[Interview] never before seen by eyes of whoever

[Ron Edwards]

This interview was commissioned by a well-known pop culture site last summer (2014). As with a lot of interviews, I ask the interviewer to answer my questions too, in hopes of a back-and-forth that will not only really nail a topic, but will also make it a little more like a real dialogue. Not only would he not do it, he told me they wouldn't run it.

So, here you go. I'd love some comments.

[glandis]

Hi Ron,

(I notice my opening paragraphs are less about the substance of your responses than the, um, tone and possible "image" they project. I leave them only in case you find them useful and am entirely comfortable being ignored in that area.)

Did you get any explanation on why no dialogue and/or why they chose not to run the interview? I guess the obvious (if short-sighted, by my thinking) is "we don't do interviews that way" and "since your response assumes dialogue, we can't use it." But if you got anything specific, and feel it's appropriate to mention, there might be something interesting to discuss.

I mean, many of your invitations to dialogue involve disputing the premises behind the questions, which I imagine an interviewer might find annoying. On the other hand, I basically agree with you about the need for clarification, so I'm not sure what to say. Question 1: maybe they're asking for a self-assessment about how your personality influences the way people react to your ideas. But since I, personally, neither love nor hate you, it's hard to not just agree that the question is flawed ...

I do find question 2 particularly difficult, both in the way it was framed and (more than in other cases) how you responded. Again, I basically agree about the need for clarification, but I can also understand the interviewer just wanting an answer to "do you regret/wish you phrased differently?" The last, "are people justified" question is kinda nonsense to me (or at worst, if considered malevolently, a version of "when did you stop beating your wife"); *maybe* "why do you think people feel justified in getting so angry?" is a version that could, in dialogue, get a meaningful response.

(Enough of that.)

I think the "preference and mood" stuff conveys what "priority" means real well and in and of itself means making this interview available is worthwhile. "Independent=creator-owned, published and controlled because I think that's a good thing" is also esp. clear here, though I don't get why that particular bit is sometimes so hard to grasp.

You mention Jared & his games plenty later, but I noticed his absence in question 9. There's probably other names too, and obviously I intend to attribute no malice to your omission, but that one leaps out at me for some reason.

I wonder about self-publishing as the ONLY "movement" - seems to me "games that will let me do story the way that I want to" was at least a sub-goal for many, MANY people (NOT all, nor all the time for all people who did have it) at the Forge. Attributing "improve Narrativist design" as A (not THE) Forgeish movement doesn't seem wrong to me, although failing to understand the limits of that, and the primacy of Independence, was/is all too common.

That's some initial thoughts.

[Moreno R.]

Oh god, that poor journalist...  he asked the usual leading and superficial questions that fill most interviews, and instead of replying with some witty barter promoting your new book, you question practically every single thing he asked...  Journalists will be scared to approach you now!

More seriously: it's pity that he didn't reply asking some of the things you listed for him. One that I would be interested to ask about is this one:
"From my childhood and teens, I have a lot of personal experience with what are now called intentional communities, some of them notorious. I know exactly how they go off the rails. Ask me more about that if you're interested."

OK, I am interested!  :-)

I don't think I agree fully with what you wrote about communities (apart from agreeing that things like Facebook and other online "communities" are not worthy of the name and are instead actively anti-social), but I will wait for your answer to the question above, it could be that we don't disagree after all...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon,

He'd agreed to the dialogue premise before sending me the questions. I say that to almost all interviewers, they all say "sure!" and I think only one or two people actually did it. Mostly they run the interview as initially returned, leaving it looking sort of weird, as if I'd stalled questions.

He was quite specific about why they were killing it: too negative, too harsh, too defensive. As if opening with a direct reference – with no critique of it – which included a decade of solid invective and descriptions of physical harm toward me did not demand a defense. My defense of course, beginning with "have you any idea of what you're talking about."

My frustration here is that I have found very few interviewers who practice anything like professional due diligence. It's why I tell them now that I won't answer "tell me about how you started the Forge" questions or "gee what do you think of role-playing." It's as if they see XYZ posts and references in some echo chamber somewhere and decide to represent the most superficial zeitgeist they can. I'm now in the business of making interviewers do their damn self-appointed job.

