capitalism Archives

This week everyone is talking about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not for a good reason.

Last week, a revision to the longstanding D&D “Open Gaming License” leaked. I’ve written about the OGL before, but in short it’s the persistent legal agreement that allows independent creators to use the core rules and concepts of D&D to create their own 3rd party material. While that ostensibly exists for people who want to sell their own 3rd-party D&D supplements, it also acts as a safety net for anyone homebrewing their own content.

Many outlets have written at length about the newly-drafted version of the OGL – i09 reporter Linda Codega broke the story at Gizmodo last week. The draft institutes a number of restrictions, including tightening the ability to distribute digital content, enforcing royalty-sharing on big earners, and instituting some potentially-invasive rights to reproduce creator content.

Understandably, both creators and players are in an uproar – after all, every D&D player is also a co-creator of their campaign’s story! Even if they never intend to publish or profit from their storytelling contributions, there’s a pervasive feeling of “this affects all of us” solidarity from the D&D community.

Another reliable leak mentioned that D&D owners Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Hasbro would be looking at digital DNDBeyond subscription cancellations as an early metric of the community’s response to the OGL changes. A leak coming from within the DNDBeyond team makes a lot of sense. WotC and Hasbro bought DNDBeyond last April from Fandom for $146 million dollars. The DNDBeyond team don’t have a long-term allegiance to the Hasbro corporate overlords and they are watching the stellar good will they’ve amassed as a community platform being quickly eroded by this decision.

As the DNDBeyond team may have feared (but also secretly wished for), this new leak immediately lead to a cascade of hundreds of players posting proof of their subscription cancellations on DNDBeyond forums and on Twitter.

I was one of those players.

Tomorrow is my bi-weekly D&D date with my best friends from the states and I am currently the Dungeon Master of our campaign. That means today ought to be spent finalizing maps and building out potential encounters for my custom campaign that has taken a hard left turn from the official campaign in Storm King’s Thunder.

Instead, I’m spending the day wondering if it’s worth putting in the effort to tell stories in a fictional world that is just another capitalist playground. [Read more…] about The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

I think today might represent the most remarkable cultural difference we’ve experienced so far in our three months of living in Wellington.

What’s so remarkable? That today is completely unremarkable, aside from the stunning weather.

Of course, living in the states, this day is Black Friday – a day (and term) invented in Philadelphia. A day that’s ostensibly about the convenience of so many people having off (unless they work retail), but has metastasized into 30hrs of capitalist frenzy to get rock bottom prices on things you may or may not have any practical use for in your life or budget to buy but suddenly must acquire because Christmas or something.

I tended to batten down the hatches on Black Friday and keep them sealed until the entire Christmas shopping season has passed. Why risk going anywhere and getting sucked into the capitalist vortex of deal-seeking shoppers?

Here in New Zealand, Black Friday is just another Friday, owing in part to the fourth Thursday in November simply being the fourth Thursday in November. Today is still Black Friday in the sense that US holidays completely pervade the world calendar thanks to the hegemonic force of their culture.

Shopping on Black Friday is a thing here, but there are few readily visible indications of that. It comes with only a modest sales uptick on the order of 30% over the previous week, which owes at least in part to the fact that the majority people are actually at work here on this utterly normal, beautiful day.

With the lack of a push behind the retail holiday, there’s also a commensurate lack of a sense of the holiday season having suddenly begun. Christmas decorations haven’t suddenly appeared in every business and on every house’s facade.

There are other, trickle-down effects of not having Thanksgiving and Black Friday to kick off the official holiday season. Here, Christmas retail kicked off on November 1st with relatively little fuss. I would say, “the day after Halloween,” but that’s also not really a thing here. Our nearest neighbor advised us that if EV6 dressed up they would find some candy to give her, but no one else in the neighborhood would have any.

That’s not just our neighborhood. We were out and about for the day and did not witness a single costume and nary a pop-up shop in the preceding weeks. Despite being an ostensible global holiday, Halloween is uncelebrated enough by Kiwis that each year there are Very Serious articles written about Trick-or-Treating and if it should be embraced or rejected.

(From the rejected side of the debate: “it is a repugnant excuse of a holiday, dripping in slimy American commercialisation.”)

(Seriously, I like it here so much.)

Even as someone who doesn’t personally partake in Black Friday or Halloween, their effective cultural absence leads to a queer void in my perception of passing time. Sure, the nationwide NZ Secret Santa began on November 6th, but without the unavoidable drumbeat of those twin poles of autumnal capitalist frenzy I hardly believe the end of the year is approaching – which isn’t aided by the fact that today is the most gorgeous one we’ve seen in three months of living here.

The cumulative effect is that I find that I’m not dreading December here the way I did in the states. Yes, I’m sure people will be busy with holiday plans and parties. Christmas on the beach is a thing; after all, it will be summer here. There’s simply not the sense of stepping out of Thanksgiving to fall into a month-long unrelenting blizzard of blaring holiday music about Santa and snow.

Black Friday might bear all of that weight back in the states, but here it is jut another day.