Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2021–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I would specifically recommend "Game Wizards" by Jon Peterson. Gygax comes across as a pretty huge jerk, though Arneson isn't entirely sympathetic either.
- The author is very clearly making histrionic statements about the state of the entire hobby, so my use of broader terms is entirely appropriate. I'm using the term "D&D" in the same way every RPG gamer I know has ever used it: as the genericized trademark that it is, often synonymous in everyday use with some broader sense of tabletop RPGs.
In some places, the author focuses narrowly in on TSR and Hasbro and D&D as a specific property. In other places, the author makes broad, sweeping, silly statements about the hobby as a whole, and implies equally silly despairing nonsense about other hobbies (which is beyond the scope of this thread to even look into).
> Without the market’s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted, either their own or ones drawn from other sources.
> Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control of his dream. It’s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips even our leisure activities of their communal joy.
The author is playing a semantic game and moving the goalposts in order to commiserate where there is no imposed misery. Just consumers who sometimes make choices that lead them into boring walled gardens, while still having the choice to walk out of those walled gardens and find the rest of the forest.
