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Archivio => General => Topic aperto da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:07:54

Titolo: Giochi "Indie" e indie-rpgs.com (the forge)
Inserito da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:07:54
In un altro thread è stata chiesta la differenza fra giochi "indie" e "small press". Lascio ad altri la definizione esatta di "small press", e spiego cosa si intende su The Forge con "Indie" (ricordatevi comunque che è una definiziona contestata) e cosa quindi significa l'indirizzo che ha, www.indie-rpgs.com (http://www.indie-rpgs.com)

Alcuni link utili:
Definition of Indie RPGs (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24659.0)
Poison Pages (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24751.0)
Forge Vision (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=21483.0)

Collegati a questi, possono essere utili l'essay di Edwards del 1998 The Nuked Apple Cart (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/12/) e questo post (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=7398.msg77801#msg77801) con la cronistoria di varie tappe dell storia del sito.

In "The nuked apple cart" c'è già la critica, radicale, al modello editoriale che andava per la maggiore negli anni 90:

"Indie RPGs have generally been ignored by the gaming media, most notably by the so-called independent RPG magazines. However, I claim that indie RPGs are the real thing: where roleplaying is "at," to use a phrase of my youth. Only a few of them have made it into commercial print (Over the Edge, Prince Valiant, Extreme Vengeance, FUDGE, Zero), and even fewer have managed to stay there. Why have indie games been largely ignored, why do they have such a hard time making it into stores? Bluntly, because the priorities of those who sell roleplaying games are almost entirely opposed to those who actually play them."

"So for people who really want to write RPGs for people who really want to play them, I suggest losing the dream. Quit trying to be the big publishing man for the great middle class, and remember what roleplaying is, who wants to do it, and how their very real customer demand might be satisfied.

"As a final note: I am a customer as well as a designer of RPGs, in fact, far more so the former than the latter. As customers, too, each of us faces a personal decision: are you a practitioner of an artistic activity or a consumer of a advertising-driven product? I urge you to consider your role in roleplaying economics, and to consider whether a shelf of supplements and so-called source material really suits your needs, as opposed to a few slim roleplaying books with high-octane premises and system ideas."

Ma cosa vuol dire "Indie" per Edwards (e in generale per i fondatori di The Forge)? Seguendo la filosofia "radicale" di indipendenza rappresentata nei fumetti da Dave Sim, non si parla di semplice copyright: la conservazione del copyright da sola non vuol dire nulla (come hanno scoperto nei fumetti quelli che hanno fatto contratti con la Vertigo che garantiva il copyright agli autori e vent'anni di pubblicazione esclusiva e senza vincoli all'editore...). Si parla di controllo economico e editoriale

"at the Forge, that term is strictly economic; it means "self-published" and it also indicates that the creator, or small group of creators, maintains executive control over the money, publishing process, and content of the game."

NON e' una definizone che riguarda il contenuto:

"It is quite conceivable that some publishing company like AEG or Green Ronin or whoever might produce a game that fully fits the procedural category of game that includes, say, Universalis or Polaris, written by someone who is not an officer of that company. That game wouldn't be independent, economically. A good example is The Dying Earth, from Pelgrane Press. It's as innovative and offbeat as one might want, but the creative and professional means of making the game doesn't match the Forge definition. That doesn't make it a boring or non-innovative game."

Also, the Forge definition of independence has nothing to do with being produced at the Forge or through any kind of interaction at the Forge. There are hundreds of independent RPGs; many or even most aren't connected with the Forge in any way. The Forge resources are available to anyone publishing an independent game, if they want them, but not everyone wants them. A good example is S. John Ross, who publishes independent games like Risus - he doesn't post here, and he doesn't have to; his game is still independent.

Cosa si intende allora per "forge game"?

