term you wanna use to describe wargames or RPGs that aren’t produced by Games Workshop or Wizards of the Coast, there’s a logical reason why these games will never compete with the elephants in the game store.
Just for clarity, the term “independent” in today’s topic means, essentially, not affiliated with or supported by or produced by a large corporation. I’m used to the “indy” term from the filmmaking space. Indy film vs studio film, et cetera. So independently-produced could mean a single person making their own game or a small company making a game, there’s just a, you know, like an imaginary line somewhere where if a company is this big, they’re considered corporate or big business and below that line are what we’re calling “independent” producers.
So today I’m sharing a concept I heard about somewhere else, I don’t remember if it was a podcast or if I read it somewhere, I just don’t remember. It wasn’t about tabletop hobby stuff, but still, small disclaimer, I’m stealing this idea because it definitely applies to the topic at hand. At its core, the concept is that fame functions a lot like gravity. Which is essentially trying to answer the question: can indy anything compete with famous anything.
Like can Blades In The Dark compete with Dungeons and Dragons? Or can Infinity Code One compete with Warhammer 40k? Or even can a writer NOT named Stephen King or George R R Martin compete with Stephen King or George R R Martin?
The answer to this singular question is NO. No, they cannot. And they never will. It’s literally the nature of the universe that makes it so.
The follow up question then is: well, if what this knucklehead on this Tabletop Alchemy channel says is true, why bother creating anything new or independent or alternative at all?
And the answer to that is, because, my dear viewer, as I mentioned earlier, another nature of our universe is the “paradox”. And paradoxes result in exceptions to the rules all the time. In fact, exception to a rule is literally a rule all on its own. So, paradoxically, even though something small can never compete with something big, small things emerge all the time that eventually become competitive with all those things I just said were impossible to compete with. And my saying both things, while paradoxical, fits the laws of our sorta paradox-loaded universe.
All right, so, why do I think an indy game like, say, Relicblade won’t ever be able to compete with, say, Warcry? The actual non-glib answer to that is that I merely think it’s highly unlikely, not that it’s impossible. No offense at all is intended against Relicblade, not by a long shot, or ANY of the games I might mention in this video. Relicblade is fuckin’ awesome and has a fantastic line of miniatures produced by Metal King Studios. Which, actually, is the product of a single dude – artist extraordinaire, Sean Sutter. And no, I don’t know him, I don’t know any of the people or companies I mention on this show, I just pretend to name-drop. What?
These [bleep]ing videos. Wow.
Let’s say D&D is the Jupiter of our tabletop RPG hobby. Let’s say Blades in the Dark is Phobos, one of Jupiter’s moons. ICRPG is Europa, Numenera is Ganymede. Yes, I’m still just making stuff up, I didn’t go looking for sales numbers to correlate all these game products to one another to make a metaphor statistically accurate. You’re just watching artistic license in action so I can make a point.
I did google Jupiter moons, though, and I was completely surprised to find out it has 80 moons! Eight zero, 80. 80 moons! Who knew? I mean besides me. And come to think of it, even that little tidbit is a perfect metaphor for the topic today.
For another example, in your friendly local game store, there’s a massive or famous game that doesn’t share one shelf with the other 20 skirmish games and wargames, if those are even on a shelf, naw, it’s got it’s own aisle, it’s own massive chunk of retail landscape. Now let’s do a quick mental, you know, zen thing:
Breathe in, breathe out. Imagine you’re walking into your local game store. You wander toward the miniatures aisle. You see boxes and boxes of Games Workshop product. And there, around the corner, you see boxes and boxes of more Games Workshop product. And over there … you see racks and racks of Games Workshop rule books … and paints … and novels.
Now, did you even see that little shelf off to the side with the non-GW products on it? It was easy to miss. This is a literal example of what’s going on in the metaphysical zeitgeist as well as physically in a store.
Another thing I find interesting and correlative to the physics of our universe, like the way motion and momentum work, is how a company or person or endeavor can reach a “critical mass”, a turning point where the very size of a thing’s “presence” in the zeitgeist begins to power itself. Kinda like a snowball rolling downhill, right? Momentum begets momentum if just a bit of energy is continually applied. And – I’m gonna jump to a new metaphor for a sec – the brighter a light, the more it outshines or obscures smaller lights. It’s just physics.
Of course it’s up to that famous entity to continue generating some energy, but you know, once you have some momentum going, it does become easier to maintain or build upon that momentum. Not easy but easier. Sustainable celebrity comes from hard work, vision and constant execution.
Everything is an example of this. A YouTube channel gains more reach as its audience grows. Stephen King’s audience grows because he has an audience. He’s gotta maintain quality, of course, but until he writes something that’s complete dog shit – well, maybe in his case like ten dog shit books in a row – he’ll continue to reach more and more readers. And so he takes up more “attention space” in the zeitgeist, or, more literally, he takes up more google search result space, leaving less space for lesser known authors to be discovered. He’s a black hole with a huge event horizon in the fiction book space!
