KILL THE ARTIST (you're still there)

we can make our own myths, right? isn't that what all the games are for?

it’s kind of like this

The past few days in the tiny bathtub pond that is indie rpg social media have been dominated by a few articles and a lot of discourse about, broadly, auteurship and what it means to be an “artist” and make art.¹ Some of it has been exhilarating and most has been exhausting, and a lot of bystanders have been very quick to get some dunks in and back-pat themselves that they’re surely above it all, that they’re just here for the games, this is all ridiculous. Me too.

But through the weekend I have sat and thought and read some really insightful work and am trying to put forward something a little more considered and vulnerable, something I believe in very firmly. Because I think it concerns not just myself and my opinions, not the state of the “culture” (ick) but the well-being of people in this scene and out of it:

We have to kill the Artist as a myth, as an exceptional identity. There is no noble title, no secret spark, only people making art constantly, everywhere, with varying degrees of ‘success’ defined in various ways. The rest is class warfare.

The modern self-started indie creator exists as a joint economic and social role, one that applies to almost everyone in this industry (including me). And it’s a nice one! To live and work for yourself, to make things people love, to stand proudly apart from both the grinding weight of wage labor and the icky anti-proletarian guilt of being a Small Business Owner (especially in the imperial core, where myself and the majority of discourse-havers are). It’s enticing! This is also why the people selling “how to improve at art fast” or similar are not actually selling a cheap bootleg of the “soul” of Artishood, they aren’t stealing valor. That’s fake! It isn’t real! Instead they are selling the same thing, just more honestly: a (supposed) route to material success and the promise of a lateral move from your rapidly-eroding class position.

But as much as we’d like it to be true, I think this feeling of freedom and noble apartness is a bit of a smokescreen. As an artist who sells your “work”, you are a trader in a luxury commodity, which comes in two primary forms that often appear together:

• Your idea-commodity, your “IP”, which only holds (monetary, reputational) value while the capitalist strictures of copyright and trade law allow it.

• Your physical commodity, your real goods attached to IP, which almost always can only be produced profitably via exploited labor from the global south.²

And both of these commodities are currently (and have often been, over the arc of history) imperiled! Your IP from the rise of AI and rapidly cheapening export labor, and your goods from trade wars, ground wars, tariffs, and so on. So as an Artist-commodities-merchant, your foothold is getting shaky. You need something else to shore it up. You need a third thing, secured to you, something that resists material threats.

And this is where I have played a bit of a trick, because earlier I said the learn-art-quick grifter bogeymen weren’t selling Artisthood because it isn’t real. And it isn’t—but they are selling it! Everyone here is. This is the safeguard, the third thing: the reification of the Intangible Artist’s Spirit. The Creative as a class apart, a creature ineffable, an intrinsic quality, sure, but one lovingly and magically bloomed into something suprahuman.

What if your brand wasn’t your IP, what if it was you? You, the Artist, the one who has seen the wonders past the dreary veil, the one who has labored for your craft, the one who brings the spark, the intangible, the burning spirit that yes of course everyone has it but you really have it, you know? Your spirit has been tended and nurtured into something incomparable, something the untermenschen can only hope to appreciate, never understand, and it shines from you like a beacon of capital for everyone to see.

And so your value is protected, and your position preserved, and the world turns, and we argue about paragraphs.

I think rpgs are particularly vulnerable to this myth-taking because of the weird in-between they occupy economically: too small and undercapitalized to be a fully structured industry, but necessarily too commercial (reliant on crowdfund hype cycles, etc) to remain a purely amateur craft culture. Trying to make it here, unless you are absurdly lucky, involves whiplashing between the poles of “hobbyist” and “merchant” frequently enough that the psychic pressure starts to take up space. Starts to scuff, starts to hurt.