As best as I can tell, the term "Forge game" is not well defined at all. I think "Forge game" probably means something like "created by using lots of the resources at the Forge," although clearly a lot of people use it to indicate some kind of innovative or off-beat content, and still others use it to mean some kind of social label indicating that the publisher is part of the Forge community of discourse. This is a bad definition. It cheats Justin Bow, for instance, whose game Fae Noir is 100% independent by the Forge definition, and who is definitely part of the Forge community, in terms of participating at the booth at GenCon. However, Justin is not particularly interested in the theory-talk here (or wasn't when writing the game, anyway) and didn't write the game in the context of Forge-based critique. So is Fae Noir a "Forge game?" There's no meaningful answer. It's a crappy term and I don't particularly like its clique-ish implications when used. (To be absolutely clear, if Justin wanted a publisher forum here at the Forge, he would get one - because the game's economic status makes it eligible. Its rules-design and any other features are irrelevant.)

"Story game" is even more vague. Beast Hunters is a Gamist, Gamist RPG. Playing it does tend produce stories, but as a by-product of highly sophisticated Challenge-based rules and processes, not thematic questions at all. But it gets discussed at the Story Games website and is a perfectly good example of a functional, focused RPG. As far as I can tell, "story game" is more socially defined than functionally defined, even if it can be said to be defined at all. (In some ways, this may be a virtue. Andy may not have wanted to over-define eligible games. Perhaps Story Game simply means a game with a strong play-reinforced SIS, regardless of any other goal, and is therefore wide open in terms of content.)

The term "narrativist" refers to a particular creative goal during play itself. There are dozens and dozens of games produced through interacting on the Forge, or being influenced by ideas here, or supported through the mechanisms here that do not meet that criterion at all. EABA is an excellent example. You can't get more independent than EABA, and Greg Porter is arguably one of the most Forge-ish publishers around (even setting an example for the invention of the Forge in the first place!) - but the game is Simulationist with a capital S, and more power to it. Also, conversely, a lot of games made via interacting here do support Narrativist goals of play, certainly, but so do many other games written without the Forge. And many people play in a Narrativist fashion without ever having heard of the place. So that would be the very worst possible label to use for games that originate here or are heavily supported here in publishing terms.

I think it is good to be precise and accurate with one's terms.

1. Independent = self-published, creator-owned

2. Forge game should mean that the site was useful to the creator, if it is to mean anything at all (and maybe it doesn't)

3. "Story game" is a term I don't feel any need to define; it seems to be a social issue

4. Narrativist = the rules strongly reinforce a specific creative goal/agenda, that of addressing Premise (see the Glossary for clarification if you need it; this does not mean "makes a story")

If you were to name a game with which I am familiar, I could tell you where it stands relative to any of these terms except maybe #3. My point is that whether it's independent or not doesn't automatically mean it's Forge or not, and whether it's Forge or not doesn't automatically mean it's Narrativist or not, and so on - the terms don't affect one another.

I know that's not a very helpful answer in terms of arriving at a single label. I suppose my best answer is that a single label is a bad thing to apply when you are talking about multiple variables.


Tutto qui? Per la definizione, sì, ma volevo approfittare dell'occasione per postare una serie di interventi di Ron Edwards sull'argomento, che meglio spiegano il perchè di the forge.... la maggior parte sono presi dal thread "poison pages", e già il titolo dice parecchio...  :-)
Titolo: Giochi "Indie" e indie-rpgs.com (the forge)
Inserito da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:09:49
A little bit of economics

What is a distributor? It is a person/company which buys the books from the publishing companies. This is a true purchase; at that point, the objects are gone from the publisher, who has received all the funds they will ever receive from them. Stores place their orders to the distributor, who supplies catalogues and acts in all ways as the marketer and policy-maker regarding sales to the stores. Then, the store-owners own the books and people buy them there. In other words, when Joe buys your game in a store, he is the fourth owner, and his money is specifically going to recover and add to the cost of purchase by the store owner from the distributor.

This is called the "three-tier" system for distribution. Details vary, but the breakdown of cost is usually in this ballpark: 40% for distribution, 60% for retailer. Let's use my game Sorcerer as an example.

