Feel free to dismiss everything I say here as just the mad ramblings of a man in the middle of a meltdown. If you want a quick explanation, you can always just say "Dwiz is a neurotic spaz who's impossible to be friends with." It wouldn't be untrue. But I'm the one who has to live with these feelings, so I'm going to do my best to explain them.
First off, I know that I am well-liked by many. Lots of people have reached out with kind words. To assure me that I'm valued. I appreciate all of you, and I know that you've all been left without any answers about what's going on in my head right now. But I can reassure you all that I have never had any doubts about this particular fact. As you can see from the length of this post, I have a lot of anxieties about my place in the RPG world, but "I'm not popular enough" has never really been one of them. I know that many would envy my place in this little community. I've always tried not to take that for granted, and I apologize if what follows sounds ungrateful. But I do want to be honest about my feelings, even if that means I make an ass out of myself. So I cautiously submit to you this: sometimes it's not about being disliked, so much as it is being liked in the wrong way. Or perhaps, for the wrong reasons.
Additionally, I am going to name-check a few folks in this post. I do not intend it as a callout. In fact, I will proudly proclaim myself a fan of everyone who comes up in this post. Several of them I consider to be friends, who I respect enormously and who I know wouldn't intend me any ill will.
Alright, here goes. This is going to be very personal and ugly and stupid.
I didn't talk about RPGs with anyone online for my first, like, 10 years in the hobby. I just read games, played games, and read other people talking about games, until I was all caught up. I missed out on G+ because I was averse to all social media. But a pandemic happened and I had to learn how to make friendships through the internet fast. 6 years later, I haven't really figured it out yet.
Folks know that I semi-regularly take breaks from Discord for a few weeks at a time. It started as something I did every one or two years. Now it's every few months. Everyone has always been very understanding and accommodating of this habit. But uhhh... it does kind of bother me that I don't know a single other person who needs to do the same thing. No one else seems to have nearly this much trouble just, like, hanging out in servers full of gaming blog enthusiasts. I had to grit my teeth and examine this behavior, knowing that it would demand some kind of drastic change in my life.
The more time I've spent hanging out in RPG spaces, the more unhappy I've been. I walk away from nearly every interaction feeling bad. Not just annoyed or sad, but also confused. Why do I feel insulted by things that others don't intend as insults? Why am I constantly surprised at the expectations people have of me? Like whenever someone reveals how they anticipated I might react to something, it's always intensely negative, which just feels so wrong and strange. Why do I keep feeling hurt by things that aren't harmful?
It became less confusing with time. All those unexpected interactions start to form patterns. Something slowly comes to focus. I realize now that there's a version of Dwiz that everyone else has in their heads, who I didn't recognize at all. But by the way people talk to him, and the way they talk about him...
Man... I fucking hate that guy. I really do. He seems like he fucking sucks to be around. And for a moment, I was still confused how I got here. That is not a guy I have ever been mistaken for before I had this blog. What had gone wrong that everyone else seems to see only that guy when they talk to me? How had we gotten mixed up?
But there's no mystery there. People interact with you how you've trained them to. They're not getting it from nowhere. I write words and other people read them. I have no one to blame but myself.
A friend pointed out to me how hypocritical my attitude is. It was a pretty nasty gut punch, but once she said it, a lot of things became obvious to me. Just about everything I hate about the RPG spaces I hang out in, and the interactions I have with others, I am so much more guilty of than any of them.
I hate how pedantic and nerdy and annoying everyone is. Every conversation is so fucking exhausting. I spend so much time and energy trying to carefully craft every claim to be bulletproof against minor quibbles and edge-cases. I spend so many words in each post just hedging my statements and acknowledging caveats.
But nobody is a bigger know-it-all than me. I scrolled through weeks and weeks of messages I had sent in Warren's server and nearly every single one of them was an instance of me intervening in someone else's conversation to correct a misconception or add useless details that weren't salient to the main point. I have rarely in my life ever felt such palpable self-loathing as reading back my own Discord messages and realizing what an obnoxious, insufferable prick I am.
I hate how mean-spirited and nasty and petty people are. That they're constantly eating up drama, actively rooting for failures and downfall, glorifying any kind of "dunking" on someone, and most of all, just complaining about seemingly everything.
But everyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge asshole and a grouch. I'm abrasive in my posts and rude in conversation and bitter about developments in the hobby that I feel, however arbitrarily, are "wrong" or "undeserved." I dish it out constantly, but apparently I stopped being able to take it myself at some point.
I hate everyone's obsession with projecting every thought they ever have out into the world and demanding attention for it. The internet generates this sickness that infects every single interaction people have, where all expressions of thought or action become filtered through a lens of content. It makes me ill. Here, I have a couple anecdotes that'll take a bit to explain.
I cannot tell you how many times I've tried sharing a thought or explaining an idea somewhere only to be bombarded with people telling me that I should be posting it on my blog or bluesky or itch.io or wherever. The casualness with which people will just tell you "think of the numbers this would do" is, to be blunt, fucking weird to me. They always mean it in a supportive way, but... I would like to go back to being able to just fucking talk to people, y'know?
Sometimes, they just post it themselves instead. All of these bleets originated as something I casually remarked in a Discord conversation somewhere. Most of the time when this happens, I only discover it later while scrolling.
Many of you probably read Patchwork Paladin's weekly newsletter. In addition to linking posts and projects and other standard fare, one of its standout features is a recap of some conversations that took place in Discord. There's a lot of great stuff that gets lost in the ephemera of private servers, hidden from search engines.
But a couple months back, I opened it to find a long description of something I talked about in a thread, including heavy quotation, that really caught me off guard. Despite the fact that I just said "ah yes, what a nice idea this is"... if I'm being honest, I don't really think of what I'm writing in those spaces as something for public consumption most of the time. In this particular case, I was actually planning on writing a blog post about those thoughts, too. But I wanted the chance to take my time to, y'know, articulate it properly.
My final example also comes from a couple months ago. Ben Milton, of Questing Beast fame, made a video adapting my post cataloguing initiative methods. A 17,000 word blog post can now be consumed in a 20-minute video.
I want to state this as clearly as clearly as I can: this is not an issue of credit. None of these people plagiarized me. I do not believe that I have been wronged in any way. I am not angry or hurt by any of these people. Patchwork Paladin immediately apologized and removed that section from her newsletter when I confronted her about it. Ben fully credits me in the video and links to my post, quite enthusiastically. And when people do tell me about this sort of thing ahead of time, I pretty much always approve. Look:
(I'll admit that my ego is a little wounded by Ben's video getting more views in 6 days than my blog post did in two years, now fully double its total. But again, that's not his fault at all, and I don't begrudge him an audience that I believe he's earned.)
Like I said, these incidents haven't hurt me. But they do alienate me. I feel so disturbed whenever I encounter this behavior. This bizarre attitude towards every interaction that sees it only as fodder for engagement. I don't think that any of these people would characterize their own actions in this way, of course. I'm sure they could all cite a purer intent than I'm giving them credit for. But that's the insidious thing about this infection: sometimes I swear I'm the only one who can see it.
Take Ben's video. He made it very clear that he was adapting my post. But in addition to listing initiative methods, he also provides some commentary and opinions about each one. And those parts also match up almost 1-to-1 with my own descriptions. And that gives me a funny feeling.
Maybe Ben just so happens to share all the same views as me. That's not an unlikely explanation, of course. One of the reasons why we've long been such big fans of one another is because, wouldn't you know it, we share a lot of the same opinions and preferences! Alternatively, maybe Ben's thoughts about initiative were shaped by my words. It's possible that he simply read my posts and was persuaded by my arguments.
And yet, I just can't shake this weird suspicion that the real explanation has nothing to do with the substantive quality of my words. That funny feeling in me says that he probably just took my observations and put them into his script because it was content he could use. Not because he'd want to jack my shit, but because that's just the way we all seem to interact with each others' shit.
I hope it's clear that I put a lot of effort into my blog posts. So it makes me sad to think how disposable my work is. People don't consume my work because they want to digest it, but because they like to consume. It's tasty slop at best and discourse-ammo at worst.
But this is the section about hypocrisy, right? How could I possibly complain that much about the relentless content churn of the RPG hobby, about the deranged eagerness with which people participate in the attention economy, without acknowledging that I have a fucking blog! Good lord, can you blame people for encouraging me to use it?
