In the beginning, hobby gaming was entirely a social affair. People got together, played in person, and conducted fantastic fantasy campaigns using rulesets whose roots arose in a 19th century game called Kriegspiel (literally “War Game” in German).
These groups are the origins of The Clubhouse.
While it was originally meant to be useful to military studies, it also proved to be an entertaining and manly hobby in its own right and attracted those who wanted to try their mettle at command but—for whatever reason—could not or did not get the chance.
While it began with revisiting Napoleon’s era, as his campaigns left a mark that endures to the present, what wars would be revisited would expand with time- and with it, the appeal to historians, armchair generals, and others of similar mind and temper.
It is in the gathering of these men—and it is men we speak of here—together to play their battles, relay their orders, and adjudicate results in an ongoing campaign until someone won or everyone lost that the roots would find purchase and the cornerstone of our hobby be laid.
Organizing men into a club, keeping them interested in the campaign, and rotating in new players to replace those lost for one reason or another would be the first hurdle in formulating this hobby’s culture of play.
Overcoming this challenge at a time when the Consumerism of the present did not yet exist, meant that a Clubhouse did not push product upon its members as if it were an Amway or Scientology cult. You didn’t need to bring your own Chess or Checkers set to play those games. You didn’t need your own dice, chips, or cards to partake in Poker or Craps. It was (and it still is) unreasonable to expect hobbyists to lug around their own copies of a wargame; you used the host’s set, like you do for Poker Night.
While the play of the game was a test of the mind, requiring focus and attention to detail, it was also—in controlled manners and conditions, not unlike that Poker Night—an opportunity to socialize with one’s peers in the community privately, and as it was a controlled environment there were rules and norms to adhere to that all were expected to abide by. As such, while there were similarities across the hobby scene, each Clubhouse could and did exist as an autonomous entity- a thing unto itself.
The Clubhouse, therefore, is a social group first and foremost- not a building or formal organization.
Conventional Play Undermined The Clubhouse
During the 1970s, the wargame Clubhouse culture fell into the laps of the Baby Boomers as part of their overall cultural patrimony.
It was in the years leading up to this inheritance where a mature wargame hobby began to experiment with wholly fantastic adventure wargaming of the sort that would lead from fantasy Braunstein scenarios through fantasy Chainmail campaigns and culminate 50 years ago with Dungeons & Dragons.
This was not received with universal acclaim. Plenty of strictly historical wargamers did not like the incorporation of fantastic adventure literature and mythology into an otherwise historical wargame scenario from the Ancient, Medieval, or Early Modern period. (For all that, in depth, I refer you to Playing At The World by Jon Peterson.)
What arose at this time was a reaction to the explicable success of D&D, and that reaction is an understandable one given the era: the reviving up of a publishing business (TSR Inc.) that would spend the rest of the decade publishing newer editions of the game, culminating with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons late in the decade.
In addition to publishing in-house supplementary materials, other publishers would get in on the act and publish their own materials as well as competing products. In this mania, the transmission of the Clubhouse Culture got lost and by the 1980s that lapse in transmission already proved mortal to the Clubhouse.
There was no serious attempt to teach the massive non-wargaming audience that came in post-1980, many of whom (such as myself) were both isolated from that Clubhouse culture and too young to have picked it up in the ordinary manner of the day via participation in university-focused hobby clubs.
Couple this with the parallel rise of the videogame as an entertainment technology, soon to also be brought home with the earliest consoles (e.g. the Atari 2600), and the rise of rampant Consumerism as a cultural norm by the status-anxious Boomers now fully in their maturity (Remember Thirtysoming?) and equally anxious to finally seize power from their elders. What do you get?
The result is a Consumerist approach to the hobby, using the barest skeleton of a social gathering (people meeting in one’s homes), but instead of engaging in the Clubhouse social norms and procedures wherein members would add new elements to an ongoing campaign of their own creation (but otherwise just shared one complete game product) the norm shifted to what is now a meme.
The publisher, not the Clubhouse, now determined what the rules and norms of play would be. The agency of the players would be crippled more and more over the 1980s and ‘90s, first by pushing crippled unfinished non-games as products (for which Palladium Books remains the most successful offender) and then by selling them yet more supplementary product to either replace player imaginations or to pretend to fix problems with the product- this is the origin of the Supplementary Product Tread Mill business model.
This theft of user—of player—agency, coupled with removal of other wargaming norms that made the fantastic adventure campaigns of the 1970s possible, would leave players perpetually confused, frustrated, and yet unable to properly address the problem because they had no exposure to the Clubhouse culture which possessed the remedies.
In short, the Cargo Cult that came to take over the hobby after 1980 and its aberrant Conventional Play paradigm had successful thrown the Clubhouse down the memory hole and replaced it with a Pop Culture Consumerism Cult using a Cargo Cult mentality where it is presumed that merely aping the form of 1970s publishing would magically recreate their results in the same way that making bamboo plane models would get cargo to fall from the sky post-World War 2.
Yet you have an entire cohort that knew no better, and a bunch of Boomers that could not be bothered to figure out why they could not grok how to play the games properly, which opened the door for further problems.
Every Pop Cult Becomes A Death Cult
While it is unfair to blame the Boomers at TSR for the cultural subversion that arrived by 1990 with the arrival of White Wolf Game Studio and Vampire: The Masquerade, it is fair to blame the Boomers as a whole for failing to maintain the virtue of religion that (like everything else) they received from their elders and did not pass on in turn. This abdication of responsibility opened the door for the cultural destruction we endure now.
