There are some posts on the historical OSR blog scene that I’ve read recently from the Grumpy Wizard and Grognardia (here, and here). They lament the current state of the old-school gaming community, compared with how vibrant it was in the heyday of the OSR, when blogs and forums ruled and conversations on both were commonplace, as well as linked commentary on other blogs.
Travis at the aforementioned Grumpy Wizard notes that the blogs of this era informed him of games and gaming history that he was not aware of:
The era of D&D from 1974 to 1981 was something I knew nothing about until I started reading OSR blogs. … John Peterson’s Playing At the World blog, Grognardia’s retrospectives, and others filled me into the fact that there was a lot more to the hobby and it’s history that I was completely ignorant of.
Here is a choice quote from James at Grognardia on blogs and the rampant sharing of ideas:
The OSR blogosphere was, in many ways, the intellectual and creative heart of a movement none of us fully understood while it was happening. Before social media transformed everything into a fast-scrolling feed of ephemeral opinions and algorithmic noise, blogs allowed for longer, more thoughtful engagement. There was conversation between blogs, even, perhaps especially, when we disagreed, as we frequently and passionately did. Posts would spark responses, build on shared ideas, or spin off in wild new directions. Someone would post a new take on alignment or a character class, and within days, if not hours, half a dozen other blogs would riff on the idea in a cascade of strange and wonderful interpretations. That kind of idea-driven collaboration was a joy to witness and to be part of.
And another from James on cross-blog pollination and community:
Similarly, blogs engaged with one another. There was a lot of cross-pollination in those days – as well as spirited argument. One of the reasons I look back so fondly on those early days is that there really was a sense that the OSR was a genuine community.
I discussed similar changes twice, in the context of the move away from forums – the first time was 11 years ago when the OSR-verse moved to G+, then again when G+ was shut down. My initial objections around G+ related to ease of threaded discussion and discoverability, and if anything, this has gotten worse since then. Discord and Facebook and the large micro-blogging platforms are walled gardens that don’t allow public search engines to crawl even their “public” communities. Reddit, while being publicly searchable, suffers from old comments or posts being quickly buried and forgotten (commenting on an old post doesn’t bring it back to the top of the post list). I’ve noticed a lot of post repetition on Reddit between related subreddits and even within the same subreddit, where the same ideas are re-hashed time and time again because the old discussions are effectively lost. MeWe, which I noted back in 2018 was the erstwhile replacement for G+, has stagnated and is not widely used, and in any event, also suffers from being a walled garden.
The blogosphere, such that it exists still, facilitates public linking so that similar discussions can be read and compared (much as this post is doing). I still think forums are a better way to form a community to discuss and share ideas, but blogs have two main advantages that complement forums: 1) They encourage long-form posts and 2) they allow the author to have control over their own content.
It’s also easy for a blog author to link to a forum post or topic, so the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Nine years ago, I started the Smoldering Wizard Forums as a response to the Swords & Wizardry Forums shutting down, since then my own forums have morphed into a generic old-school gaming discussion and play-by-post platform, and I routinely link my posts here to that forum for discussion.
I don’t think this is nostalgia – the community back in the early days of blogs and forums was better in many ways. Perhaps the worst part of the current mess of platforms is that they have split the community. Some only hang out on forums, some on Discord, some on Facebook or Reddit, and there is not a lot of cross-platform pollination, either because it is not possible, or is prohibitively difficult (if it has to be done, one ends up sharing screenshots of conversations from those other platforms, which of course can hide relevant context).
Will that old community come back? I don’t think so, at least not fully. I have no plans to stop what I’m doing, and I encourage other old-school gamers to start a blog or join a forum if they feel they have something to share. My worry is that the Gen-X’ers like myself that have continued to blog and frequent forums will eventually age out of the community, and I don’t know that the younger generations will pick up the mantle.
