Roundup: Platforms & Platformers
Several Seemingly Separate Discourses (and 15 blog posts about them) - Also an important announcement
A few conversations from a few weeks ago reminded me a bit of each other.
Adventures for (and against) Systems. The answer to the age-old question of whether to make an adventure system agnostic, and what system agnosticism even means, was proffered by Playful Void in Got no game: Should your module be system agnostic? I saw some interesting discussion of the topic across the balkanized landscape of P/OSR discord, but Symbolic City shared their response, System neutrality or creative solidarity, on their blog (a better, more fruitful way to respond than discord messages, for what it is worth). On this topic from my own Prismatic Wasteland blog is an older piece of advice on Universal, System-Neutral Stats.
Super Mario & Its Rules. Jay Dragon is at it again! This time making people argue about the nature of rules with a pithy bleet, then expounding on it all in a longer post on the Possum Creek blog. A choice quote from the piece: “A lot of games care a lot about the materiality of their toys, and bake a lot of the assumptions of their game rules into this materiality. It would be cheating to fill a football with helium, but that’s only because the codified rules of Football via the NFL outline the expected dimensions of an American Football.” There has not yet been a series of blog posts responding to these insights, but it did remind me of the hoary old post from the A Knight at the Opera blog, Game Design vs Level Design.
Payment Processors Punish Platform. If you somehow didn’t already hear about this whole mess, Rascal News, as usual, does a good job of detailed the who, what, and why in Itch.io Delists, Bans Games Under Pressure From Payment Processors And An Australian Anti-Porn Group, but there is a lot more to read on the topic from the wider blogosphere: the Indie RPG Newsletter wrote Censoring Itch, the The Virtual Moose brought us Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam, and from Harmony Zone you have the itch.io adult content ban.
Blogging is Dead (Long Live Blogging). The venerable Grognardia looked around the blogosphere and saw Ruins all around. In typical blogging fashion, it elicited a few responses from both The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms who wrote Lost in the Ruins about reports of their blog’s death being a great exaggeration, and Grumpy Wizard who waxed poetic on their own Nostalgia for the OSR Blogs of Yore. My two cents, for what it is worth, is that blogs continue to be quite vibrant! In my discord, we track new blogs and so far 2025 has at least 50 or so the last time I counted, averaging about 2 new bloggers every week. Yes, blogs do go dark all the time, but others flicker into existence. The blogosphere is an ocean and we are all but mere droplets in the sea. Tides rise and fall, but there is no ocean without a multitude of drops. The complaint isn’t a new one either—see for instance one of my favorites from the modern (i.e., post-me-becoming-a-blogger) era of the False Machine: The Crypt of the OSR. And perhaps OSRish bloggers are just likely to dwell on ruination. After all, Against The Wicked City (which has unfortunately been dark for a number of years) pointed out nearly a decade ago the prevalence of the OSR aesthetics of ruin. I just hope that, when the day comes that I no longer post (likely because I have been imprisoned for the crime of writing directly into layout), some blogger ten years my junior is around to mourn me and beat their chest and decry the ruination all around them. It’s all ruins, baby, and it always has been.
So what do all of these cheekily have in common? Platforms! A system can be a platform for modules (or, arguably, the reverse). Super Mario is literally a game in the “platformer” genre. Itch is a digital platform for commerce with all the attendant ills that seem to arise with commercial platforms. And blogging is the most pure platform of the bunch, and it is always rotting and dying, just like you and me.
And Now, an Announcement…
Platforms are inherently fraught, for lack of more choice phrases you could use. I started this Substack as a bit of an experiment (the reasoning behind which I wrote about here) because the fact is that there are a lot of people who do not read blogs, which require their own, more antiquated habits, but do read Substack. Basically, there was an audience out there that I wasn’t reaching with my blog alone and I wanted to cast as wide of a net as possible. The reward has been nothing to shrug at! But, I continue to chafe against this platform in particular. It was only after I signed up here that I learned the full extent of Substack’s Nazi problem. That is just part of the fraughtness of being on a platform—you are often alongside repugnant stuff. But recently, Substack has actually sent push notifications for explicitly Nazi (self-described, this isn’t simply Godwin’s law) newsletters to users. Everything is sort of a trade off of risks and rewards, and it is just no longer lining up for Substack, especially when I have my own blog.
The bottom line: I am going to let this substack go fallow. For my subscribers, I will find a substack alternative (and please do feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t want to join me on the journey to my next step) in the near future. I will see out the current Blog Bandwagon on Appendices, but then will be donezo.
One thing that began (in full force, there were earlier inklings) here was the organized Blog Bandwagons. They have been a lot of fun, have encouraged a lot of great posts, and even inspire new people to start blogging! I don’t think that should end just because some Illinois Nazis logged onto Substack. So I will continue hosting those, but will move said hosting to my own blog. Maybe managing two blogs simultaneously was a fool’s errand from the start, but I hope you got at least something out of it. You’'ll hear from me again in September when I do my final roundup on this platform. Then, onto bigger, better platforms!