An Ode to The New Hotness
A con is coming up. There’s always a con coming up, or a kickstarter. And we’re waiting. Waiting to see the new games.
Waiting and hoping for The New Hotness.
Anticipation is palpable. There are always whispers, then promises, then reveals… and then often disappointment. This new hotness is hot for just a little bit, but we quickly move on to newer, hotter, hots.
Gamers, particularly in the indie tabletop role-playing scene, are always looking for the new hotness. Maybe all humans are looking for the new hotness, to some degree, but I think that elemental desire burns particularly bright within us niche RPGers.
Are people just fickle? Always bored with what we’ve got, always wanting something shiny and new? Sure there’s some of that, but I don’t think that’s the heart of the matter.
The heart of matter is that we are drawn to the promise of the new hotness because, deep down, we don’t feel the games we’ve got are hitting the mark. They aren’t going as far as they could, or even comprehending their own potential. Yes, many are great, but even in greatness some games just hint at how far we are from where we could be. We can’t even put into words what the play-form we want looks like — by definition, if we knew what that was, we would have already invented it, and then we’d have it.
We mock the perpetual craving for the new hotness, but that urge is really telling us something important.
So we’re left wanting something but not knowing what or why. The vacuum haunts us. After hearing even the merest scrap of a description, an upcoming game can capture our imagination, because we subconsciously project all the things we want onto it, filling in the unknowns with our dreams and ideals, without even being able to say what those things are.
This new hotness might be the one. This might be the game that takes us all to that next level. That next level we don’t even know we can’t imagine. Yet.
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I think there’s some truth to novelty-seeking, dissatisfied boredom. I remember buying some miniatures and then getting home.. and putting them in a box with all my other unpainted miniatures. I realized then I was just doing this to pay homage to a hobby I didn’t have time for. That realization saved me a bunch of money, since I could just window shop instead!
On the other hand, RPGs suffer from needing multiple people to fully enjoy. Scheduling is hard! In some sense, new games and the buzz around them serve the function of marketing for the idea of getting together to play. “Something new and interesting is happening, come and be a part of it,” even if the New Thing is (for all practical purposes) the Old Thing with a cover in this year’s popular art style.
My f2f group all just bought the latest edition of Burning Wheel. Why did we do that? I don’t know, we all have multiple previous editions, more than a dozen copies of the playable game between us. Yet, as a result of this, our google chat group has been briefly taken over by excited chatter as several people bash together characters to explore the lifepath changes, which may result in a BW game.