Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

Some friends and I dove into D & D during the pandemic. I have some improv and writing background (I’m an English teacher), so I took on the DM role. I honestly was not prepared for the depth of complexity and time investment to faithfully play the game. In the end, we stripped away entire parts of the rule book and made the game more role play focused; it’s not fun to be constantly referencing the rule book, but there was also a sense that we weren’t really playing D&D.

I'm not an expert in D&D per se, but looking at my shelf I have bought and read a ton of different P&P systems.

So I can't say you're right or wrong about the money grab, but I think you're missing the point that some people like world building (maybe more than the stories) and some people like storytelling (and couldn't care less for the world).

Some quick examples, a lot of the World of Darkness systems like Vampire, Hunter, Werewolf: You don't need to describe the world like in D&D because it's Earth, with a few differences. All background material is mostly social, political, some tech and "made up" stuff. Contrast this to D&D where you can sell books for every region: the geography, the lifeforms, the history, etc.pp

And I think you can't simply say one is better than the other. Some people want to play in a completely made up world and some people like the setting of Earth (with or without extras, there are also systems who don't have any magic or monsters). And this is a huge part of how many source material there is.

>So how can you get people do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them?

I don't think we're going to be able to discuss this. Our priors are too different. This question sneaks the premise that people won't and don't "do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them", despite counterexamples littering the (impressively capitalist) world. Engaging with the question on its face is accepting the premise. It'd be like if I asked the parent "by ensuring that nearly everyone has to do often-meaningless and sometimes actively harmful things in order to avoid succumbing to exposure, what are the powerful people (who can, and do, choose not to debase themselves thusly) trying to prevent?"

For that matter, I might recommend David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, in answer to implication that all work is necessary.

>My impression is that the tedious and unpleasant work in large projects like Linux is often done by those who are paid for it

Linux itself didn't spring from a salaried worker, and large open-source projects having paid maintainers wasn't a requirement for their inception. AFAICT, paid maintainers exist precisely because their open-source projects have grown too large, unwieldy, and important to be allowed to be someone's pet project that's only worked on in spare moments.

And it's not that nobody's interested in large open-source projects, it's that the current system doesn't allow one to focus oneself entirely on something that doesn't make money, because without money, one dies of exposure. I can say this with confidence, because all those open-source projects that now support paid workers evolved from smaller ones whose contributors worked for free-as-in-starving-artist.

The thesis _almost_ makes sense. Then the article does nothing to support it.

The history of D&D is an example of capitalism commoditizing creativity.

Initially, there were some very thin rules about character stuff to accompany miniature wargaming. This was not terribly interesting to most people. Wargamers or otherwise.

That grew into some still thin and permissive rules and more of a focus on playing a role and storytelling. The onus was on the players to do most of this. There wasn't much in the way of example or instruction. This attracted the crowd we think of today as makers - self-directed problem solvers who like to greenfield.

That all seemed sort of interesting but not approachable enough, so, in typical capitalist fashion, there were more and more manuals and rule sets and published scenarios. There was a lot more hand-holding for the creatively needy.

Meanwhile, simple algorithmic dungeon crawlers were created on computers. There was only a thin whiff of role playing as theme in combat-mechanic- and metric-heavy CRPGs.

Then we bounce back to TTRPGs who've learned from CRPGs and they become something a bit like CRPGs with slightly heavier theme. Almost all the creativity is sucked out of it. What we used to call "munchkining" prevails. The only meaningful decisions are in character creation, itself a strictly bounded system.

How did this happen? At every step along the way decisions were driven by profitability, economies of scale, and the general commoditization of creativity, turning every game into the same pleasant McAdventure.

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