The surge in popularity of D&D has a lot to do with live streamed “actual play” campaigns that are very popular on twitch and YouTube and even podcasts. Shows like “The Adventure Zone” “Acquisitions Incorporated” “Friends at the Table” “Critical Role” are vastly popular and there are celebrity offering too, like Dan Harmon’s game. Exposure to collaborative storytelling, delivered by likeable and dynamic role players pushed a lot of kids away from the idea hat D&D was only to be played in basements by sexless nerds (it still can be! 🤓)
At my local FLGS a few months ago, a young DM, no more than 17, had his party of attractive young people absolutely spellbound, hanging on every word. Warmed my black heart bout half a degree it did.
I did see Sword Coast Legends on the list, I’d never heard of it, but it was described as an action RPG, which why I said “real” RPG, since I figured an action RPG probably didn’t count. Let me know if I’m wrong though. I don’t think I remember hearing about it, but I could have just forgotten.
Well it’s not Fortnite huge or anything but it’s big enough to really get some notice and… a number of celebrities admitting they’re playing which helps.
There were a couple of pieces on it this new found joy too:
It wasn’t an overnight sort of thing, but man it has gone a long way. My group basically died when we all left the area and didn’t have good tools to stay in touch… I’ve been buying the books for years though because I just like them.
I keep hearing about how some of these kids signed some sort of contract and knew what they were getting into… at 16. Can they even enter contracts at 16? In the states, unless that’s a family owned business and a family member, there are strict rules for working minors… even when unpaid.
It does look pretty bad. Sure…there were contracts, but we all know that starbound made a fuckton of money. If that was me (and it wouldn’t be, because I’d never use work from unpaid contributors in a game I was selling), I’d happily do a ‘hey, we fucked this up, we regret how we behaved back then, here is (at least) $5,000 each to you people who did this work for us’.
It would be good marketing & PR, versus really bad PR they have now…
I am wary of any commercial effort taking unpaid work, especially from children… but it still would’ve been a completely different story if that unpaid work had lead to some or most of them moving onto what they wanted to do later like… I spent hundreds of hours on this great game, here is my work, here is what everyone enjoyed and how close I got with just my effort and… it lead to these open doors, or this scholarship or… you know something even if it wasn’t wages.
This story has been quietly rumbling around, and I kept waiting for a few of these dozen people, who are not afraid to be blacklisted by saying something, to come out and say this was a positive experience in some way. Maybe it really wasn’t. No matter how you dice it, if the volunteers feel used years later, something went wrong, very wrong.
Also contracting kids to do unpaid work seems slimy, especially since I thought that game made bank too.
It’s more than that. As mentioned, the popularity of groups who stream D&D and the involvement of known figures into the community has helped give it a less basement based image and increase its popularity.
This video is a nice look at D&D and why it’s appealing by an outsider:
I particularly liked this stance. In addition to what OW said, I think that focusing on one area means you have to be good; you can’t rely on the broader journalism carrying the writing in your core topic. Over time that necessity is going to help keep quality high.
Q:Can you foster that diversity by diversifying your content. Plenty of games sites now write about pop culture broadly – Game of Thrones, superhero movies, I’m sure you know what I mean. Is that a route Eurogamer has ever contemplated going down?
OW: Nope. No. Never doing it. With all due respect, we’re just never doing it. We’re a video games site.
There are two reasons for that. One is we’re a video games site, and video games is enough. We have enough to write about. The other is – and this is just a personal thing of mine – it bugs me, I find it presumptuous, that a video games site would write about Marvel movies and not Tarantino or Almodovar movies… We wouldn’t make those assumptions within video games about our readers. We assume they might be as interested in an indie game as a AAA game. At least, there are reasons why we would cover both, and we think both are interesting and deserving of coverage.
I don’t like this idea that there’s a Venn diagram of geek sub-culture. I prefer to assume that our readers interests outside of video games could be absolutely anything. Of course, it’s statistically likely that those interests might include Marvel and Game of Thrones, but no – I just don’t like that. I’d rather we launched a new site to talk about pop culture, rather than put pop culture on Eurogamer.
No Brad, you don’t understand! The bad people were not true gamergaters, so their harassment doesn’t count. True gamergaters ™ only care about ethics in games journalism.
Plus, those mean leftists deserved it because they said that “gamer” is a stupid identity.
As we all know - actually - Gamergate was about ethics in journalism: initially about an allegation of a journalist giving favourable coverage to a game developer he had a relationship with, without disclosing that relationship.
But for some reason, in your article, the journalist - the person at fault, surely! - is not mentioned by name once. And the game developer is mentioned 21 (twenty-one) times.
Eurogamer is one of the few (only?) gaming news sites I visit regularly. It’s been very interesting to go back and read over their history (had no idea they’d been around 20 years!). Good on them.
