Why I Stopped Chasing Attention As A Creator
One Platform’s Goals Aren’t Your Goals
Creativity used to work like this:
Be Inspired → Create → Share
You were passionate about something, so you made it. The specific thing, the type of creative expression, didn’t matter. It could be crafting, writing, drawing, painting, photography, making video essays, sharing recipes, it’s all creativity, and it’s all wonderful and valuable and a thing that makes the world a better place. You were inspired, so you created something, and then you shared it.
Then the internet came along, and this felt like a good thing for a lot of people. Those of us with professional aspirations got to share things with a wider audience, and it gave us an alternative to legacy media outlets and gatekeepers. We could actually make some money selling our creations! People would see our stuff and tell us they liked it! There would be feedback that allowed us to make new stuff that was even better!
The problem was that all of those platforms needed to make money. Corporations exist to turn profits for their shareholders. Period. Everything else is how they make those profits. YouTube doesn’t exist to give video creators a place to showcase their work; it exists to make money. Etsy doesn’t exist to give crafters somewhere to sell their work; it exists to make money. DriveThruRPG doesn’t exist so small indie game designers can offer unique takes on what roleplaying can be; it exists to make money.
Every platform reaches a point where it has to change, so that it can put maximization of profit ahead of what the creators want or need. You’ve heard the old saying: if they’re not charging you for a product or service, you’re the product or service? You create content for platforms, they monetize it, and if you’re lucky, they share some of the money they make with you. They don’t actually care about what you make, as long as you’re giving them free content. We get sold on the idea that this is beneficial to us, and sometimes it does work in favor of the creator. They keep getting new creators coming in so that content stays fresh, and they make the platforms addictive so people keep coming back to doomscroll.
What Gets Rewarded → Create → Share
We get addicted to the attention. It could be in the form of likes, nice comments, growing numbers of followers, and subscribers. That’s the gamification of the creative process. We want to “win”. Sometimes that reward is money, the ability to earn a living, or to buy more books or art supplies and fund our hobbies. That’s cool. The problem is that the platforms start picking winners and losers. This kind of content attracts eyeballs; that kind of content doesn’t. So they create algorithms that reward some forms of content while absolutely buying others.
The result is that we start changing what we make. We might still be making what inspires us, but we’re doing it in a format that’s algorithm-friendly. Maybe we’re trying to Trojan horse it, disguising what we want to make as something that the algorithm will promote. Sometimes, you end up just making what the algorithm rewards, whether you feel any passion about it or not, because you want the likes, you enjoy the engagement, or you just need the money.
What Gets Rewarded → Talk About It → Share
The late-stage creator economy is the point where the creator isn’t making anything other than content. The person who made makeup tutorial videos has stopped doing that and is talking about the new eye shadow palette, with a link in the description. Instead of talking about your work in progress, you’re reviewing the latest hot book, not the last book you read that you loved, the book everyone else is talking about, so you can jump onto that trending hashtag. You start a commentary channel, or only post about the latest drama, or start a podcast. You’re no longer doing a thing, you’re talking about a thing.
The content flattens. Everything looks the same, feels the same, is the same if we’re honest about it. People keep watching, reading, looking, not because the content speaks to them, is useful to them, connects with their own passions, but because the platform has been made addictive and it’s easy for them to kill time endlessly scrolling, rather than finding something they truly want to engage with deeply, in any kind of meaningful way.
Get Bored → Burn Out → Leave
Creators get tired of making the same content over and over. You can only stretch one idea so far before you either start repeating yourself, going to extremes to make content fit into the algorithmically-rewarded box, or lose any semblance of dignity, self-respect, or basic sanity. Step too far to one side, and you get buried. Step too far to the other side, and the audience leaves.
Viewers get tired of it, too. They stop following creators who no longer create, and content producers who’ve fallen into the trap of rote repetition. A lot of them, especially lately, quit precisely because it’s been engineered to be addictive. All of these platforms used to be places for discovery, but the algorithm can’t categorize something new. Since everyone is chasing favor and reward, everything flattens. There’s no point in looking at anything, because you’ve already seen it all.