The game's Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) is $20. The distributor buys some amount of them from me, paying me $8 per copy. That's all the money I make on those books; it must be enough to offset my printing, promotional, and shipping costs, or I go out of business. The distributor then receives orders from retailers, for however many copies per unit time, and the retailer pays him $12 per book. So the distributor makes $4 per book, and the equivalent from many companies. The retailer now sells the books at $20 apiece to Joe the customer, making $8 per book. (If he can't move it at cover price, he can put it "on sale" to sell for $10, at least recouping his cost and making a little money. Remember, MSRP has no real meaning; the retailer is free to charge anything he wants for something he owns.)

The terminology for all this is bizarre: the distributor is said to be "giving a 60% discount," which in literal terms makes absolutely no sense. He's buying it at 40%.

The reason for distribution is simple and non-problematic: stores simply cannot deal directly, independently, with every publisher. Invoicing, shipping, ordering, timing, and everything make that impossible. My criticisms of the three-tier distribution system don't stem from its central nature, but from the transfer of ownership and with certain scale issues, which I'll explain a bit later.

Various issues that have often shifted about within the three-tier system include returnability up the chain, responsibility for shipping costs, and the time scale of ordering and figuring profits. All of these are worth whole chapters of history and discussion, and if you're interested, visit the appropriate panels and bar-discussions at the GAMA Trade Show for serious ear-fuls. I'll talk about the time scale in a little bit.

For comparison and clarity's sake, consider consignment sales, in which the retailer sells the book and sends part of the profits to the publisher. Also consider fulfillment, which is the physical act of invoicing orders and shipping the books. Fulfillment should not be confused with distribution. I'll post more about that later too.

There is no point to anyone posting "what [term X] means to me." It's a futile exercise. What I've listed above is how it is, for game publishing. I don't mind being corrected or adjusted as long as we're talking about real economics, but please, leave "gee when I think 'distribution' it means ..." posting for some other website."

A little bit of history

The original role-playing games didn't have a fixed venue. The mall store didn't exist; hell, malls hardly existed. The game materials first began to be available in classic hobby stores, which were small crowded shops in secondary locations (ours, in Monterey, was continuous with a gas station). They typically carried a full selection of train gear, military-colored paints for models and miniatures, trading cards, and everything one might want for building models, as well as novelty items like toy gliders and sundry small objects. They'd recently incorporated a wide range of Star Trek and monster-movie products, mostly rubber novelty stuff and glow-in-the-dark models. The main promotional device for the new hobby was a banner reading "Dungeons & Dragons Headquarters." The trouble for them was a lack of product: the 1,000 copy print run that debuted at GenCon didn't really have much of a follow-up, so exactly what you bought at the D&D HQ was a bit vague: a kid tended to walk away with a staple-bound Judge's Guild supplement, a box of lead miniatures, and a meetup date with local gamers, usually including one or more guys from the local military base.

The first important economic shift included the advent of Lou Zocchi, one of gaming's more interesting personalities, as the first distributor for D&D and soon, other games. I don't really know which is chicken and which is egg, but at this time, whole racks of D&D modules, RuneQuest stuff, T&T stuff, Metagaming (later SJG stuff), Dragon Magazines, and the higher-end boxed-set wargames started to appear at game stores in more upscale mainstream venues, the kind of place specializing in cool chess sets, Fimo clay kits, those semi-abstract wooden dinosaur skeleton models, and "thinky" games based on intricate structures. When the hard-cover AD&D books first appeared ('77-80), they went into Waldenbooks, although I have no idea how that does or doesn't relate to Zocchi's distribution.

Moving into the middle 1980s, more games-specific U.S. distributors appeared, both regional (i.e. several states, like Blackhawk) and national (Alliance; a companion company to Diamond Comics, a comics distributor). Also, games themselves moved into new commercial outlet: RPG-centered games stores, modeled on and often combined with the new mall/strip-mall version of comics stores. This is more-or-less the same commercial situation we see now, which was already stumbling in the early 1990s, to be revived by Magic and the successive wave of similar games, only to stumble again badly in the last few years. However, back in 1990 (a key approximate date for this thread), these shiny new stores were a sure sign to the hobbyist that at least, we had "made it," and they became both sales and social venues for the hobby.