*maybe* "why do you think people feel justified in getting so angry?" is a version that could, in dialogue, get a meaningful response.

You're kinder than me. My answer to that would be "Why are you asking me?"

Good call about Jared. It's like the Seven Dwarfs. I can always name six of them but not the same six each time. I should go through the text and alter a thing or two here and there, noting it as a change.

I wonder about self-publishing as the ONLY "movement" - seems to me "games that will let me do story the way that I want to" was at least a sub-goal for many, MANY people (NOT all, nor all the time for all people who did have it) at the Forge. Attributing "improve Narrativist design" as A (not THE) Forgeish movement doesn't seem wrong to me, although failing to understand the limits of that, and the primacy of Independence, was/is all too common.

It was a frequent creative goal only because of the historical gap in real RPG texts and hobby discourse. It wasn't a dedicated goal at the site, and I took pains to support and help people regardless of the creative priorities – in fact, often putting less time into games that were heavily Sorcerer-like or perceived to be Ron-like because (i) a dozen other people were on hand to provide good advice and (ii) I often did not trust the writer not to be currying favor, even if he or she didn't see it that way.

Best, Ron

P.S. Uh-oh, Moreno just characteristically pinpointed a hard one. OK, I will start composing.

[Ron Edwards]

So, intentional communities. That's what you say now instead of "commune." Maybe co-op (short for cooperative, for non-native English speakers).

There were thousands, maybe dozens of thousands of them, across the United States. Some simply meant a group of people bought into a mortgage together and committed to living there as a chosen extended family. Others were almost completely separatist and considered themselves to be an exiled mini-nation, a chosen reservation-in-reverse. You could find almost anything in the spectrum between these extremes.

My own home was a bit of one, at the more ordinary end. My parents rented rooms in our house to local students and part of the deal was that they really lived there, becoming part of our family activities and general routines of life. One detail of that was that I'd give up my room during the summer and leave town for the mountains, so that arguably, my mom and stepdad were more committed to the other tenants than to me in day to day terms for a fourth of the year. During the school year, I effectively had a rotating cast of older siblings, who stayed the same age.

In "the mountains" was a radical camp which had begun as a Quaker retreat/summer camp in the 50s, but was now about as close to the feared dangerous-hippie naked black-people-too stereotype as you can get. I lay claim to being one of the longest-running attendants, not continuous but beginning at about age two as a staff brat, then many years as a camper (typically three sessions) and then a counselor. It was very much its own intentional community and by modern standards was terrifyingly cut off from any kind of rescue or technical capacity. It was completely low-tech; there was no service staff and we cooked over fires. It's astounding no kid ever died there. Life at camp was organized by tribes, each including at least one male and one female counselor, each with the full age range of campers from 10 to 17. The kids always included a fair proportion of group home and street kids, mixed in with the rest of us. It's one of the reasons why I was such a foreigner in ordinary American life, even on the California central coast (which counts as "northern" in California language; that's a matter of who's stealing the water) which is already foreign to most of the U.S.

My mom taught pregnancy and childbirth classes all the time, and sometimes would travel to various communes around California to teach people how not to die. This was an interesting example of perceived hippie and woo-woo material that did in fact get adopted into mainstream medical practice after a couple of decades of political strife (i.e. my childhood). When my wife and I had kids less than a decade ago, I was amused to see the prenatal classes at the hospital feature the same material that I'd mimeographed and collated for my mom thirty-five years earlier, considered at the time to be radical and scary. Yes, a woman gave birth in our bathtub at one point. My bathtub, as I saw it. Anyway, I went with her on these trips and stayed in all sorts of places, including the famous Black Bear Commune, as it happens at the same time that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were living there – as he and I found later when we sat down to figure out where-all each of us had been.

My oldest stepbrother (born 1949) was a former Weatherman and general dissident, and by the early 70s had decided that he could simply not live any kind of ordinary life in the U.S. (his mother actually defected to Cuba). He was very skilled mechanically and was therefore solid gold to any rural commune, as he could keep the sump pump running and similar stuff. He joined Synanon sometime in the early 70s, and we visited him there pretty regularly – including and right through its infamous media period and its eventual decline in numbers and effectiveness. I'd stay there for a weekend or a week, every few months on and off, for let's see ... about age 12 through age 17.