This reflects why I got off of social media personally, and why I took Lightspress off of social media as well. Being told how you need to engage is the antithesis of being free to engage on your own terms. And being told that you have to engage, because flawed engagement is better than none, just pushed all of my punk contrarian buttons simultaneously.
We all end up back at square one. How do I show people the cool thing I made, and how do I find other people making cool things? The only way is to be creative, not only with what you make, but with how you try to share it with the world.
Be Inspired → Create → Share
If you’ve paid attention to Lightspress Principia for the past month, you know that I’ve taken us off the merry-go-round. There were some bumps, and some placeholder explanations that weren’t exactly clear because we were still getting our heads around what we were doing, but it went a lot more smoothly than I expected. We have a clear thesis about what we create, why we create it, and how we create it. If a platform supports that, we’ll sell there. Should a social media platform (and by this I mean the user culture, not the rules of the tech lords) deign to allow us to engage with people on our own terms, we’ll do it. We’ve added a lot of venues, but I don’t expect all of them to pan out, to be honest. All we’re doing now is testing for fit, reserving the right to drop out of anything that doesn’t serve our needs and further our creative goals.
So here’s where we’re going.
The Cultural Theory of Roleplaying
This is our overarching thesis: that roleplaying belongs in the humanities. The first game I ever played, like many people, was Dungeons & Dragons; the first roleplaying book I owned was the 1st Edition Dungeon Master Guide. It contained words I didn’t know and ideas I wasn’t familiar with, which sparked my curiosity. That one book led me to reading history, biography, political science, and sociology. Appendix N was fine, but fantasy led to mythology, philosophy, and theology, which led to reading classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, taking me all the way to literary fiction.
Roleplaying games are both influenced by and expressions of several disciplines of the humanities. It doesn’t matter if players today create characters on their phones, don’t read books, and get their cultural knowledge from short-form video; the underlying truth remains. That the idea that I want to explore through Lightspress Principia. On a broader scale, we’re exploring the idea of story itself, and roleplaying as one form of expressing a story that’s parallel to novels and movies. Which means not everything is going to be a roleplaying game, but everything will be connected to this central premise.
Principia Canonica
We’ve already published our core rulebook, the Principia Canonica. It’s a universal narrative-based game that can be used for any genre or setting. Yes, you can use it for fantasy, but when we say it works for anything, we mean it. The system is built on principles of storytelling, of drama, of acting, and improvisation. It’s not grounded in wargaming, violence, and rigid kill-loot-level-repeat logic that has, frankly, held the form back for decades. I know there are exceptions, that narrative play isn’t new, but this is the horse we’re backing going forward. This is, again, what I’m passionate about, even if it’s not what’s rewarded, so this is the direction we’re going to explore.
The Architecture of Story
We’re still fine-tuning the writers and readers’ side of things. The argument here is that you can’t understand either roleplaying or the humanities if you don’t grasp the fundamentals of storytelling. The Architecture of Story is what we’re considering to be our “core rulebook” for this exploration, but I acknowledge that it’s woefully incomplete. Whether we publish a second edition a year down the line, or end up with a new, more comprehensive core book, remains to be seen; in either case, this is the foundational text we’re starting with. In many ways, it runs parallel to the Canonica, and roleplayers can benefit from it even if they’re an avid reader or writer. For that matter, readers and writers could probably learn things from the Canonica even if they’re not roleplayers. It all contributes to and becomes an expression of our central thesis.
The Bottom Line
We’re glad that you’ve enjoyed the things that we’ve created up until now, but we’re not. I’m not. This isn’t a hard pivot, as some people have thought. All we’re doing is making some course corrections and finding a path forward that’s going to be sustainable, as well as satisfying for us as creators and you as readers. There will be a document published that explains how to adapt our older roleplaying material to the Canonica, but we’re not going to revisit, revise, or republish those books. The only direction is forward. We can acknowledge the past, thank the older work for its service, but we need to move on to even better, more creative things.