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Titolo: Giochi "Indie" e indie-rpgs.com (the forge)
Inserito da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:11:57
A little bit more economics

Three-tier distribution creates three distinct markets in action: the profitability relative to effort/cost for the retailer (signficantly, taxes and rent), the profitability relative to effort/cost for the distributor, and the profitability relative to effort/cost for the publisher (significantly, printing). The first and the third have literally no contact with one another, and traditionally, distributors will not inform publishers about which stores are ordering how many copies. (Interestingly, the publisher sets the MSRP, which superficially appears to be a link/unifier among the tiers, but remember - that price means literally nothing in the U.S.; the retailer can sell it for whatever he wants.)

The assumption, or myth as I think of it, is that all the tiers are minor modifications of a fundamental market process occurring between publishers and end-use customers. According to the assumption, consumer demand drives store orders, and store orders drive distributors' demand from the publishers. I do not think that any of this is, or has been true for role-playing games.

The reason why not lies in several factors. One of them is each submarket in the tiers system acts as a filter for the diversity available for the next step. However, that filter's "holes" do not operate in any way that is relevant to, say, a customer's needs or interests in the games. That is, what makes a game a successful venture-capital investment for a distributor is not what makes it a successful purchase for a customer. Another factor is the difference between long-term, repeat sales strategy vs. short-term, immediate-debt driven sales strategy. The latter has typically prevailed in hobby game retail.

Therefore, the distributor has no interest in whether the consumer actually buys or doesn't buy a given game in the stores. Repeat sales are of no interest - it's all one to the distributor, because he has a warehouse of more recent orders. What works for him are (a) orders for big-ticket, high-MSRP items, and (b) orders for the next installment of a given sequence of publications.

Here's another wrinkle: the game retailer has no window into the availability of games - what they are, how good they might be - except through the distributor's catalogue. He is, effectively, a captive market: he needs games to sell, and the ones he must buy are the ones that the distributor has to give. The distributor will even tell him which ones are Hot Hot Hot, which is to say, the ones the distributor would be most happy to unload. The retailer is basically the distributor's bitch.

This problem is compounded when one considers the time-unit of decision-making on a retailer's part. It's short: somewhere around six weeks, varying slightly. It's barely adequate for comics; it is 100% inadequate for assessing how well a given role-playing product actually does what it purports to do, per play-group and per customer. Therefore product performance (whether the game is any damn good) plays no role at all in the retailer's decisions about what to order. The retailer paid no attention, whatsoever, to how a customer liked a given game or how much fun it was to play. What matters is the unsold stock - all of it, raw debt, his latest deep-order - sitting on his shelf, and which one this gamer is likely to buy today.

So, effectively, the retailer is screwed from the get-go. He's a debt-bunny, frantically representing the distributor's interests, believing deeply in the existence of the New Hot Thing, and seeking to blame customers and publishers when things don't go well, as they typically do not. I'll have to hold off from discussing (i) desperation measures like deep-ordering based on the ceaseless cauldron of "industry" rumors, (ii) unbelievably poor tracking of actual sales in the stores in both short and long term, (iii) the role of light-fingered fanboy staff in the stockrooms of both distributors and retail stores, and more.

To shift to the other end of the chain, the publisher now confronts this set of doors or hoops even to have his game appear in stores at all. None of the priorities of those "doors" has anything to do with a customer actually playing, liking, and promoting the game itself, among the gaming community. The publisher must accepted, or "picked up" as they say, by a distributor, or his games are just a bunch of paper in a basement. In just a few years following the mid-1980s, publishers either realized they needed to conform to the distributor's economic needs (including the features of dominating retailers) or vanish. Whether this was a deliberate decision or based on imitation of what they saw apparently working, is not important. The realization is apparent in the physical nature of the games. Staple-bound booklets, ziplock bags, and boxes became replaced by perfect-bound paperbacks in the form most gamers now know well, with the AD&D hardbacks essentially setting the standard as the "real men" version of RPG format. SJG, The Chaosium, Hero Games, and Iron Crown Enterprises all illustrate the transition during the late 1980s.