I'm the same as everyone else. I claimed that I hate everyone's obsession with projecting every thought they ever have out into the world. But I quite famously never shut the fuck up. My wordcounts are literally a punchline in the blogosphere.
The big wakeup call that led to me closing up shop was when Warren invited me and Josh to start a podcast with him. And I almost went through with it! Try to imagine the actual delusion it took for me to think that the world needed to hear even more of my thoughts, or that I would make a good host of a show. Even if this is somehow the first post of mine you've ever read before, you already have a sense for what a sour, humorless little narcissist I am.
When we first shared our ambitions with others, one friend actually laughed at it. Again, kind of a gut punch, but sometimes you need those. What the hell was I thinking? When did I forget how to shut the fuck up already?
Here's one big juicy example that I think captures a lot of my misgivings about this thing I've made myself.
You may recall I once wrote a negative review of Mothership 1E by Tuesday Knight Games. After a few months, I took it down. A lot of people assumed that it must be because I provoked too many negative reactions. While it's true that I did indeed get a handful of fucking freaks losing their goddamn minds at me, that was a pretty short-term pain (that I mostly slept through, actually). The real reason I took it down was because of the "positive" reactions the post got.
A lot of the people who disliked my review accused me of being a contrarian, that I just wanted to say something negative about something popular. And I truly don't feel like that's accurate. But I am coming to realize that it may be the reason why so many people liked the review.
In the post, I was unambiguous in my respect for Sean McCoy and my support for his work and the greater Mothership cultural project which has grown so beautifully. Nonetheless, for months afterwards, I ran into people linking my review at least weekly, always wielding my words as a weapon. There are a lot of unhinged weirdos who loudly proclaimed that I, Dwiz of Knight at the Opera, have provided definitive proof once and for all that Mothership is unplayable garbage, or that Sean McCoy is literally the Devil, or that the OSR is a cancer on the hobby, or that (perhaps worst of all) system truly doesn't matter after all.
But even outside of the screwballs, just the general reaction to the review made me uncomfortable. Again, I'm not bothered by people disliking me or my work. I'm bothered by how they like it. Even the most benign praise still revealed how poorly I had conveyed literally anything I had intended to with the post. That I must have unintentionally written a "takedown" when what I thought I had written was a reflection on my own preferences. I do not find it encouraging when someone tells me how much they love my ability to devastate with my writing, or when they tell me that my words convinced them to not buy or play a game. I cannot begin to express how gross those compliments make me feel.
Frankly, I just don't think the RPG world is ready for serious criticism yet. People sometimes like when I have something positive to say, but they fucking adore whenever I write negative things. The fact that my then-most-viewed post of all time seemed to engender exclusively mean-spirited reactions does not reflect well on any of us. And when I see how readers would talk about my words, when they'd share it around with others and add their own commentary, it was obvious that all of the substance was lost in translation. Because that wasn't the point. My writing is purely instrumental. It exists solely for its discursive functionality. The actual content therein is completely immaterial.
I took down the review because I don't want to play in this grotesque game happening around me, even if my contributions are minor and inconsequential. However insignificant the harm, it was still clear to me that my words were putting more bad into the world than good. The choice couldn't be more obvious.
But I'm still the one who chose to write the dang post. I still couldn't help myself but say a bunch of negative things about something people love. Let's not pretend I didn't know what would happen when I wrote that review. I'm an insatiable shit-talker and I am ashamed of it.
The only metric for success I ever set for my blog was this: would this be the kind of blog that I, personally, would have loved to read back when I was first getting into the online RPG world? By that standard, it has been a triumph from day one. I enjoy reading my own posts. I think my writing quality has improved and my understanding of the gaming arts has deepened. I even make myself laugh sometimes.
But I've been forced to reevaluate what I've really built here. It's all well and good to say "the only opinion that matters is my own. As long as I'm happy with my work, that's good enough." But as we've seen, everything I disdain about this community resides also within me. As I looked at my surroundings, everything I didn't like was something I could ultimately trace back here. Whenever I cringed at the thought of how others perceive me, it became harder and harder to ignore the source of those perceptions. It's me who's been making the bed.
I can't go back in time and undo my actions. But I can try to clean up after myself.
-Dwiz
No comments:
Post a Comment