Now I’m sure this all sounds like a huge “Duh, dude” when discussing it out loud. I just find it fascinating that the universe seems to function in a metaphysical way similar to how it functions in a physical way. So if this is a big DUH, then what’s the point of this conversation? I’ve got three points I wanna make.
The first is that, as I mentioned, maintaining critical mass, or “continued success”, relies on continued effort – nothing manifests energy from nothing. And any of these huge entities can crash and burn or fade away into irrelevancy at any time. So even if you’re a big famous corporation or creator, you still gotta iterate and progress and work hard to keep up that momentum, that metaphysical gravitational pull.
The second point is how not only does fame work like gravity, but the metaphysical gravitational pull of larger and larger entities works very similar to how black holes work, insofar as how a black hole might suck up smaller entities that stray too close – or in our running metaphor, how large corporations buy up smaller competing companies or hire independent creatives that gain their notice.
My third point has to do with that paradox I mentioned. While no indy game company can compete with Games Workshop, the only game company that’s gonna compete with Games Workshop is gonna rise from that impossible spot of trying to compete with Games Workshop.
My friend and I have this repeated conversation all the time. Mostly ‘cause he’s a glutton for punishment, I think. He’s gonna throw something at me for that.
He’s got this gnawing hunger, this burning desire to be part of some hugely successful creative endeavor, be that a movie, a video game, a graphic novel series, a tv show, or some other creative, artistic commercial enterprise that’s very successful. He’s one of those guys who’s pretty into the “Top 40” kinda stuff, like real pop culture kinda stuff, sometimes I think just because it’s popular.
And he’s often focused a lot on financials – the money side of things. Success, in his mind, in my opinion, feels like it’s measured by the number of ducats a project or company rakes in. We talk about the meteoric rise of new things, like Stranger Things, for example, or The Blair Witch Project, or Gloomhaven, and he’s always wondering how to emulate that new thing’s success.
My position every time we have this conversation is that “the next big thing” will never be an emulation of what already was a “next big thing”. I mean, you can never know what the next big thing is gonna be. The next big thing will come out of nowhere – that’s why it’ll be “the next big thing”.
So not being able to predict what the next big thing will be by definition means that if you want to make something successful, you have to embark on a risk-taking endeavor. You have to create your own thing with the full understanding that success is never guaranteed. In fact, you have to understand that it’s way more likely to not be successful.
And you gotta make your thing or do the thing you wanna do in spite of this knowledge. Cause Unsuccess is not guaranteed either. That’s a weird way to put it. Who writes this garbage? Of course what I mean is that Failure is not guaranteed either.
But a lot of us older, jaded folks feel an investment of time and energy into something that’s most likely going to fail, or at least not be financially successful, is a ridiculous risk to take. And I definitely feel that the older one gets the more one potentially feels like this, simply because one has more experience in life. So if you have all this perceived risk, why bother trying to make anything at all? That’s where it comes down to doing something just because you want do it. You wanna make the thing, you wanna create. So you just do it for that reason alone. Profit has gotta be the last thing you think about – if you even think about it at all.
I’m pretty sure this whole concept bothers my buddy a lot. I think it also bothers Hollywood executives and company shareholders a lot. People want “sure things”, they want as low of a risk factor and as high of a profit margin as possible, and I’m a person, at least as far as you know, so I’m included in this mindset. We all wanna mitigate risk, but most of the time, we would probably benefit from taking more risks in life than less. And when it comes to creative endeavors, money just can’t be the driving force, because money is just a by-product, it’s never the actual thing, it’s not the creative endeavor, the product, the experience, whatever, money is not the thing.
Now I’m sure there are thousands of counter arguments to this whole thing, and I freely admit that in certain industries there are many more technical and financial aspects to a product or company where focusing on financials is actually a way to generate success. I’m talking about creative endeavors here, commercial art and entertainment. As with most of my topics on this channel, I think there are several evenings worth of beer and pretzel conversation to be had about this.
Ultimately I find it fascinating that in a world where most of us can look at something and say, “no one can compete with that” – breakouts not only happen but always happen. Even though they’re impossible. Miniature agnostic games would not exist without Games Workshop. And Games Workshop wouldn’t exist without Dungeons and Dragons. And Dungeons and Dragons wouldn’t exist without tabletop military wargames used by actual armies way back in history. Everything comes from something, but the big huge successes are typically … new. Or new twists. Not just re-hashes of existing IP or products.
So, do we have an answer to my ridiculous click-baity title? I think we do. Is it satisfying? For me it is, but it might not be for you. Is it intriguing and possibly fuel for the adventure of taking risks and making something. I hope so, but you tell me.
Go make something! See ya!