Effectively, a strange kind of supply-side economics came into action. Not the classical form, but a stepwise form operating in both directions from the center. A publisher's success relied solely upon his ability to convinced distributors to carry his books, and therefore, upon his ability to pump out new, periodical product. A new publisher in the 1990s encountered advice cobbled together out of survival tactics, all based on pleasing distributors, but none of which were working anyway. In the stores, customers could only buy what they saw, and they could be easily fooled into thinking a company is "successful" because its books are all over the shelves. They could easily be trained by a retailer to accept him as the voice of the hobby, informing them about what is good and what is popular, not knowing that he was desperate to recoup whatever funds he'd sunk into ordering whatever Hot Item he was effectively told to order.

More history

By the middle 1980s, a certain power/status structure had appeared among the companies, with AD&D (mistakenly) perceived as a mainstream class of its own, with wargaming companies like Iron Crown and Avalon Hill perceived as the hobby-specific power-hitters (when Hero Games was bought by Iron Crown and when RuneQuest was bought by Avalon Hill, these events were perceived as "success! success at last!"), and with SJG as the innovative, edgy move-us-forward company. Looking back, I think that by around 1986, most RPG publishers had bought their own marketing hype: that role-playing was the Big New Hobby Sweeping the Nation! Hitting it big, or getting into some kind of venue that was supposed to accomplish that, was the brass ring. D&D had "done it!" with Waldenbooks, short-lived as that was; everyone else was still in hobby-land, but if you could get picked up by a real (i.e. wargaming) company, then you'd "done it!" in that more limited way. None of these perceptions were to last past 1990, but they were the cultural foundation for the transition at that time, and that's where the hobby's "old dons" come from.

Given the change in the economic framework and the couple of years it took to sink in, a new context was created in which these older companies were ill-prepared. That context (the three-tier system) is the environment in which our current crop of self-described mainstream publishers came into existence. It informed their values regarding procedural game design and physical game presentation. The leading publishers that I described before - the ones that survived and adjusted the first few years of distributor-driven shifts - all hit the skids by the early 1990s, in various ways, some surviving and some not. Discussion of the very few mavericks (BTRC, Phage Press, a couple others) will have to wait. Discussion of the new companies that arose, including Wizards of the Coast, and these companies unquestioned belief that FASA offered the core model of success, will also have to wait. The fascinating story of R. Talsorian should be reviewed in full.

Other thing that have to wait include (i) the supplement treadmill tactic, which killed many companies and nigh-killed many others; (ii) the scorched-earth tactic, which saved a few companies but also destroyed what shreds remained of any functional hobby based on store culture, and (iii) the few retailers which managed to change their habits and values entirely, and who, not surprisingly, are the most successful stores today.

The content, or actual in-play procedures, of RPGs - what we call "game design" - also tracks nicely to the economic history and the context for publication, up until the advent of "post my game on the internet" as a common and mutually supportive practice. The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time of proliferation of techniques, diversity of goals, and expansion of scope and topic. From then until the early 1990s, several game lines settled into three distinct foundations of design: the AD&D approach, the GURPS/Hero approach, and the BRP approach. Just about all role-playing games built afterwards represent modifications of one of these chassis, and sometimes a little mix-and-matching among them. By the early 1990s, certain syncretic combinations were established, primarily using Cyberpunk, late-stage Champions, and Shadowrun as templates: this is where the so-called Storyteller system comes from. These combinations were now, for all intents and purposes, "role-playing" - a feeble, mismatched, and limited bag of techniques, especially compared to the spunky renaissance 15 years previously. Look over the 1990s game titles, especially those which were released as Hot New Things with promised lines of supplements stretching into eternity.

It's testament to gamer culture's wonderful imagination and drive that a certain spark of novel design did continue to show up here and there in the early 1990s. I can talk more about what that was and why it often failed during 1992-1996. I can also talk about why and how LARPing seemed like an obvious alternative, and why Magic boomed the way it did.

