Well, for those who don’t like me talking about politics or role-playing games, here’s a subject that touches on both.
The role-playing hobby had several antecedents, but most people credit its start with the Medieval Fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-70s. “D&D” was published out of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin by Tactical Studies Rules, which (like MTV or KFC) eventually just became its initials, TSR. It ended up producing several other examples of geek culture like the 70’s apocalypse game Gamma World and the Space Opera game Star Frontiers. They even managed to license D&D as a Saturday morning cartoon, which like most Saturday morning cartoons of the time can only be appreciated ironically.
At the head of this game empire was designer Ernest Gary Gygax. E. Gary Gygax. EGG. Saying that Gygax created D&D is a bit like saying Stan Lee created Marvel Comics (and let’s not get into that right now). He certainly did promote himself like Lee. Like Lee, he was fond of a greatly expanded intellectual vocabulary and a salesman’s approach to his business. If there is an image of the typical role-player as a know-it-all, do-it-my-way male who might be a bit sexist and involved with macho Conan-type Fantasy, Gygax was a pretty big reason for that. He was very good at promoting the idea that Dungeons & Dragons – or his “Advanced” trademark of it – was the epitome of the hobby his company had created and if you were using some other system, you were doing it wrong. But to people like me who had our heads expanded with the very concept of role-playing in the 70s and early 80s, Gygax really was the standard for how to think and how to approach the game. A lot of us thought so. And then we grew up.
We started asking questions like, “why does armor make you harder to hit when it should make you easier to hit but harder to hurt?”, “Is it Good alignment to kill Goblin children, even if they are Goblins?” and “Why does my 1st-level Magic-User have less hit points than his housecat familiar?” Other people started making games with different rules, and in other genres that D&D didn’t simulate well. (For example, TSR’s licensed Marvel Super Heroes, where you actually lost hero points by killing people.)
At the same time, in the process of expanding TSR’s business profile (such as the cartoon deal), Gygax moved to Los Angeles and sort of “went Hollywood.” According to Wikipedia, “Hearing rumors that the Blumes (his charter financial partners) were trying to sell TSR, Gygax returned from Hollywood and discovered the company was in bad financial shape despite healthy sales. Gygax, who at that time owned only about 30% of the stock, requested that the board of directors remove the Blumes as a way of restoring financial health to the company. The Blumes were forced to leave the company after being accused of misusing corporate funds and accumulating large debts in the pursuit of acquisitions such as latchhook rug kits that were thought to be too broadly targeted. Within a year of the departure of the Blumes, the company was forced to post a net loss of US$1.5 million, resulting in layoffs of approximately 75% of the staff.” However Brian Blume and his brother sold their stock to businesswoman Lorraine Williams who eventually took over TSR and nudged Gygax into selling his stock and leaving the company.
All that financial maneuvering didn’t change the fact that the company had diversified into areas that weren’t panning out, and they were no longer the only game in town for RPGs. In 1996 they were put in a cash crunch when publisher Random House returned large numbers of unsold books and demanded fees, and despite having high sales, TSR again laid off staff and by 1997 Williams decided to sell the company to competitor Wizards of the Coast, most famous for the card game Magic: The Gathering. And while Wizards kept the brand going until about 1999, they released a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the WotC brand, as every edition has been since. And they’ve had ups and downs but have solved some of the problems with old AD&D. (Like, 1st-level characters have more hit points than a housecat.) Notably the fifth edition of D&D stated that in creating character background, “You don’t have to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender.” Despite having at least one example non-binary character in the old source material, this declaration was not popular with some people.
Jayson Elliott registered a new TSR in 2011, since the previous trademark had expired, and under this brand published Gygax Magazine with the cooperation of Gary’s sons, Ernie and Luke, but not that of Gygax’s second wife and widow Gail (and that’s its own big kettle of fish) so that project discontinued along with the involvement of the Gygax brothers, although Elliott continued to hold the trademark and publish Top Secret: New World Order, a contemporary edition of an old TSR espionage game. But then this year Ernie and a couple of business partners relaunched TSR as their own thing apparently over Elliott; as he told it on Twitter, “last year, we missed a filing date, and another company registered it, though we are still using it in commerce. While we could win a lawsuit, we frankly don’t have the money to litigate. So we’re licensing it back from them.” The social media accounts of TSR confirmed that they were charging a nominal fee of about 10 dollars for Elliott’s company to use the name. Although that has just changed.