The reason is that, as author Brian Niemeier observed:
Creed: This is where the PopCult falls short of a full-fledged religion. While they have a massive and growing body of shared lore with which all members are expected to have at least a passing familiarity, only hopeless psychotics believe any of it is real.
As a result, the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations.
If you have nothing real to address the problems that a religion answers, you will find yourself occupied by one that does imposed upon you- like it or not, and that’s where the Cargo Cult’s undermining of the Clubhouse made way for the Death Cult that is now the religion of the West. (See the linked post to get an explanation.)
The Death Cult, being a Gnostic heresy at its root, is a parasitic thing; it hollows out its hosts and wears them as skinsuits to use to attack other victims zombie-style to Spread The Poz.
That is what the Death Cult did to the Cargo Cult, which means that Conventional Play (and its current cachet of Social Proof) has been weaponized by the Death Cult to be the vector for pozzing hobbyists into Cultists—into meme-zombies—who then are subject to the Stand-Alone Complex that the Cult carries as part of its meme complex.
If you want to know why 4chan’s /tg/ board gets routinely mined for videos by channels like Neckbeardia, that is your explanation: the Death Cult, which (like its counterparts and Fellow Travelers Antifa, BLM, etc.) attracts spiteful mutants, losers, misfits, Karens, and resentful Gamma Males.
Reminder: Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.
—ForgottenMysteryGrove, Nov 15, 2023
And oh boy are there now so very many of those freaks in Conventional Play, and they are all True Believers that use Conventional Play as a skinsuit to push the poz. All of them are terrible people, and just the other day this came up front and center again in my Twitter feed.
Jim’s reading from an article archived here. It’s insanity in action, but also Death Cult anti-morality in action and the inevitable result of the Cargo Cult’s Conventional Play and its Consumerism.
You see this showing up again now as the Death Cultists converge publishers like Catalyst Game Labs and Games Workshop over time, pushing the poz into the Intellectual Properties that they control under the assumption that the nihilism inherent in Conventional Play will leave such a gaping void in the hobby’s mind and soul—that they are so atomized, isolated, and easy to freeze and scare into compliance—that they will bend the knee to anything the Cult demands with their purloined Social Proof and stolen moral authority to avoid being excluded from the hobby.
Or rather, they would, if not for a couple of examples of a game’s hobbyists doing just fine without official publications or other products for years on end- BattleTech being one of them.
And it is the roaring and riotous rejection by said hobbyists of Catalyst’s demand for Cult compliance that leads me to say that it is time to take what the #BROSR started and Finish The Fight.
The Industry Must Die For The Hobby To Live
Or, to put it simply, “Return of the Clubhouse”.
The reality of the situation is that the Death Cult’s presumption of victory is premature.
The same technological changes that makes it possible for Chris Gonnerman to publish his Basic D&D retroclone via Print On Demand strictly at-cost at Amazon while giving the PDFs away free are also the same technologies that allow players to organize once more into Clubhouses and play in proper wargame campaigns.
The #BROSR (organized out of a Discord server, supplemented with Twitter DM groups, blogs, email, etc.) is Proof of Concept that this works. They are not the only ones doing so, not by a long shot- especially if you know how popular Tabletop Simulator is (just ask the Fantasy and 40K people). BattleTech has MegaMek for virtual tabletop play that Hairbrained Studios wishes they could achieve without extensive third-party modifications.
That’s before we account for the advent of 3D Printers detonating the chokepoint that miniature sellers formerly held (such as Games Workshop), making an in-person form of Clubhouse with its old norms viable once more. Need something? Print it off- a new miniature, some manuals, dice, tokens, maps, etc. All for a fraction of what you’d pay at a store, virtual or realspace, used or new- those printers quickly pay for themselves.
Which means that hobbyists no longer need be constrained by what some publisher says about anything, putting the power—the agency—for not only one’s play in one’s own Clubhouse, but for the hobby as a whole back in the hands of hobbyists for good.
Does this kill the commercial viability of tabletop gaming? You better believe it does, and it could not be a more effective way to purge the poz and the Death Cult that spreads it from this part of the culture. Clubhouses are far easier to gatekeep than whole product lines, and decentralized—but federated—hobby scenes are far easier to keep clean across generations than centralized ones slaved to a master outlet run by a single point of failure (i.e. the publisher).
We don’t need The Industry. This is a hobby of agency, not passivity, so burn in holy fire and be gone already. The Clubhouse does not need the Industry; the Industry is totally dependent upon the Clubhouse- and soon we’ll celebrate our Fabian Strategy.
(What? You think a hobby based on wargaming wouldn’t have historians around?)
“What’s that?” you ask.
“Don’t buy their product. Buy used. Set up guerilla POD listings for at-cost manuals and other publications. 3D print minis, tokens, and other objects. Print maps, sheets, and gatekeep without mercy while welcoming all earnest and honest prospects who will accept the rules of the Clubhouse.”
And, when required, call up the greatest friend of all free men everywhere.
This is a hobby. It is meant to be done in social groups. It is not a Lifestyle Brand, to be defined by conspicuous and senseless Consumerism and all that such entails- and no Clubhouse for fantastic adventure game hobbies worth a damn will ever permit it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just rolled up a new man and I’ve got to decide if he’ll be a Druid, a Ranger, or an Assassin. In the meantime, I have a question to ask of you, dear reader: Would you like me to repurpose some of my AD&D1e posts here, reformat them into a pamphlet, or both? Comment below.
Revisiting your AD&D1e posts would be great. The ones detailing classes and races in the rules implied setting were excellent.
Let's see your AD&D 1e material here! I'm sure I've missed some and there is a whole new audience for it.