Oh, there is so much more to discuss, which I have to hold off from. The history of GAMA, the Trade Show (not the same things! did you know that?), and Origins; the debates and role of returnability up the chain; the hidden use of outside funds to start up companies and to keep them "alive," and more. I haven't even mentioned the economics of various forms of D&D, which left so many publishers' bodies floating in its wake while being perceived as the flagship of the hobby. My core point, in any of those discussions to come, is to identify the distributor-driven three-tier system, and its features I described earlier, as the unspoken, perceived-as-natural environment in which all these events went through their contortions.

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Titolo: Giochi "Indie" e indie-rpgs.com (the forge)
Inserito da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:16:21
A little bit of recent context

I won't be able to talk in detail about any of the following in this post. Maybe later.

1. The millenium ushered in the general failure of distribution and of many stores (see the retailer booths at GenCon: "Buy 1, get 3 free!"). The first step was when Alliance became the sole national distributor in the U.S., which effectively put all of the inherent flaws of the three-tier system into fast-forward. Another part of the change concerned the interesting beast called the internet, but not in the way that retailers howled about ("stealing our sales!") - instead, it was because gamers could actually communicate about what they played and what they liked. Such dialogue had been silent since the early 1980s. The all-important control over information about the hobby was no longer confined to the retailer environment.

2. D20 represents a whole case study of its own regarding late-stage tactics in a dwindling, dying economic infrastructure. The shift in retailer culture from "why isn't it D20," to "it better not be that fuckin' D20," took only three years. Those three years, though, allowed the next item to occur.

3. The illusory success of D&D was finally outed when its owners, $36+ million in debt, sold TSR to WotC; this was then made more interesting when Hasbro bought WotC, acquiring Magic, Pokemon, and TSR with it; it became even more interesting when Peter Adkison left WotC, bought GenCon from Hasbro, and formed GenCon LLC.

4. A few novel ventures appeared that provided different angles to the system, seeking to work with new publishers in groups. Sphinx Group, Wizards Attic, and Tundra Sales Organization were among the first, and others have appeared since. As I see it, they may be categorized along three independent axes: (a) helpful vs. exploitative, (b) clear-sighted vs. confused, and (c) successful vs. failed. There's lots to talk about. Some of these ventures are incredible, and others are no better than abusive chickenhawks.

5. Annnnnnd, so many other things. (i) New technological formats, like PDF and then POD; (ii) a new meaning for "direct sales," via the internet, ushered into full form with Paypal; (iii) independent publishing modeled on the 'green revolution' in comics a few years previously; (iv) new venues for dialogues among gamers, particularly about game design; and (v) new common ground among customers, publishers, and some retailers.

In conclusion, the three-tier was an artifact of current standards, venues, historical features, and a single legitimate need. That need can now be met in other ways, rendering all the rest completely obsolete. No matter that, as an economic system, it generated a value system which was internalized and still keenly felt. It's done.

In addition to the links I provided earlier, here are some examples of clashes and debates when people who'd internalized the three-tier values system encountered the Forge (please note the dates):
State of the Industry editorial
"the supplement treadmill
D&D specifically (split from Supplement Treadmill)

Best, Ron

P.S. Special note to Eero: none of this has anything to do with you. When you see the word "distribution," please don't hop into the discussion as if you were implicated. You're not. This is a U.S., three-tier, deeply embedded issue, specific to U.S. geography and to the marginal status of hobby game stores here.


-------------------------
I just realized I'd provided the first set of links in the Site Discussion thread, not this one, so here they are:

Phase One, Successful RPG line and Channel conflict with distribution-retailers-manufacturers; Phase Two, Distributor questions, There *is* a problem: POD into retail, and The Truth is Out There.

Again, please note the dates.

Best, Ron


(non son stato a mettere i link, noti i subject ritrovare i thread su the forge è banale)

Consiglio di leggere il resto di "poison pages", con gli interventi anche di altri operatori del settore.
Titolo: Giochi "Indie" e indie-rpgs.com (the forge)
Inserito da: Moreno Roncucci - 2009-08-08 21:21:47
Da "Forge Vision": il post che spiega meglio la funzione di The Forge, e perchè è nata:

______________________
I'm a fanatic. I have the vision of what I want to accomplish, and that's shared very greatly with Clinton's vision about the same stuff. The Forge has not only stuck by that vision, but brought about incredible things way beyond what we imagined.

