Most of you reading this are not necessarily gamers. Therefore this ongoing happening in the tabletop gaming business is at some remove to you, and you will be able to follow along as I point out the Narrative Warfare campaign being waged.
This drama is a microcosm example of how Globohomo and its imperial rivals weaponizing information controls at multiple levels to achieve its objectives and defeats threats.
First, a summary of the matter is in order.
Wizards of the Coast is a wholly-owned subsidary of Hasbro. Wizards recently had a turnover in senior management, the C-Suite, and those now in charge are not gamers and do not understand the tabletop role-playing game market or hobby (or, for that matter, any other tabletop gaming market).
Wizards is under pressure from Hasbro (who's new CEO is Wizards' former CEO) and its shareholders to maximize the profit potential of Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards' new leadership may not be gamers, but they can read profit/loss statements and map out trendlines over time. They conclude--correctly--that the tabletop RPG business model only monetizes 20% of the total customer demographic at best and nothing within the existing business model can succeed in changing this.
Wizards concludes that they have to change the business model, but there is no path to success by selling physical product that is traditionally produces and distributed, which is what D&D is defined as being. The leadership concludes that they must change the product to change the model in order to achieve its goals.
Wizards' leadership sees--correctly--that the real value of D&D is the brand, not the product. They commit to changing the product and to pivot the brand identity away from it to a "lifestyle brand" of identity.
Wizards' leadership sees--correctly--that the existing customer demographic will not accept a change away from how things are. The leadership concludes that they must fire the customers and recruit a new demographic.
How does a corporation go about firing a no-longer-desired customer demographic, pivot the brand to something more profitable, and recruit a replacement demographic to achieve those revenue and profit objectives?
Wizards could have been open, honest, and forthright in their plans to pivot D&D away from the physical product and traditional retail channels of the business towards an all-digital Game-As-Service with microtransactions. They could have just said "We understand that many of you will not want to go along with this. We are convinced that you will see it our way in due course, and we await your return then." But no, they didn't.
Instead, Wizards set about a psychological operation intended to drive away their "legacy" customers with intentionally antagonizing and insulting Public Relations moves as the first step in a Narrative Warfare campaign.
Those familiar with psychological abuse or hardball negotiations know this pattern: Make unacceptable demands, set the narrative frame that certain things are already inevitable by what is said and how, then walk back those demands until either the other party accepts or only what you are after remains- whichever comes first.
This is what Wizards of the Coast has done, and D&D Shorts has the recepits.
Let me start with the Frame Game.
Wizards presents as inevitable that v1.0a of the Open Game License--no, you don't need to know what this is to get the point here--will not be honored ("revoked") and that any who persist thereafter will be punished in court.
Wizards' "new OGL drafts" accepts this premise as given. Other such elements so presumed include Wizards' control over all published material, as demonstrated by how Wizards uses sophistry to hide their intent to exercise such control over individual and group actors alike.
Wizards intentionally uses language tricks to focus attention on what they are willing to give ground on vs. what they do not, and then paint the reactions as "unreasonable" both in internal communications (to silence and suppress dissent) and with external parties (mainly Hasbro and the shareholders, who is whom Wizards cares about and not customers).
Following from here, Wizards will begin to build up to an Outrage Marketing campaign as a defensive move against the tabletop hobbyists and publishers unhappy with Wizards and their moves to damage Wizards financially. The media outlets currently unfriendly or neutral to Wizards will turn friendly and publish hit-pieces on the tabletop gamers, and when the new D&D movie flops it will be them that take the blame- especially if an attempted boycott gets anywhere at all.
This campaign will frame the "legacy customers" and tabletop as a hobby as socially unacceptable and politically unpalatable, justfying Wizards openly pivoting away from them (and the legacy business) to where they want to go along with making it easier to recruit the replacement demographic- a demographic, at best, neutral to tabletop if not outright hostile to it.
The campaign will have all the Death Cult signals needed to get the oversocialized and terminally online Death Cultists to signal boost Wizards' claims and add social cache (in the form of "sticking it to the chuds"); the proof is that the "morality clause" in the current "draft" has already turned some objectors into agreers and prompted those in the dissent to deal with attempts to install one in alternative licenses in the works.
Wizards is also not above astroturfing support for its positions.
As the majority of the opposition are themselves either Pop Cultists or Death Cultists--and thus already accepting the moral frame Wizards presents--they cannot hope to mount an effective counterattack in time. It will come down to lawfare, and Wizards is well-positions to use a Fabian Strategy to win there also.
When you study this entire drama from a distance, you can see all the Narrative Warfare operations in real time with crystal clarity.
Now you can see how, and why, this works. If you can do that, then you can figure out how to beat it, and that will get you closer to Empire's fall.
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