Against "Gameable Content"

    If you spend a lot of time in the blogging circles I do, you'll notice the term "Gameable content" crop up a lot. I was first introduced to the term in Prismatic Wasteland's server, and its such a popular term that it's even a subcategory of award in this year's bloggies (plz nominate me for all of my good posts btw.) The idea of rules and monsters and geegaws and even whole adventures able to be reheated and used right out of the oven fits right in with a couple of common-ish OSR principles: from the retroclone days, the idea that any Old School system worth its salt should be able to run Keep on the Borderlands with minimal friction, and modern Blorb Adjacent notions that The Adventure Is The Core of OSR Design. This is all fine and dandy. I've got nothing against that. I love silly little mechanical geegaws and stuff-I've made my own adventures and ideas and let them loose onto the internet. 

    My umbrage comes from the term "Gameable Content," which lends itself to a myopic view of tabletop games as a medium that ends up with dipshits posting stuff like this:

If you understand this, I am so sorry, but also blame Markus

Against "Gameable"

    Long-time fans of Magnolia Keep may know that I'm a pedant I don't like making absolute claims when I don't have to. Part of this is my background in academia, part of it is getting sick of discourse (you can't get upset that people are clowning on you when you cap off a post alleging that different styles of design treat people like children, that's an inflammatory thing to say!), and part of it is a consequence of the low-budget Yahtzee Croshaw routine I do in order to avoid feeling insecure about how every other blogger is smarter than me. 

    Labeling certain content as "gameable" necessarily imposes a label on what is and isn't "gameable" or whatever, and frankly, I feel like that does a disservice to people's ability to create. One of my favorite parts of creation is when something I've found out about (a new historical figure, a cool bug, someone schizoposting) suddenly connects with something else in my brain, reforming and becoming something new. That's the joy of making art, of being able to play with others and figure shit out together. Something like Kenneth Hite's suppressed transmissions is no less gameable, no less capable of inspiring a wayward GM just because they don't include any stat blocks. 

    It's not gameable, it's just convenient, ready-made, able to be (relatively) painlessly plugged into a given campaign. And there's nothing wrong with that! There is a ton of value in seeing cool monsters or magic items or adventures or what have you, and easily putting them into your home game. I have far too many third-party adventures on my hard drive to argue otherwise. But calling it gameable does everyone a disservice.

    Speaking of doing everyone a disservice:

Against "Content"

    Friends, bloggers, Gadda, lend me your ears:

 STOP CALLING YOUR WORK CONTENT

    Please, I am begging you.

    You deserve so much more.

    Your work is art, not so much "content" that can be reduced into a dull grey slurry alongside the dross of AI voices explaining movies and other successors to Elsagate. You make adventures, monsters, spark tables, theory posts, magic items, characters, tell stories, have fun times with each other, engage in intellectual cross-pollination with people from around the world. It's wonderful and beautiful and circuitous and frustrating and full of discourse but it is real and it matters. Otherwise there wouldn't be morbillions of dollars of venture capital flowing in to make a shitty version of the stuff we as a community do. 

    You are making art. Please treat it (and yourself) with the respect it deserves. 

Against Conclusions   

    I'm worried all of this will make me sound like I'm high on my own farts, and maybe I am. I just get frustrated because I keep seeing my friends reducing their work to interchangeable bits of fluff, when it's a lot more than that. We live in an age of computer-generated dross (as I write this, one of the two big stories of the past week was Twitter's AI, which is actively poisoning my air quality, is being used to generate pornography of nonconsenting women and children). Things like The Zungeon Manifesto are part of the great DIY spirit that I love so much about this hobby, because it's things that are made and made by people. It's a beautiful thing, and I wish we valued it more.