So given the last six years, is there room for a new vision? Sure! Let someone else have their own and bring it into existence. Andy K is obviously the key figure here with all the contests and sites and stuff, but lots of others are moving and shaking too. Fine.

But the Forge isn't their vision. It's ours, just Clinton and me. And not only that, Clinton and I (I keep saying both of us because we talk about this stuff, and I'm representing those talks right now) want to keep the Forge's function right where it started - finding people in the canebrake, struggling with their designs, or having produced an amazing design but not knowing what to do with it. We like it working best and most for the guys with a crappy Geocities website and a neat game idea, who aren't quite sure how the internet can help them further.

As long as the Forge lasts, it serves those guys first, and that same spirit/attitude of theirs which both Clinton and I individually try to preserve in ourselves. That's why it is not, and will never be, an imprint of the kind that would force membership or identity of any sort on someone just considering or along-the-way of developing their own game and perhaps company.

The Game Publishers Association exists for that. You can pay to join, to benefit from the accumulated experience there, and to have their logo on the back of your game. The Forge is run by a different vision in which the organized activity at the site, and associated spin-offs, is what matters. The product (labels on games, imprints, everything) is wholly personally the creator's, and in terms of the Forge, it represents what that game creator wants to take out of the Forge, if anything.

The fact that a cultural-brand exists that helps and serves a number of people is great. Yes, there's a banner at the booth which exploits or at least expresses that reality.

But the booth isn't about that banner as a representation of Sorcerer or the Burning Wheel, at least not primarily. It's about Kevin Allen Jr. being at all able to sell his awesome game Primitive at the premier hobby-games convention in the world (possible exception of Spiel Essen). I'd far rather keep working to make the Forge useful to folks about two years behind where Kevin is now, than to develop the brand to benefit, say, Vincent Baker, further. It already benefits him immensely, and as far as I'm concerned, that's way way in the black, huge gravy, relative to anything we ever expected.

It's hard enough as it is for me to preserve my focus on that vision I'm talking about. As far as I'm concerned, the Forge is actually a bit in the red in that regard, relative to its first couple years of existence. Clinton and I do have work to do with what the Forge "is," culturally. We've discussed it. It doesn't prioritize actively building the cultural brand into an institutional one to benefit established companies further. That work has to turn more grass-roots, more punky, and more toward those folks like Doug Bolden, James V. West, Jeff Diamond, and others, as they were back then. (I name these guys because the Forge ultimately failed them, unforgivably on my part, which I see as a far greater indictment of it than Vincent Baker's success is a vindication. Clinton has his own list of casualties. We remember them even if others don't.)

That's why the First Thoughts forum is key. I wish more of you guys would spend time there, and use your pride and success in getting your companies off the ground as a fuel for outreach to these guys as they appear or are invited ... and rediscover the chance to learn from them. 'Cause that's where the great ideas really are, out among the wacky little guys who think they're alone in the brush. Not in the modern blogspace and not in the (thank th'Lord defunct) theory forums.

That's way more important to me than saying, "OK everyone, you can now purchase shares in Forge Corp and gain the privilege of putting the little cartoon logo on the back of your game." Would that help sell more copies of Perfect, Dogs in the Vineyard, Universalis, and so on? Probably so. Would it help the game-store retailers to grab a clue and order these games and market them in a coherent, unified fashion? Absolutely yes. Would Clinton and I make big bucks off monetizing it in some way? You betcha.

But it's not the vision. I don't think doing that would benefit the incoming folks, and in fact I think it would destroy their single greatest contribution and potential - the new ideas, the unfamiliar angle of attack, the intellectual/cultural mutation (new variants) they represent. I am a fanatic. I know exactly that that is what I want to promote and facilitate, and that's what the Forge is, or should be at its best.

If Jason Valore, Brennan Taylor, Andy Kitkowski, Jonathan Walton, or any other inspired, motivated, constructive people want to form any new method in which established companies share and benefit, more power to'em. If I like the model they propose, I'll join in myself if I'm welcome.

But the Forge ain't that thing.

Best, Ron