Where I Talk About Journalism in TTRPGs
Keagan, the creator of In Extremis, recently came back from their twitter hiatus to post a list of hot takes. And it’s inspired me to have a hot take of my own. I’m doing it here on Tumblr because I can and because this might turn into a well-researched article at some point instead of just my coffee-induced ramblings.
And I obviously need more than 240 characters.
I want to talk about games journalism here. My hot take? That we, as professionals and hobbyists in the TTRPG space, should have been much more skeptical of Dicebreaker and Polygon when they came to us telling us they would cover indie games.
To explain this I need to talk about journalism first. Mostly I need to talk about modern journalism. There are lots of great ways to learn about modern journalism and how it’s completely fucked. I think it’s rather telling that most people online only get reliable news from other individuals over Twitter.com (which is one of the reasons why the threat of Twitter disappearing is a greater act of aggression than anyone is really ready to talk about yet).
Modern journalism is owned by rich people. This isn’t news. We all know that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. We all know that journalism is a business at this point. It needs to turn a profit or the rich people will sell it and people will lose their jobs. To turn a profit, the newspapers, magazines, and websites need to sell ad space. And for those ads to make the company money, people need to see them. Which means buying a newspaper or going to a website.
Apologies if this is all painfully obvious to anyone, but stick with me. Also, real quick, we’re ignoring subscription services right now because I’m going to talk about those later on.
So modern journalists are not responsible for reporting the news. They are responsible for getting people to buy the thing or click the thing. They do this a lot of different ways, but the most prevalent one in our modern age is through outrage and misdirection. Not a week goes by that a painfully bad article title is roasted because it refuses to report directly and obfuscates blame or opinion on the matter.
They also do this by writing lots of articles. You, as a working journalist, might have to write an article a week (sometimes more!) and you will often be assigned your topics. You can call this bloatware or whatever you want, but the important thing to note is that they need to do this or they can’t make money.
All of this to say that modern journalism is not altruistic. It is not a bunch of well-intentioned people who simply want to report the news and be supported for that. It’s not a bunch of folks who just love researching a topic and reporting on that. It’s not a place that thrives on well-thought-out opinions or even reportable facts.
In these conditions, it is possible for a journalist to do amazing work. It does happen. But, if I’m being fair, I cannot expect that from journalists. What I can expect when looking at modern journalism is mostly click-bait. The best journalism work comes from passion. Journalism, like other mediums of writing, is an artform. To Art is to be human, and I think to report/analyze/critique things is part of that.
I think it would be easy to just chalk it all up to capitalism-bad and move on. And a lot of people have. People have taken the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” to defend people working for literal defense contractors, so there’s no limit to the kinds of takes a person can have about working conditions, payments, and their relations to artistic endeavors. This post is to collect my thoughts on the matter in relation to my field, which is tabletop roleplaying games.
My first thought revolves around artist endeavors as a hobbyist. To do that, let me tell you how I started my career in games, because I think it’s a normal path for hobbyists to take on their way to working professionally (meaning full-time with pay).
I started writing game material because I liked doing it. I would have described it as a compulsion at the time because I had so many game ideas and not enough time to game them, so I would write them. I posted them on reddit because that’s what I felt like doing. I wanted to share my ideas because I believed I was smart and creative and wanted other people to say that to me. I wrote as a selfish endeavor. I wrote for self-fulfillment. I wrote as an act of kindness to myself.
I need to stop here before I say the spicy stuff. Fair payment in the artistic fields (all of them) is a current and constant battle professionals wage day to day. People who create as a job, under contract, or whatever else, deserve fair pay. Livable wages.
I say this because I believe I did not automatically deserve payment for enjoying my hobby. I do not believe my artistic labor automatically means I was owed. I write my fan fiction (even now as a professional game designer) as a hobby. I do it because I feel like it. I think I can (and we should) make a distinction between making art for yourself and making art for consumption. WotC paying their freelancers pennies on the dollar is bad. Me writing for free in my spare time because I want to is not bad and is in fact normal.
I feel I need to make this distinction because money in the artistic fields is a touchy topic and I in no way want to infer that artists don’t deserve payment. In fact I would always argue that they deserve more.
Back to the story. So, my career started because through my writings I eventually got fans/followers. I eventually started posting my works to storefronts and charging for them or using pay-what-you-want models. Through more creations I earned more followers and would get a few more purchases each time. I did this (semi-consistently) until I had a big release where I decided to run pre-orders for a print book.
The process of me going from hobbyist to professional was slow and took a lot of hail mary’s. It mainly relied on me believing my work had value and being consistent. I believe a lot of other creators/freelancers go through a similar process. A slow build from hobby work to paid work. An accumulation of clients and colleagues. A slow ramp of charging more or making more, or whatever.