The interesting thing about Synanon, and also some other fairly gaudy or notorious examples like the People's Temple and the Rajneeshpuram, is that they had a really high turnover rate. The idea that they kept people and refused to let them leave is confined to a couple of custody cases, not to the ordinary membership. I have the numbers somewhere in my Amerikkka research, so might be mis-remembering, but I don't think Synanon's current membership was ever more than a few thousand people – but it wouldn't surprise me if a hundred thousand or more had spent a fair amount of time there, say a year for a given person during its run from the late 50s through the late 80s. Anyway, I stress, these communities are the most powerful and effective when a lot of people are showing up to join, and a lot of people are simultaneously leaving on good terms.

Was life there pretty intense and different? Sure. Everyone lived in dorms. I always stayed with the kids my age, which meant pretty much recovered heroin addicts and street prostitutes. Everyone worked, everyone attended classes (in the kids' case, perfectly reasonable academic ones). There were scheduled Games, and impromptu ones if someone felt like things had gone to shit in some situation. The Game has a bad rep and I saw my share of its abuse, but it's also true that the techniques are still alive in most effective drug-rehab and other contexts, with the serial numbers scraped off. Say what you like about Synanon, but its rehab techniques didn't have any shitty 10% stats like AA, it was way up in the high percents like 60-75, and that's for hard-core low-rent unrecoverable heroin people. It was full of hippie talk and unbelievable local jargon, but by God everyone worked harder and better there, day in and day out, then I've ever seen in any other voluntary context. "Work" in the professional middle-class sense is a complete joke by comparison.

My take was to cope with the simultaneous insight and bullshit very carefully. That was the primary problem with 70s culture, activist or not, people running numbers on each other all the time, with the presumption that if a person was dumb enough to swallow it, then they didn't deserve consideration. Very, very hard on the younger members of the community and culture. The Vietnam generation had nothing on mine when it comes to cold cynicism and a general suspicion that everyone is lying; they'd at least grown up with Eagleland in their eyes before getting slapped down. I hated the meanness of it all and still do, even while preserving as much of the era's sense of constructive alienation as I can. Nobody in that subculture had good personal boundaries, and so developing "feelers" to discover others' limits became a necessary skill for me in adult life – I'm still pretty bad at it, and still can't shake the "only too far is far enough" mentality although I do try.

As for how these things go wrong, that's going to be a profile in Amerikkka. It has a lot to do with what I said in the interview: the leader becoming actually the leader instead of someone whose ideas are attractive to people on their own decision, often after he loses his immediate partner or close friend who can tell him when he's full of shit, often when a clique forms around him that "takes care of him" and wields the real power, seizing upon some notion and treating it as a holy decree. When Diedrich crashed and burned in Synanon, taking the Farmworkers' Movement with it; when Jim Jones went loopy in the years prior to moving to Guyana; when whatsername at the Rajneeshees started bugging everyone's cabins and poisoning people, it was always this weird little clique who really made the decisions – never the "main man" who's always wrongly painted as a Svengali.

My goal with the Forge was never to become that guy, in part by knowing this whole thing had a goal which defined its potential end, and in part by spraying the forming me-centered  clique with social acid every year or two, very much on purpose.

That'll do to start.

[Moreno R.]

Wow, now I really want to read Amerikka right now (and I call dibs on the translation).

You say that you were as foreigner in ordinary American life, but at the same time, the places that you describe is totally American, in the sense that there was nothing similar anywhere else. I had to search wikipedia a lot reading your post, and it made for a very interesting reading, describing a totally different, alien world. We get a lot of "americana" from every media here, so much that it seems sometimes that America is more familiar that another part of Italy. But that part is practically never touched. From what little I know about it, it's not something that happen only here, the rewriting of the past is global. Do you see it as successful? I mean, apart from the media representation, in real life, talking with people, they usually know what you are talking about or it's like you lived in a world that never existed?

About the Forge: I think it would be better to start another thread at this point, because my observations about the Forge would go in a totally different direction from this, but at the same time I would be interested reading more about your life experiences.

I am trying to rein my usual temptation to go rambling on and on for pages, so I will try to keep a "one question at a time" approach, and my initial question is this: seeing that I think you agree with me that forums are not a real "community" at all, why do you think that what apply to a real community would apply to a internet forum, too?

