[Venus 2141] The future has goo all over it
Ron Edwards:
I meant to reply to this earlier, but forgot.
Moreno, what you wrote illustrates a concept I profoundly disagree with: that games are only worth playing insofar as they are being actively published and that their owner is commercially still viable. This is the "dead game" concept - that once a game is no longer in print, or no longer "supported," that the actual role-player should ignore it.
I don't understand that concept one bit. It strikes me as raw consumerism, mistaking the commercial identity and cultural branding of a product for its actual value. Should one stop listening to a record album if the band breaks up, or the record company no longer exists? Stop reading a book because its author is dead, or the original company that published it no longer exists?
My answer to these questions is no, of course not. It's the same for role-playing games. I suggest there is no such thing as a "dead game." If you own the text, or if it's available to you, then you can play the game. If the game is being played, then it's part of the role-playing landscape exactly as much as any game which is receiving massive publisher promotion and advertising, and for which multiple secondary products are being regularly published. One of my first realizations in 1994 or so, upon casting my attention across role-playing content on the internet, was that Marvel Super Heroes was one of the best-loved and most widely-played RPGs, and had been since it was published. Was it "dead" in subcultural terms? Yes, as a doornail. Would considering it genuinely dead and ignoring it in terms of whether to play it, or in terms of designing new games, be smart? No, that would be stupid, then and now.
Over ten years ago, as I decided to stay with self-publishing and realized that "graduating" to selling my game to someone else was idiotic, I met a fellow in a game store with very strong opinions. In an aggressive fashion, poking his finger and with a fight-threatening glare, he told me that the single variable that determined his loyalty (his word) to a game was support, i.e., whether a game continued to be represented by multiple products and looked to be so represented indefinitely.
That guy was being stupid. He was a consumer, not a role-player. He was an economic puppet, not a usage-based customer. He was a supply-side victim, not a participant of a market. He was proudly, and as I said socially aggressively, boasting of having his pocket picked.
Here's another point, which is that anyone can run into trouble with a website or personal organization. The Soyuz Arts site only went down a week or two ago. It seems graceless to assume instantly that the company is out of business and that the game is out of print. The Adept Press website (sorcerer-rpg.com at the time) was replaced by a boring financial investment page for almost a year in 2000; the Burning Wheel site regaled us with Russian porn for a while, if I remember correctly. If the people who enjoyed those games had the attitude you just illustrated in your post, then both companies would have sunk. Does that sound like a good idea to you?
Venus 2141 has a lot to offer. It's a damn good design and a lot of people would enjoy playing it, and would benefit conceptually as members of the hobby and potential designers and publishers. Even if Soyuz Arts is gone, that fact doesn't change.
Best, Ron
Rafu:
Ron,
while I profoundly agree with you on this matter, you should also concede that discontinued web support etc. made it a lot more challenging to actually get one's hands on Venus 2141 (the instruction text) in order to play Venus 2141 (the game), for anybody who hasn't already.
Knowing Moreno pretty well, I believe this was what prompted it to post about his indignation on The Forge... but that he can speak for himself, of course.
My point is that the investment in time and effort tracking down a "discontinued" game product is the same required to acquire and try out several "actively supported" games, making it less worth it in the context of one person's life: especially with the amount of creative activity currently flowing through our "indie" roleplaying design scene, the "discontinued" game really has to be somehow exceptional for me to pursue it rather than trying out several other titles. This way, the many games which are good and well worth playing but not the most outstanding of the crop... those games risk becoming dead for real once they become not easily available to the public.
Moreno R.:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on August 23, 2010, 07:19:59 AM
Moreno, what you wrote illustrates a concept I profoundly disagree with: that games are only worth playing insofar as they are being actively published and that their owner is commercially still viable.
[...]
Venus 2141 has a lot to offer. It's a damn good design and a lot of people would enjoy playing it, and would benefit conceptually as members of the hobby and potential designers and publishers. Even if Soyuz Arts is gone, that fact doesn't change.
Ron, you're preaching to the choir there. I could rebuild everything in your post simply quoting things I already said very often in Italian forums or elsewhere...
I did not say that the game was "dead". I said it was "gone". As in "you ask me how can you buy that game... ehm... I don't know, right now I don't really know of any way, really, to get a copy. Not from a distributor, not from a shop, not even as a pirated scan on the web. It's gone. let's hope it will return". GONE is not DEAD, even if the site return in a week, all it mean is that it was, really, "gone away" for the entire week.
