And yet, these thoughts infest me, and I must put them somewhere. If you're anything like me, you shouldn't read them. And if you're anything like me, you will read these thoughts. Every wretched word. You will read them looking for the humanity in them, hoping to see a glimmer of something real and honest, rather than yet another schmuck making a tragedy all about himself.
I am sorry to constantly disappoint you.
One Year Later
One year ago, Mandy Morbid made accusations of sexual assault against Zak Smith, including accounts from Jennifer and Hannah making similar sorts of accusations. Three days later, Vivka Grey did the same thing.
In the aftermath, the OSR (and the greater RPG community) collectively turned its back on Zak, and over the next several days and weeks, people shared their own thoughts on the subject. Some of these were soul-searching, a few were gloating, and many were self-serving — a chance to take the tragedy of four women and make it about oneself, or an opportunity to tell everyone "I told you so" and prove how smart one is, or a chance to ramp up blog traffic by capitalizing on the story of the day.
Scattered among the smug posts were accounts of people's own encounters with Zak. Many strange anecdotes about the man himself asking for support here or there: cut this person out of your friend circle, don't support this product, do this weird favor for me. The standard cult leader schtick.
There's still some lingering controversy as to whether or not Zak actually victimized anyone — but if even one tale out of the multitudes is true, then it seems enough for serious examination and reflection. Zak is still out there, crowing for proof, but the hard reality is that you don't get to claim you didn't hurt someone when they say you did. Even if you think the other person's accusations are unfounded, you kind of just have to apologize, move on, or both.
If someone hates you, you don't get much say in how or why they dislike you. You either change their opinion by being a better person, or you move on with your life.
What Did We Learn?
In a word, nothing.
Or more accurately, perhaps we learned too much. Once you read the Necronomicon, you can't un-read it. I reject absolutely the thesis that some knowledge is poisonous, venom for the soul, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some things are too dangerous to know and stay human.
Collectively, the community took its ten seconds of public contrition and self-reflection and then decided to make the same mistakes over and over again.
It's fitting that all this came at the end of Google+, that the punk, grassroots, do-it-yourself RPG community fractured in its aftermath. While the greater RPG community took it as yet another controversy in a subsection of the hobby, wrote their thinkpieces about it, and moved on, the Old School Revolution (or Rules or Ruckus or whatever pithy term we're using now) still hasn't fully recovered.
The OSR and associated artpunk RPG movements fractured into Twitter circles of influence and private Discords and a thousand thousand tiny communities flung across social media, each typically crystallizing around one or two prominent personalities. (And a year later, half of those luminaries aren't even speaking to one another.)
We can't even agree on the name of the old-school movement anymore — some people find OSR too acerbic, too problematic, too reminiscent of past failures.
(An aside: Personally, I keep using the term "OSR" as an act of defiance. Every time we cede something we enjoy to someone else, our island shrinks. If the Nazis invade your subculture and you give it to them, then you have less stuff to enjoy and they have more. I certainly appreciate the Russian strategy of pulling back into the frozen wilderness and burning your villages as you go, to leave nothing for the invaders, but that strategy only works if you go somewhere they can't follow only to someday return. If they get it forever — I guess I can't like this thing because assholes like it now — then they won. You don't necessarily have to be the person to fight for your community, but if no one does, everyone loses it.)
(Another aside: But people also like to use their subculture as a weapon, a pointed dagger to keep people separated. I wouldn't actively consider myself part of the OSR, both because I tend not to think of myself as a member of any given community, and also because I play many varied sorts of games. The D&D/OSR/storygame/whatever divide is a set of false dichotomies, another front in the culture war designed to keep focusing on our differences rather than our similarities. Another rant for another time, I guess.)
But more worrying than the fracturing of the gaming scene and the emergence of several new cults of personality is the venom. Zak Smith still casts a long shadow over various parts of the RPG scene, but instead of being the guy who shows up to yell at people in a thread, now he's just this malignant presence, an unspoken threat in every conversation. (For example, I've typed his name several times in this post simply because no one else will. I usually see him referenced by innuendo or pseudonym like he's fucking Voldemort. Everybody treats him like the goddamn bogeyman, a lingering shadow who ought not to be named lest he is invoked. If you treat somebody like a god, they become a god, so don't be too quick to give your divinity to everyone you meet.)
While people were quick to throw out his writing, they certainly did keep his rhetorical style. Social media nerds have always been adept at vitriol, but Zak indoctrinated many RPG people in how to win an argument through brute force and how to quietly drive people out of a community, and then they used it. Starting last February, people sharpened their knives and started settling scores. Every corner of the community is now a battleground where people are encouraged to stay in their respective lanes, and if you say the wrong thing, you will be exiled from your corner of the hobby without any opportunity for contrition. (Sorry, buddy. If you want to keep making or talking about RPGs, you're relegated to TheRPGSite with the alt-right guys. Have fun in racist jail.)
This behavior is hardly new, but the tribalism has almost certainly become worse in the past year.
The Antidote for Cynicism
Lest you think this is overly cynical, there are a handful of positive changes over the past year. The core RPG community is still overwhelmingly white, male, and American, but we've been talking about that a bit more in the past year, and we've been trying to encourage more women and more people of color in the community.
While the tribalism leaves a lot to be desired, the small collectives of creators have been doing excellent work, and we've been seeing more experimental projects. The blog scene is making a comeback after the death of Google+, if only because that's the only centralized place where we can have certain conversations.
And nothing is permanently written, right? I usually don't offer solutions in posts like these — there is a certain amount of messiness we have to accept from our fellow humans if we're going to coexist in this world — but we can always strive to be better. We still have a chance to change our course, to remain vigilant for predators in our midst and to allow people to make some mistakes without calling for their permanent exile. It is entirely possible to do both.
Remember: you're just as error-prone as anybody else. Take no shit, but if someone is willing to do the work or apologize or just show that they're coming at a problem from a different angle than you, you can probably find some common ground.
And if that sense of compromise is too much hippie shit for you, and you think total war is the only way to bring peace to your world or your slice of it, I suppose I can't argue. Come back in a decade and we can revisit the egalitarianism vs. tribalism debate.
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