[Ron Edwards]

Let's keep both "me" and the Forge/interview talk in this thread.

I lived in a world that never existed, according to everyone else. The larger cultural "snap" or perhaps shift into a different dimension came in about 1982, and by 1989, everyone's memory was rewritten. I am often dismayed by how this obviously fictional representation is experientially so accurate. Fortunately a few books and events show I'm not alone, like that brilliant book about disco I was talking about last year. One of my personal reasons to stay close to Palestinian activism is because the people in it are so grounded in a reality which I can understand.

This component of U.S. radicalism in the 60s-70s has strong European roots. It goes back to German naturalism from the 1920s and 1930s, associated with anti-war communism and certainly in support of the opposition to Franco in Spain. All the same stuff: rural living meets intellectualism, milking the cows and then writing plays, complicated community council meetings to decide what we do when someone does something stupid, constantly re-arranging marriages intentionally or unintentionally, naked all over the place ... Markus Wolf was brought up like that, did you know that?

I don't know if I've mentioned this before in our conversations, but my family was also military. My father was the Naval historian in Saigon through the worst/weirdest period of the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

I am not sure if I understand your community point at all. I'm saying that a real, deserves-the-name internet community is possible, but is very likely not to be (especially if you call it one from the start), and even if it is, is likely to descend/degenerate into many community's crappy fate.

My current notion is that by intentional community we need to mean community with purpose, and once that purpose is done for a person, he or she should leave, and once it's done for the community, it needs to end.

I noticed the page views for this thread skyrocketed yesterday, more than would seem possible from repeat viewings. It'll be interesting to see how what I've said here bleeds elsewhere.

[Troy_Costisick]

Ron,

I'm seeing a number of parallels in the independent video game movement that I saw in the independent RPG movement that you led.  Have you followed it much?  Are video games even something you care about?

Peace,

-Troy

[Ron Edwards]

I don't know anything about it but am interested to learn. Tell!

[Troy_Costisick]

I don't know anything about it but am interested to learn. Tell!

These are my own perceptions, so understand that these statements come through that lens. 

There is a very similar 3-tier model in video games.  A company like Iceberg (http://www.iceberg-games.com/) fulfills almost exactly the same role Alliance did/does for RPGs.  It's a video game "publisher."  In the video game world, a publisher does not create the games, it just distributes them.  I'm working with a guy who is publishing his own independent video game right now.  He told me that he and his dev team were approaching Iceberg about distribution.  I asked what the terms were.  He told me that Iceberg would take 50% of the sales price for itself for both in-store and online sales (more on this in the next paragraph).  I encouraged him not to go with Iceberg as I thought it was absurd to give them that much for doing something I felt his team could do on its own and because of the lessons I learned at The Forge.  The decision wasn't entirely his, since the whole team is involved in producing the game.  Thankfully, Iceberg rejected his game.  The team decided instead to put the beta version of the game up for sale for those who are interested in paying to playtest, and in the first three months of it being on sale they made back ALL the money they have spent so far on programming, art, and 3D rendering/animating.  It was like I was seeing The Forge all over again.  So that's one parallel.

A second is STEAM (http://store.steampowered.com/).  This is, more or less, the Drive-Thru RPG for video games.  It is a MASSIVE online seller of video games in digital format for PC, Mac, and Linux.  Most (but not all) of the big games are on it.  It is also very hospitable to independent producers.  STEAM does take a 30% bite out of sales, but they do offer a lot of additional services for game producers beyond just hosting an online market.  There's a number of them, and I'll detail them if you ask.  But is more than just an online catalogue.  The main thing it does is, like Drivethru, it raises visibility and gives people a place to sell their games.  Now, getting back to Iceberg for a second.  This is where it and companies like it are really insidious IMO.  That 50% I mentioned earlier that they take, comes out after STEAM's.  So the game developer actually gets a mere 35% of a games retail price if he/she goes thru a publisher.  Yikes, right?  Sadly, so many developers, including indie ones, feel they need a publisher.  Here's an article about one studio that went through Iceberg and is touting how many game sales they had: http://www.gamewatcher.com/news/2014-08-12-steam-autumn-sale-surges-amplitude-s-endless-series-over-1-2-million  Just remember, Amplitude only got 35% of whatever those 1.2 million games cost at the time they were sold (and that includes when the game is "on sale" on STEAM which is very frequent).