Marvel Super-Heroes was NEVER "gone". If someone ask me for a copy, I can cite shops, e-bay vendors, second-hand stores, personal ads, where you can easily buy a copy. Not counting the amount of photocopies of the rules around (then) and pirated scans (now). I can find you a copy in 15 minutes. Tops.
Hell, I played two years with a game "dead" from more than 15 years... Runequest II. Before the web, before the scans, without ebay, without, really, any way to get a "real" copy, and in a rpg-poor country literally thousand of miles from the nearest copy in a shop... all you had to do to get a complete set was to ASK and someone in the local gaming circles would have photocopied you the entire set of RQII books from his own photocopies of photocopies of photocopies that someone did years ago with a true, real, precious set of RQ II books..
So, if I say that Venus 2141 is AT THE MOMENT, "gone", is not because I don't see it in the next Alliance catalog. I think I didn't even look at that catalog for... ten years now, I think, maybe more. I am not talking about "ohhh... it's not in the Catalog of Next New Shiny Things... I suppose I will not buy it, then...", I am talking about "hell, I can find you any rpg published in the last thirty years, I can find you original D&D from '74, I can find you even the old pre-print version of Sorcerer's supplements (you signed them to me in Italy, remember?), I can find find every version of FATAL and every version of Wuthering Heights RPG. And what I can't find you, somebody will. And that somebody is simply a google search away. We are not in 1999 anymore. But I can't find a copy of THAT game. It's like it never existed"
When I say "gone", I mean "I can't find a copy anywhere. Not even a scan. The only one I ever saw was in Ron's hand, no shop or distributor has ever carried it as far as I know, and the web page is gone"
If the web page returns next week, with news about a contract with Amazon to include a free copy of the game with every shipment of books in the world, it doesn't change that fact.
I am saying all this not because I did take offense from what you wrote (well, a little, but this is not the point), but because this new kind of "disappearance act" for new games has nothing to do with shops, distributors, catalogs, and all that. That was 1999's battle. It's over, You won. Nobody with any sense of reality these days could even say that a game is "dead" because it's not in a distributor catalog or doesn't have a lot of monthly supplements. But doesn't mean that A LOT of games aren't still disappearing for different motives and in different ways these days. In silence and without having left a lot of loyal old fans like RQ or MSH.
If you would not have written about it, nobody would have EVER wrote a single post about Venus 2141 at the forge. Or anywhere else.
And it wasn't the distributors, the catalog, the shops' fault this time. I think (my personal opinion, obviously) that the game's authors made really a lot of errors, that shoot the game in the foot before even starting to race. Errors completely independent from the game's quality, I could be wrong, and in any case, I understand that it's always easier to say these things in hindsight without being in the creator's shoes and having sometimes these choices forced upon you by necessity. But I think that, when we talk about games that FOR NOW are "gone", it would be much more fruitful to try talk about the reason why, in 2010, with all the means available now to assure that a game will never be "gone" forever, something like this could happen, instead of assuming that everybody who bring up the question is still saying the same things some clueless WW or WotC fan said in 1999....
Moreno R.:
By the way...
Quote from: Moreno R. on August 23, 2010, 11:11:47 AM
So, if I say that Venus 2141 is AT THE MOMENT, "gone", [...] When I say "gone", I mean "I can't find a copy anywhere.
[...]]
If the web page returns next week
The http://www.venus2141.com/ website linked by Ron and Me in our respective posts is still gone, but this time google cough up some other results.
I found one used copy on ebay, but, more importantly, the Soyuz arts website is up (I think I checked it too before posting two weeks ago, though... but I can't really be 100% sure) at this address:
http://www.soyuzarts.com/doku.php
I don't think this invalidate anything I said in my previous post, but it's another chance to get the game for anybody interested.
Ron Edwards:
Yes, OK. I would like to distinguish between (i) your actual views/values and (ii) the likely implications of your post for others who have not been deeply involved in the independent scene, and then I'm willing to concede in full.
We could debate "gone" vs. "down," regarding websites, although that gives rise to vulgar puns at least in my mind, and it wouldn't be important because ...
... apparently we agree regarding my concerns in my post. Which is great. And I was unfair in ignoring your mention of potentially posting a PDF, that's true too.
It so happens that at my house I have a few copies of the game from GenCon 2009. I'd be happy to send them to whomever is interested, if I can get a confirmation from Tony or Jason about that. I mean, if there's some way for them to get paid. If they're out of stock or not able to ship for whatever reason (they both travel a lot), then maybe I can be fulfiller for them at least for that limited amount. Let me send them an email and if I get an affirmative reply, I'll post to say so.
Best, Ron
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page