Basically if you are not already familiar with the flaming shitshow, and I can’t blame you if you aren’t, the new company, TSR3 or as a lot of us call it, “nuTSR” started off by saying they were going to be producing a new Star Frontiers despite not having a timetable for that and the minor detail that Wizards still has the rights to that trademark. Then Ernie Gygax did a tape interview where he said “There’s a ton of artists and game designers and people that played TSR, and recently they were dissed for being old-fashioned, possibly anti-modern trends, and enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity”. (I am not sure why the concept of gender fluidity is so radical when Gary Gygax himself created a Dungeon Master’s Guide item called “Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity”, but here we are.) The company is (in its spare time, I guess) trying to promote a game by TSR veteran Jim Ward called Giantlands which looks like a Gamma World-type project, but the details are sketchy on that too. Family drama got pulled in when Luke Gygax supported TSR’s critics and the TSR Twitter account basically dissed him by saying he was never part of the company and Luke said that was a good thing. Whoever is running that account (apparently someone other than Ernie Gygax) announced that they were going to deny right to the TSR name to any old-TSR Facebook fan page that didn’t take their side. In this, at least, they resemble the classic TSR, whose competitors liked to joke that the initials stood for “They Sue Regularly.” (In the midst of all this, Jayson Elliott announced before the 4th of July weekend that he was changing his TSR Games to Solarian Games, apparently because the brand association is no longer an asset.)
And at one point one of the Twitter trans activists asked the company to publicly state “we here at TSR think that trans women are women, trans men are men and trans lives matter.” And the Twitter account for Giantlands just responded: “Disgusting.”
I mean, I guess I understand why these guys are so defensive. They’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole they created and the only way they can is to do what the Left wants them to do. You’re basically asked to make a ritual statement of your good intentions. So: Do I believe trans men are men and trans women are women?
Well… I’m reminded of that Tim Burton movie where Ed Wood and his crew had to get baptized by a local church to get funding for a film and Wood’s agent is played by Bill Murray and when the preacher asks him “Do you reject Satan and all his evils?” Bill goes, “Sure.”
Frankly all this “critical race theory” and “gender identity” stuff doesn’t matter much to me, but I AM a cishet white guy, and you can’t expect it to matter much to me. I CAN see why it matters to other people. I CAN see why diversity and visibility are important.
I understand that the way I grew up viewing the world has already passed by and other people are taking the stage. And my only advice to the Left in that regard is that one day the same thing will happen to you, and sooner than you think. I mean, maybe you assume that you have a social enlightenment that has eluded your forbears, but I’ve been around long enough to see how my siblings’ generation thought they were going to create The Age of Aquarius and then they grew up, and they had to support families, so they had to get jobs, and then they started asking questions like “Who is this guy FICA, and why is he getting 18 percent of my paycheck?”
Just as most of those people who seem so reactionary now probably thought of themselves as hippies or freethinkers about the time D&D first started. And here’s the thing, I’m one of those guys. Ten years ago, maybe even six years ago, I would have been more aligned with the Trumpniks than the vegan trans people who think the Democratic Party isn’t socialist enough. So why am I not a Trumpnik?
Well, ultimately my greatest loyalty has to be to the truth. That requires preserving a government that preserves the freedom to find the truth. You know, like America, ostensibly. And in the 1980s, the best way to do that was to be a right-winger. I don’t care if the Russians love their children too, it doesn’t matter what they want as long as they have no say in their own government and the thugs in charge just care about their own power. That’s still the case, by the way. It’s just that since the thugs changed their military uniforms for business suits and Marxism for the Orthodox Church, the Party of Reagan has decided they’re okay now. More than okay, they see them as role models.
Whatever I might think about the Left, they’re not nearly as much of a threat to the American way of life as what passes for the Right, especially given the Democrats’ lack of ability to consolidate the government as well as Republicans do even when they’re not in charge. But given their general unpopularity, reinforced by the incompetence they display when they are in charge, one of the few things the Right has going for it is general dislike for the Left.
So in terms of the subject at hand, there may be a lot of people in the gaming hobby who don’t like how “woke” Wizards of the Coast and other companies are getting, or “wish we could just ditch politics and get back to games.” Well look, nothing says you can’t. Nothing says you have to buy Wizards’ D&D or quit playing AD&D Second Edition, one of my gaming groups still uses it. I doubt the people who protest the visibility of people of color (as in, green) or nonbinary characters in the game would be using such characters themselves or have dealt with too many ethnic or sexual minorities in real life. This is the kind of thing that sorts itself: Those who are comfortable with a large variety of people seek each other out; those who aren’t, don’t.