A third parallel I see is a burning desire for video games to go beyond what traditional producers (called AAA studios) have given. Check out this video about sex in video games from a very well-regarded youtube channel called Extra Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP6gXZPVgD4  It's a bit older, 2012.  But these guys are still doing these types of videos to this day.  They are still pushing for developers to broaden the types of issues and depth of issues video games address.  They also encourage developers to invent new styles of play.  I'm not sure video games will ever get as flexible as tabletop RPGs, but you can see the same desires that drove you to write Sorcerer and Vincent to write Dogs are alight in video game fans and independent developers.  Here's another good article from Polygon (a popular video game news site) that also talks about video games as a medium for more than just traditional play: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/15/7396089/gaming-is-an-easy-target-for-censorship  I can provide further links if you ask for them.

A fourth parallel I see is Unity (http://unity3d.com/).  This is doing for video game development what PDF did for tabletop RPGs IMO.  Unity is a video game design engine.  It does a lot of automatic programming for game developers so they don't have to program every single line of code.  It can shave YEARS off a game's development cycle.  The best part is, they just charge you one time fee for using it.  Other engines in the past charged a fee AND a 5-10% royalty per game sold.  Unity provides a format for independent developers to produce and package their games that the public can consume.  Just like PDF, Unity games will work on almost any computer including tablets and phones.  It has kicked the door down that was keeping so many from bringing their games to market.

A fifth parallel I see is the market is becoming more interested in independently produced games.  Kickstart has helped.  It gets people financially and emotionally invested in games.  Gaming news sites like Polygon and Gamasutra have also started covering indie games, which has had a positive effect.  It reminds me of how the perception of independent games changed at GenCon after the first couple years of the Forge booth.  Suddenly, it wasn't weird to get an indie game and indie games were getting a lot better.  The same acceptance is happening in the video game world right now.

There are some things that aren't the same.  There's no Forge type place for people to discuss play and design.  At least, not that I have found yet.  There's no IPR that is catering just to independent producers.  It may be that it's just not time for those things yet or that video games don't need those things.  But right now, the situation reminds me a bit of how you describe the mid to late 90's where you were finding RPGs on Geocities, playing them, and giving feedback to the designer who was shocked someone actually played it and also the early 2000's when we were all struggling to figure out the publication process and how to sell our games.  It's the wild west at the moment, and a lot of independent designers are still pushing the envelope in new styles of games like Kentucky Route Zero (http://kentuckyroutezero.com/) or remaking the games of their childhood (http://www.roguelegacy.com/).

Anyway, that's the best I can give right now.  If you have more thoughts or questions, I'd be very interested in them.

Peace,

-Troy

[Dan Maruschak]

My brother was part of an indie video game studio for a while, which merged with/was acquired by a bigger games company, GarageGames, which I worked at for a while after it got a huge infusion of cash by becoming a subsidiary of a big corporation that was interested in breaking into the games field. (GarageGames tried to foster a "hey indies, talk to each other and form mutually working relationships" environment with web forums and an annual convention, sold low-cost game engines, and was trying to be a sales/publishing portal for independent games. I'd say that "the Forge + IPR" could be a decent analogy for what they wanted to be). According to my brother, at the time he was selling games each sales channel was more or less independent from each other in terms of audience -- offering games on each portal was purely additive and didn't seem to cannibalize sales from any other channel, so even if the portal's share of the sale was high it was usually still in the studio's interest to do business through them. I've long wondered if something similar is true for RPG PDF sales, e.g. does offering something on DriveThru give you access to customers you wouldn't have gotten by any other means, or is the customer base clued-in enough that they decide on what titles to purchase independent of what sales platforms they're available on. Also, it's been a few years so what was true when my brother's studio was operating might not be true about the current environment.

[Christoph]

Hey Ron

I think you're very good to have tried to even answer those questions, I find the assumptions behind some of them particularly gross, and the questions overall don't really cover the body of your publications. It's not something I'd find very respectful, if I were you.

