Bemoaning the loss of useful media

    I don't know if it's my recent viewing of Lonesome Crowded West, the pitchfork Modest Mouse documentary, or just the general malaise I've been living with since quitting my last job in search of a career change and realizing the skills I have are more or less 30 years too late to be employable, but I've been really stuck on lamenting the loss of so much weird niche media due to the nature of the internet. 

    Let me back this up. I spend a lot of time doing research into classic Magic: the Gathering sets for retrospective freelance stuff, and my primary source for a lot of this is the mtgwiki. While the information available on the wiki is mostly correct, almost all of the official sources and references on those pages link back to dead posts from the official Wizards of the Coast blog. You get this awesome 404 message with a lol so cute! Fblthp whenever you try to follow one of these links back to an "Ask Wizards" column from 2004 or really anything besides a link to MaRo's tumblr. 

This sucks, I hate this stupid little asshole

    Sure, there are links that have been updated with the use of the Internet Archive's wayback machine, but these are few and far between. Most captures of the Magic news and articles from anytime before 2015 are basically gone, alongside any remnant of WotC's short lived online-only version of Dragon magazine (Dragon+). Countless articles full of insight into Magic's design philosophy and competitive play are just permanently erased from existence. 

    I was an avid reader of the MTG blog articles back in the day. Unfettered computer access but a child's sense of how to operate the web led me to sticking to the official pages for most of the niche interests I dove into online (I'd spend a lot of time on 40k forums, but that's a different post). I remember reading just about every post between the release of Ravnica and Guildpact. These weren't just great resources for the fresh young planeswalker, they were important discourse created by people who were passionate, knowledgeable, and, most of all, paid to do it.

    I think this might be the crux of my issue: as a unemployed man with a journalism degree and a passion for gaming and also self-pity, I find myself thinking often about how the writers that made Duelist, Dragon, early White Dwarf and other dork-adjacent magazines were basically living my idealized career path. A career path that, at the risk of sounding like a "born in the wrong generation" whiner, hasn't existed in 20 years. 

    The noble games-magazine contributor has shrunken from society, due mainly to the rise of the internet and subsequent decimation of the physical magazine industry, and then shortly followed by the rise of the Youtuber and subsequent decimation of the written word online almost entirely. Seriously, when was the last time you could search up something TCG or RPG related and the top three hits weren't from Tolarian Community College?

    No, instead now we must suffer the inane engagement-baiting hokum from afficionados with an clicks-based revenue stream where inflammatory and often outright wrong statements are the norm; cluttering up any actually productive discourse with white noise. 

    Before the capitalist drive to generate monetary value from every single little thing you did took over the RPG/TCG space and even the internet more broadly, writers were given steady employment through these magazines and afforded an outlet to generate discussion and positive narratives about their games. I've been subscribed to Chris Korczak, Bookseller at rpgrpgrpg.com for about a year now, receiving two vintage RPG mags every other month, and I've gotta say: the writing in these corny $5 magazines is genuinely the most useful gaming work I've ever read. 

    We'll take my copy of Dragon #261 as an example. Surprisingly, this July 1997 issue hasn't been uploaded as a PDF to the Internet Archive yet (I should probably take the initiative). The table of contents lists three different feature articles, a short fiction, twelve different regular columns, plus another seven articles ranging from topics on how to construct a better jungle wilderness for your players to statting up Dark Phoenix from the Marvel Superheroes TTRPG. This is all in addition to the letters to the editor and advice columns. This is a staggering amount of content to produce at such a high quality every single month. Compared to the quick turnaround and constant battering of 2024 "content," these articles might as well be peer-reviewed academic endeavors as far as the actual substance of each piece is considered. The content in just one of these articles outweighs most new hardcover 5th Edition D&D books. 

     Ray Winninger's Dungeoncraft column starts on page 20, and is a continuation of the previous month's topic of designing a base of operations for the PCs in an AD&D campaign. Over the next five pages, Winninger goes into essential concepts to introduce in the players' hometown; a rumor mill, interesting NPCs, and "secrets" to use as adventure hooks or motivations for the NPCs. Five pages might not seem like enough to cover these in detail, but Winninger's succinctness doesn't diminish the value of his column. In two paragraphs Winninger sets the base for what makes an NPC memorable, and then spits out two townsfolk to populate his AD&D village Ironoak. I'm not going to run down the entire Dungeoncraft article, suffice to say it contains the kind of insight you don't get from a quick turnaround Youtube video with a title like "Top 10 Ways You're Building NPCs Wrong!" or whatever.

    Letters to the editor are another form of communication we've lost to the surging annals of time and capital. In the pre-forums days, this was just about the only get in on the larger community discussions and either share your opinion or ask for help. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Dragon #210, published in October of 1994. 

Yeah, me too man

    Clint Hooper writes in to Dragon to bemoan the obsession his AD&D players have developed with Magic: The Gathering. The editor's response is mostly benign, sort of a "Heh, yeah we're having this problem, too." This would be about 3 years before WotC purchased TSR (and Dragon magazine), so they're understandably neutral on MTG's popularity, but that's not the point, here. What makes this letter so memorable is the snapshot of 1994 gaming spaces it gives us. Never before had a card game been so popular that it might dethrone the almighty Dungeons and Dragons from its seat at the head of the table of game night. 

    These sorts of laments are now the dominion of r/DND posts, possibly the worst space on the internet for anyone looking for discussions about the actual game of D&D and not just cries for help with social issues from the socially repressed. The ease of sending this communication online has drastically dropped the average quality of communication, and social media sites tend to favor posts that are either already generally accepted by the group at large (like Reddit), or posts with purposefully bad takes and misinformation (like Twitter). 

    Overall, without the curation of a skilled editor, we're left sifting through an endless sea of takes and opinions that expire mere hours after they're sent out into the ether, devoid of any actual content or lasting concepts. They're made to be ingested and quickly forgotten about; there's no real thought or intention behind most of the noise surrounding communication in these spaces besides a drive to generate clicks and views and revenue. At least in Hooper's letter, the choice to publish it was made with intention, and now it survives as a first hand historical document of gamers' opinions and lives at the time.

    I guess where I'm going with all this is we've seen a drastic drop in quality of discussion and communication in the online spaces, and I've found a lot of solace in vintage written work. I guess solace implies I'm no longer upset that these jobs just don't exist anymore. Let me be clear: I'm still mad about it. I know this profession has more or less morphed into Substack and personal blog pages, and while I'm a regular reader of several blogs, I can't shake the bad taste of capitalism and clickbait from my mouth.