You know what I mean, right? We want that juicy authenticity. We want that rebel small press vibe. We want that 300k Kickstarter. We want a publisher. We want Voice. We want our heating and our lights on. Under capitalism these wants are rarely aligned, never stable, and always clawing over each other to the top. The Artist-as-Self doesn’t placate these issues, but it does successfully rebrand them into something you can sell, and something that crucially it is acceptable to want to sell. It is attractive because it neatly gathers up the contradictions into an object of fantastical struggle (a war against soul-hollowing degeneracy! It’s you versus gen AI, or mass consumer “slop” culture, or the grifters, too much phone, take your pick) and lets you safely show it off for others to ooh and aah over, while freeing up your mind for other things, like your work. But the claws are still there. It still hurts. But now the hurt is expected, it is internal and hemorrhagic. I don’t think it has to be.

This is, I think, why rpg writers get so mad at “GMing is game design”. This is why for a while I was really annoyed with anyone trying to market “easy layout advice” or “templates” in a way that was accessible, reproducible. Because I was a Layout Artist! I had put in the WORK, I had the SPIRIT, unlike those unwashed proles, and how dare someone come in and say “no, you can do it too! here, take this and look and try, you can do it too!”

And just like that they could, and did, and I was sent flailing for another way to justify myself. And I’m glad I was, and I’m glad I have.³

And, yes, artistic skill and confidence are real! Please don’t misinterpret me as denying that, or saying they can’t be cultivated, or even that cultivating them doesn’t directly correlate with your art being “successful” by some measures. Improving your craft is a very exciting and rewarding thing to do! But i think we can carve those things free from the Artist, and understand that metrics of skill or value or success are massively contextual and informed by our profoundly fucked commercial hyperreality here in the West.

And this reality (and the myths it spawns) is not unique to tabletop games at all, not remotely! Other mediums have been contending with it for almost as long as they’ve been around and allowed some measure of prestige: the visionary, the virtuoso, the Renaissance Man, the “cracked” twitter artist, from the modern furry comms gremlin posting $200 “adoptable” IP licenses all the way back to the power and platform of the royal gallery.

And people have been seeing through the smokescreen for just as long. I believe the popular proletarian reactions to your Rothkos and Duchamps, to use some go-to punching bags, aren’t born from bellicose ignorance of Real Art. Instead they’re often pretty reasonable responses to observing the truth of the thing: that the institution of the Artist claims enormous cultural authority over art that resists easy assignment of value and further disdains you for trying.⁴ I like Rothko! But the strawman of the huffing boomer complaining “my grandson could paint that!”—and the intensely separatist⁵ artist counterreaction to that strawman—is as much a part of his mythology as whatever the paintings had to say in the first place, and that didn’t happen by chance.

The myth is not unique to us. But our scene is so young and so desperate to define itself that we inherited it anyway, treated it as fact, and now allow its tendrils to pop up here and there as weird little shoots of cyclical discourse about who is or isn’t allowed to design and write and how they should or shouldn’t do it. And as a social scene made up almost entirely of small commodity-Artists—more than almost any other form of contemporary art— I think we stand to gain an outsize amount from seeing that myth with clear eyes, staking it to burn, and looking past it, to each other. To all the things we all can make. I would like that very much.

Thanks to Satah, to Lhuzie, to Sasha, to Jay, and to Marx.

---

If you’d like to get emails when I make posts like these, you can subscribe (it’s free) with the the button below. Expect design thoughts, reviews, weirdo stuff like this and other rpg miscellania.

1. Some stupid shit about bullet points also but i’m not writing about that sorry

2. My books are from Kowloon, yours are from Estonia, Tom LANCER’s are from Shenzen, low-run domestic print hubs like Mixam only exist because of massive extractive wealth concentration in the US, the modern global shipping supply chain and the people who keep it running are some of the oldest proletarian issues on earth, etc, etc. same shit. you get the idea

3. What exactly i replaced that with and how i got there could be a separate, worse, significantly more self-indulgent essay by itself, so i’m keeping it abstract for now

4. In fact, this is the stated intent of Duchamps’ Fountain—to show that institutional context, branding, is what often confers art its legitimacy, not its content!

5. That is, drawing lines along those who get it and those who won’t or can’t, the lucky ones who can appreciate the divine truth of art handed down to them versus the rest who are doomed to wallow in grey ignorance