I hope I don't come off as patronizing with the following. Maybe you could polish this pdf: take out the questions, organize the stuff however you want, expand on some of the questions you're asking the interviewer yourself and perhaps explain some of the things you reference (like Moreno, lots of them are lost on me without extensive research), and publish it as a memoir of sorts. Like a Spione or Shahida book, without the game. I'm always running after all the threads concerning your historic recaps of the state of publishing and design in the US and trying to see how that compares to Europe (at least French-speaking Europe), I'd love an accessible (the Forge archives are good for Moreno and me, but the rest of humanity?), structured and unified read on that. I also absolutely loved your insights into intentional communities and your developments here.

Cheers
Christoph

[Ron Edwards]

Thanks Troy and Dan! What strikes me hard is the very quick and unfortunate transition from vibrant, grassroots interface among people to a distribution/marketing nexus. I may not have made it clear that I do not like the little nuclei of sales-points that inevitably form in these situations. Even the ones that start well go badly within a year or two, and IPR is an excellent example. Even if IPR were to have remained what it started as, I'd still be unhappy with it if it were the only one. If we must have these things, there should be a dozen of them, preferably short-lived. Notice how quickly in your accounts - and here I'm describing the culture, not what you personally are saying - people shift from "look from what we're doing here" to "new hip sales-point available."

Christoph, it's a nice suggestion in terms of your interest in what I'd say. I can't see it as practically or financially viable. My only hope is that some other interviewer uses this document for a jumping-off point.

[glandis]

On the interview: Agreed to dialogue and then didn't? Then I guess there *isn't* anything terribly interesting to discuss, just a data point about how (some?) web articles/sites/writers work. I'd say it's a shame, but the impression I'm left with is the interviewer didn't really care about the questions/issues, so it's only a shame if you (Ron) get stifled - which, clearly, you're not. I'm probably more interested in simply what YOU want to say about looking back at the Forge, or at "story" or "damage" or "Nar-as-movement", anyway. The chance that dialogue could have produced some of that, though - I guess I'm sorry that opportunity was missed.

On indie computer games, CRPGs in particular: historically, the intertwining of Temple of Apshai/Ultima/Wizardry/etc. and D&D is fascinating to contemplate investigating, but I'm not sure how. By my understanding, early CRPGs were quite independent in many ways. Independent of TSR, initially, with their own legal stuff that swirled around that, and the same complex feedback D&D had with fantasy fiction. Independent in the Forge sense of creator-owned, sometimes (Richard Garriot being the poster child, I guess). But in the present, I point to Jeff Vogel (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/) as required reading at the intersection of contemporary, "indie", computer, and roleplaying game. ASIDE: In the fascinating "Surviving In the Post-Indie Bubble Wasteland!!!" entry, he both dismisses and then reclaims "indie" as a term, explaining it as when a game "feels like authentic communication from another human being." He cites Saint's Row IV as an example of a big-studio game that still feels indie. All I know about Saints Row IV is that Jason Blair was one of the designers - so maybe not entirely an ASIDE.

On growing up in the 70's and intentional communities: I'm fascinated by how easy it is for me to paint my experiences as way, WAY diluted versions of yours. The overlap this time is the summer camp thing. Dial back the intensity of the diversity a bit, and the um, radical-ness? by a lot, but - yeah, I was there too. Mine (surprise!) still exists - www.incarnationcamp.org - although I'm not sure that site (maybe on purpose) captures what it was like in the 70's. And the culturally-known guy that turns out to have been there at the same time as me is (I just discovered) New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Both RPG and "communities" connections continue. A few years back, I tracked down this book as the likely source of RPG-like activities the counselors led us through at the camp. Apparently, the author was involved in the Human Potentialities movement and Esalen. Those things meant nothing to me through the 80's, but I learned about them when I moved to California in '91.  My friends who'd moved out earlier were involved with the Forum (successor to est), and ... well, my conclusions about such things are similar to yours, Ron - especially as regards simultaneous insight/bullshit and the need for an end.

About the international aspect: we're talking some years earlier, but looking at the history of many of the bands in #ronprogrock, it's clear musicians from US "communes" had no problems traveling to Ireland/England/Germany/wherever and living in a "commune" there - and vice-versa.

[Troy_Costisick]

Ron,

In all those years of selling Sorcerer, did you ever discount your price on a hard copy?  How do you feel about discounting price on RPGs?

Peace,

-Troy