But the kind of people who actually get exercised about that sort of thing – to the extent that they’re willing to use it as a selling point – are generally not politically neutral but trying to signal people who aren’t just politically incorrect but who are unsavory or even criminal.
For example:
Somebody following the nuTSR account noted that that Twitter account is following a “Vargr i’ ve’um” or “Thulean Perspective” whose first profile lists him as “Dissident, gentile, game-designer” and whose second profile claims he is “Officially labeled ‘a disturber of the peace’ by NPCs.”
(Just to bring the meta-commentary full circle, ‘NPC’ is a game term for non-player character, as in, any character or monster run by the game master in an RPG or the engine of a video game, and used as a pejorative by the alternative-to-being-right who think that anybody who disagrees with them is basically getting all their opinions programmed into them by Teh Librul Media. Just as they attack empty-headed media celebrities while worshipping a fake billionaire whose profile was largely a result of the mainstream media pushing him as a celebrity.)
“Thulean Perspective” (sorry, I haven’t bothered to put in all the little Scandinavian accent marks) is a social media profile for Varg Vikernes, who has produced “MYFAROG”, or Mythic Fantasy Role-playing Game, which for some reason he thinks sounds cooler in abbreviation. He was much more famous as a pioneer of Scandinavian Black Metal music, endorsing anti-Christianity and Norse paganism, laced with Nazi-adjacent views including what he calls “racialism.” He became most notorious after endorsing the burning of historic churches in Norway and finally killing “Euronymous”, a former Black Metal colleague. Vikernes was tried and given a 21-year sentence (the maximum possible in Norwegian law) and served 15 years.
Say what you will, he walks the walk.
So if you’re that disgusted with the cosmopolitan leftist agenda, there is certainly a means of rebellion, but how far do you want to go with it?
Certainly both sides have escalated the culture war in this country, but it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s people who tried to hang the Vice President in 2016 cause the Electoral College didn’t go their way. If the Right wants to know why the Left is so oversensitive and so willing to assume that everyone they don’t like is a fascist, well, it’s because so many of them want to give that impression, saying that they aren’t bigoted while at the same time using Republican state legislatures to pass laws against trans people and some minority voting blocs, while also saying the January 6 Beer Belly Putsch was just a bunch of Trump-loving tourists engaging in free speech and certainly nothing warranting an investigation. It’s the sort of disingenuousness that the Left calls “gaslighting” and I call “don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.”
My take:
Why is D&D under the Wizards label instead of Wizards using the TSR label or Hasbro (WotC’s owner) using the Hasbro label?
Cause Wizards of the Coast, due to Magic and their previous RPG efforts, still had a positive reputation in the industry. A reputation that TSR had by that point squandered.
Whereas Hasbro has a mixed reputation but is mainly associated with family board games.
WotC could have kept the TSR brand to sell D&D along with their Magic product under Wizards, and when Hasbro bought them out, they could have put everything under the Hasbro label. There are reasons why they didn’t. The reputation of D&D is what Wizards and Hasbro are trying to preserve, and it is now associated with them. The reputation of TSR as a business is in hindsight mostly negative.
“nuTSR” isn’t bringing back the E. Gary Gygax tradition of intellectual depth in gaming, it’s bringing back the Gygaxian tradition of presumption and bad business decisions, and only in the latter does it exceed the old master.
The politics aren’t so much the issue, or wouldn’t be if EVERYthing wasn’t a political football these days.
The salient issues are:
A TSR that existed in conjunction with a more established TSR whose holder accidentally let the rights to the IP lapse
Said second TSR basically paying the first (TS:NWO) company a token sum so that they didn’t challenge their IP, cause as the guy said, he didn’t have enough money to sue even if he wanted to
Second TSR trying to promote itself as an old-school successor to classic TSR when they don’t have that company’s most famous property
Not having the other properties (like Star Frontiers) under complete development – or confirmed copyright
Trying to launch a Kickstarter for their Gamma World-type game under dubious circumstances including all of the above
All that, given that everything is a political football, combined with the dubious political tastes of E. Gygax and his business partner just make the thing more skeezy.
And in the meantime this company basically leans into its political incorrectness and victimhood in order to get a customer base without actually delivering anything concrete, which as the alternative-to-being-right goes, is pretty much on brand.
The main lesson I take from all this – other than, Twitter is too aptly named – is that you don’t ever give up your intellectual property, no matter how little money it’s making. Cause some things cost a lot more in the long run.