Other Possible Worlds
A common anticapitalist refrain is, “another world is possible.”
That statement is partially about the possibility of systemic change, a possibility that is often dismissed as utopian. But more broadly, it speaks to the colonization of the political imagination—the inability to see how the injustices of the past and present might be rectified in a possible future, given the scale and totality of the former. To (perhaps apocryphally) paraphrase Frederic Jameson, it’s as if it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
There is, however, an “everyday” aspect to this imagining and creating of other worlds. There are practices of mutual aid, intentional community, and self care that can be sustaining even if they cannot be large or permanent (though, they can also be messy, dysfunctional, self-defeating, even violent). And there’s also a way that art, broadly speaking, can allow for a temporary shift in perspective to see what’s missing in the present and what might be possible in the future.
In fact, this function of art, to interrupt what is and provide a window into what could be, itself exists as a trope in fantasy: the hidden portal to another world, one with its own logic, in which the ordinary, alienated, and perhaps marginalized subject of modernity can become a hero, of sorts. Indeed, from OD&D’s “mythic underworld” to Planescape, this concept has been played out in ttrpgs as well. Sometimes, this portal is itself a media artifact, in which a character can step into a world contained within a book or behind a screen or vice versa (though, this is sometimes more horrifying than fantastical).
Role Playing Games traffic in exploring other worlds, and doing so collectively. There’s of course the game/challenge aspect and the dice rolling aspect, but as social endeavors they ask us to imagine an elsewhere and be characters who inhabit that elsewhere. They are a fun, structured hanging out that sometimes becomes a way of relating to your friends (or strangers) in a new way through the intermediary of a shared, imagined world that you build together.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the ‘controversy’ around wotc’s desire to move to “recurrent spending” and one-stop-shop digital gaming environments. On the one hand, it shouldn’t bother me: even if I wanted to play 5e, I wouldn’t be playing it with a dndbeyond subscription or on a fancy virtual table top. In that sense, I lean a lot more towards “folk” dnd, per Questing Beast’s video on the topic.
At the same time, what may now be two sides of the same coin are becoming two different coins. As Milton notes, the commodification of dnd happened with its actual publication and certainly by late 70s, and it became heavily commercialized as the game grew and reached younger demographics in the 80s (DM David has this interesting anecdote about the reaction of fanzines to the 1974 publication: “the $10 price of the original box struck many gamers as outrageous. In the first issues of Alarums & Excursions, some contributors argued that TSR’s profiteering justified Xerox copies of the D&D rules.”).
So wotc’s idea to expand that commercialization to other media shouldn’t be surprising; we’ve had like 40 years of dnd-inspired videogames already, after all, and through them the game’s particular tropes have saturated fantasy as a genre. I suppose what’s new is that wotc would like its customers to rent, rather than buy and own, its products via various subscription services. The degree to which many people have bought into live-service dnd is already unfathomable to me: people have hundreds of dollars (or other currency) tied up in proprietary VTTs, where they also purchase map packs, tokens, and whatever else to…more colorfully play a game of imagination? There’s an irony of video games striving for decades to approximate the ‘open-worldness’ of ttrpgs, only for ‘official’ dnd to become the experience of playing through pre-written adventure paths in 3d environments with automated rng.
What perhaps bothered me most, even though I shouldn’t bother caring, are the fans of this status quo. The opulent live-service digital game that dnd will become, to a lot of people, just an extension of the longstanding consumerism within the hobby. At most, they are worried that wotc will fail, thus providing them fewer opportunities to consume. The dnd fanbase, steeped in “geek culture,” was probably already prone to the purchasing of unnecessary products and to practices of obsessive collecting. This is, after-all, a hobby, that contains a market for $500 “platinum” editions of already-overpriced adventure sets and kickstarters for $600 custom dm screens.
To be honest, I’m not sure where or if to draw a line there. Is the whole 3rd party ecosystem part of “official” dnd, even if not directly connected to the international corporation at the center of things? What about the indie kickstarter market in general? Surely many of us have more games on our shelves/hard drives than we have ability to play--is that “folk” dnd?
But then, maybe it’s less about how much you buy (up to a point) and more how you relate to what you play. As Claire Jackson writes for Kotaku “purchasing the core (5e) rulebooks costs around $100ish and can provide you with a lifetime of material to play with, if you wanted to save money and use your imagination like some kind of monster.” And I’ll certainly buy more rpgs and back more kickstarters sooner or later (possibly quite soon, depending on when the Dolmenwood kickstarter beings). But, as Marcia B writes, “something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-commercial interactions between members.” Less buying and talking-about and more making, sharing, and connecting. So I guess that’s a 2023 resolution for me.