I tell that story because I believe that we, as TTRPG folks, cannot rely on an outside corporation to create journalism for us. I believe, to the core of my being, that any journalism we have needs to be home grown.
But why? Because what you’re getting when you read A Journalism is a person’s research and opinion. Two things that are personal and not inherent with capitalism/corporations. Journalism comes from the individuals, not the business behind them. Which means, like other art forms, there will be journalists you like, those you dislike, those you disagree with but enjoy hearing their perspective, and so many in between. Each journalist will have a style and their own listeners and detractors.
To rely on corporations is to give them control over style. It’s to turn it into a money game instead of an artistic/analytical field. It’s to flatten things into marketability to the widest range of people. It’s to deny the growth of opinions and personalities that we’ve seen develop in every other journalistic medium. Think of your favorite personalities in movie and video game journalism and imagine that, YES, we can have that here as well.
I will repeat that I believe the best journalism comes from passion. What’s better? A corporation paying a journalist to write something to make that corporation more money which might, maybe, possibly be something the journalist cares deeply about? Or, supporting the individual journalist so that they can make their own decisions about what to work on (including time frames for that work). We see this happening on Youtube and Nebula with support from Patreon, and we also see this with zines like Lock On (video games) through kickstarter.
Maybe my belief is an optimistic one, but for us to have homegrown creators making games and to believe in those homegrown creators enough to support them, to turn to corporations like Polygon and Dicebreaker for our journalism feels contradictory. By accepting these corporations we are being grandfathered into their way of doing things. Which is the way of Modern Journalism.
I cannot believe the amount of times we’ve had to sit and watch websites continue to give WotC the time of day just so that they will maybe talk about our games instead. They have their defenses! Of course they do! They have to keep the lights on. They have to get the clicks. WotC pays the bills. But that is only the case because they are in this corporate way of doing things.
If there is one thing that the indie ttrpg scene has led me to believe, it’s that we do not need to rely on the old ways. We can create from within. We can uplift. We can support each other. And we do not need Big Daddy Polygon to give us bread crumbs.
Even if Polygon is the goal? We should be creating that from within. Not just letting them come to us with promises of coverage. It will take time because the audience for ttrpg journalism isn’t huge right now, but I also believe that will change with the growth of personalities. Polygon grew from the McElroy’s personality. The Escapist was helped in its growth by Zero Punctuation. We can follow in their images by uplifting the voices of people within the scene. Building our own websites. Our own audiences.
All of this ties together because I think in building from within we can avoid the need for advertiser-catering through alternative forms of compensation. Patreons, kofis, donations, subscription services, or even kickstarters. Like I mentioned above.
I started the NERVES zine on kickstarter. Collabs Without Permission and (hopefully) C.A. Burlitz are monetized on youtube. Bones of Contention doesn’t do payments (I believe) but does the journalism for the sake of journalism. There are podcasts like Trying to be King and RTFM. Marcia and Stella have both posted longer articles/essays on their own personal blogs. Hell, there are people on TikTok who are discussing the history of games in a very journalistic manner! I would hold any of these things way above the need for Polygon or Dicebreaker.
Building from within can also help us to avoid the negatives of modern journalism. Avoiding WotC coverage (unless it’s critical or analytical) and allowing journalists to tackle the subjects they want to cover without the fear of losing ad revenue.
I will end this section by saying that, sure, my opinions might be rather optimistic. But if we can’t rely on each other to perform collective action for the betterment of our industry, then what are we doing?
My second thought revolves around the fact that Dicebreaker is owned by ReedPop. The company that owns/runs Eurogamer.net. The company that runs/operates Comic Con. The company that bought Rock Paper Shotgun and turned it from the groundbreaking, independent journalistic website into what it is today. The company that bought and runs PAX.
Dicebreaker is one of the many tentacles of a media conglomerate. It is beholden to advertisers. It is beholden to WotC. I beg everyone reading this to not take this as an attack on the individual journalists who post to Dicebreaker (because of everything I said up above about modern journalism). But Dicebreaker (the company) is here to make money. And it wants to make money off of us. It’s job is to get our clicks to make ad revenue.
I remember when Dicebreaker first began pushing into our spaces. I remember thinking, “this is it!” I thought it was our own homegrown website that was going to try to make it in the scene. I remember them asking for our support as indie creators and twitter users to make the website do well. But it was a false belief. Dicebreaker was created by ReedPop to get money, not to promote journalism.
I feel myself running out of steam. This sort of thing depresses me because I am under the impression that most people know all of this stuff and are just wanting to use Dicebreaker to make some extra money. That we are all aware and are just buying into it for a possible pay off. But I don’t think Dicebreaker can give us that payoff. I don’t think corporations exist to promote us or help us at all. The most they could possibly do is give us their scraps while they feast on our attention.
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