Pick your lane

An editorial

This will be a blessedly short one as I am working away at several different projects. As anyone reading this may know I occasionally go off about commentators, usually in the youtube sphere but elsewhere as well, about games and so on. One of my constant complaints is essentially the appeal to authority: these people use their platform to clothe themselves in rectitude then implicitly expect you to do what they’ve outlined or accept their worldview. I in turn advise people read original sources and do your own thing.

However, today at this early hour I’ve figured out why it annoys me so much. I commented on someone’s tube and I got the genius instruction from a rando “just chill, dude is trying to entertain,” which all things considered is actually a pretty reasonable assertion. Except lets ask ourselves is it really?

Hypothetical situation.

I am a normal citizen. I dress up like a cop, I make my car look like a cruiser, I drive around in dark of night, I pull people over, I give them warnings and spook them that they might get various nuisance tickets for their actions. Then I drive on into the night. As one would expect, I am arrested and brought up on charges of impersonating a police officer.

Is claiming my actions were meant to entertain an able defense?

Of course not you say. I was breaking the law. I was claiming an authority I did not have that hinged entirely on people’s innate trust of law enforcement officers, the uniform and regalia of that authority, and what it represents. It is, by a massive extrapolation, the same reason that a certain outrage influencer is looking at jail time in Korea - where they do not mess around about hard time - because he basically was so offensive to everyone about everything the state decided to make an example of him.

“Its just jokes, bro.” doesn’t work.

So now we apply this logic to people on the internet. I’m nobody from nothing, my ‘platform’ is basically an ascended myspace screaming into the void. Further, we all hopefully know the eye often defeats the ear, and I don’t use my webcam to project myself into the wilderness and make a jackass of myself. However, everyone who does, from Jeffro (who you can find on here if you want to hurt yourself), to various other OSR commentators, to the various grifters on “dungeontube” who put themselves out there are essentially appealing to authority: look at me, don’t I look cool, don’t you want to be cool too? Let me tell you about how game is done.

That is not entertainment. That is advocacy. That is someone presenting themselves as an educator trying to enlighten you, and if they are in the process of education then we hold them accountable to the quality of that education. When students are taught poorly we don’t usually look at the student and just say you’re a stupid little shit, we judge the curriculum or the teacher for not teaching adequately, or we question the system for being inadequate.

Yet, when some tardbaby spouses idiocy in a tiktok length video for the masses, they are somehow shielded from criticism. They aren’t trying to educate, even though they have longform content which also reaffirms their terrible takes. No no, that’s just entertainment, and you’re the no fun allowed police if you disagree.

Bullshit.

Rancid bullshit.

People on the internet appeal to authority to force your conformity and then hide behind entertainment value, the literal focus of the content being games, to deflect criticism when someone points out they’re full of shit. That’s called a motte and bailey.

“The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey").The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer may claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte)”

When I talk about game stuff, particularly when I’m asked to explain mechanics or structures, I get “lost in the sauce” as I will deep dive like an autist on whatever the subject is. I am not, as a rule, the most knowledgeable in every bell and whistle of every game ever. However, I’ve been reading and studying RPGs for decades and I am very skilled in knowing where to get read on a subject in very short order. Likewise, if its something in my wheelhouse, I can often describe not only how something changed across editions but how those editions contradict or build on each other. There’s no way for my commentary to fit in less than fifteen minutes to a half hour.

So why the heck would you trust some random douche on the internet who tells you what’s what in five?

Be an educator or be an entertainer, you can’t be both.