If you’re a geek older than forty, one of the tough/weird adjustments you’ve had to make in your life is that there was a point where you could reasonably expect to at least sample every significant geek media release…

… and then you couldn’t.

In the ‘90s, for example, I could reasonably expect to watch every science fiction TV show and play every geeky board game.

Today you could dedicate every waking moment of your life and you still wouldn’t be able to do either of those things.

And this extends to movies, roleplaying games, video games… All of it.

At first you think, “I’m just getting old. If I was still young, I could stay on top of all this.”

But that ain’t it.

I lived through the transitions from “there are three channels on your dial” to cable television to the modern fire hydrant of content. Having a local channel become a Fox affiliate — a fourth network! whoa! — was a significant event in my life.

We talk about the “last Renaissance man” — the point at which it was no longer possible for a single person to meaningfully master all fields of human study. In the last forty years, we’ve passed a similar threshold in media.

Looking back across that watershed, an important thing to understand is that, because it was possible, there was a cultural pressure to actually do it. To be part of the geek scene, you needed to know — wanted to know! — the shibboleths.

Pre-1970ish, SF fans could read every major SF novel.

Pre-2005ish, SF fans could watch every major SF TV series.

But, like the proverbial lobster, we have been imperceptibly transitioned into a reality where that’s NOT possible. And, just like the lobster, this creates a lot of stress.

Some of it is self-imposed.

Some of it is external.

“You haven’t watched [insert show here]? I guess you’re not a real fan!”

The scene then fractures.

I can’t learn all of those shibboleths, so I’m going to focus on one specific slice of geek media and learn THOSE shibboleths: So anime becomes its own, increasingly separate fandom. And then there’s so much anime that it, too, fractures into sub-fandoms.

When this fracturing takes the form of excluding rather than focusing, it can turn toxic. This is usually draped in conspiracy rhetoric and/or bigotry: Women or black people or story gamers are trying to steal our fandom!

Now we’re starting to see the emergence of mega-franchises producing so much content that it’s not just a matter of not having time to read every science fiction novel; it’s that you only really have time to engage with this ONE, all-consuming media tentpole. (And maybe squeeze a few other things in around the edges.)

This creates a bizarre paradox: We have a prolificacy of media vast beyond the bounds of comprehension; a cornucopia that would stagger the imagination of, say, an SF fan in the ‘50s.

But, simultaneously, the consumption of any single individual person is increasingly homogenous.

In the late 2010’s, how many people had 50% or 80% or 100% of their trips to the cinema be exclusively MCU films?

There are antecedents to this. From 1990-ish, for example, Star Trek and Star Wars both produced enough tie-in fiction that if you fully engaged with it you would probably read little or nothing else. There was a time when you could casually read every Marvel comic… and then you couldn’t.

It’s just becoming more common.

And this creates an interesting challenge for the megacorps driving these mega-franchises. You can push more and more of the all-in-one, all-consuming fandom… but only up to a certain point.

Once you exceed a fan’s capacity to consume everything — to learn every shibboleth — then the fandom will either radically schism (possibly toxically so) or, worse yet (for the megacorp, anyway), abandon the franchise entirely.

Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting case study here.

Pre-1984, or thereabouts, you could buy and read every single official release for the game. Starting in 1984, the number of modules being published each year was becoming onerous, but pre-1989 even a moderately devoted fan could still easily engage the major releases.

After 1989, on the other hand, AD&D 2^nd Edition’s release schedule became a firehose of content. (Even ignoring the 300+ tie-in novels and video games and comic books.) No one could keep up with it, so the fanbase schismed along natural fault lines (“I’m only going to buy Dark Sun books!”) or dropped out.

D&D 3^rd Edition and 4^th Edition tried to maintain a more sustainable pace of releases so that fans could at least afford to purchase the books, but the TYPE of material they primarily released (PC options) couldn’t be brought to the table fast enough, so fans would, once again, become saturated and then drop out. (This is the fatal flaw to using a supplement treadmill to support an RPG line.)

D&D 5^th Edition, on the other hand, initially dialed back the pace of releases and focused more heavily on adventure material (which is more consumable; you play the adventure and then you need a new adventure). The result is that even casual fans didn’t feel disconnected from the shibboleths or incapable of consuming the content: “Strahd” and “Dragon Heist” and “Auril” and “Baldur’s Gate” were all recognizable references to the vast majority of the fandom.

In the last couple of years, however, the pace of D&D 5^th Edition releases has increased, the shibboleths are beginning to slip, and there are clear signs that the fanbase is fracturing. (Which is probably not great news going into a new edition.)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is having a similar problem: Yes, the slip in quality (precipitated by a brain drain of all the major creators) is a contributing factor, but the more fundamental systemic problem is that the amount of material being released increased to a point where even people who wanted to keep up with it all couldn’t. The result? Fans, particularly casual fans, started checking out.

And, as the MCU demonstrates, the more you create the impression that “everything is important” and that a fan needs to “watch everything” in order to keep up, the more dramatic your crash will be the instant you pass the threshold at which fans can no longer do that: They won’t just dramatically scale back their engagement. They’ll drop out completely.

So if you’re running a mega-franchise, what’s the solution?

It basically boils down to releasing material at a pace that your audience can consume it.

That sounds simple, but it’s shockingly easier to succumb to temptation, ramp up your release schedule, and break the whole thing. Partly because modern capitalism / greed demands perpetual growth. Partly because your loudest and most hardcore fans will happily consumer FAR MORE than the majority of your audience, and if you heed their call they’ll be all that’s left in the burnt out husk of a once vibrant community. And partly because creating stuff is fun, and as your resources grow the allure of creating even more stuff — stuff you couldn’t have dreamed of creating just a few years ago! — can prove overwhelming. There’s also likely more and more people involved in the mega-franchise as it grows, and it will become increasingly difficult for that not to fuel an exponential pattern of growth.

Now, let’s flip it around: You’re a fan of a mega-franchise and it’s growing past your capacity to “keep up.” What can you do?

Broadly speaking, you’ll either need to let the franchise go or you’ll have to figure out how to change the way you engage with the franchise so that the “consume all” credo of collectorism doesn’t rob your joy.

That might be identifying some subset of the franchise (creators, characters, specific settings, etc.) that you’re most interested in. (Although be warned that the worst mega-franchises will make this difficult by constantly disrupting every segment of the fandom with “events.”) It might be withdrawing from new releases and just enjoying the stuff you love. (Were you really enjoying everything the mega-franchise was offering? Or were you buying some of that stuff just out of a sense of obligation?) Or it might be finding some new way of engaging with your fandom, perhaps by creating fan art or fan-fiction or Youtube videos, in a way that makes you more than just a passive consumer and gives you greater power to make your fandom what you want it to be.

And, of course, the best time to start figuring this out is BEFORE the franchise has become all-consuming in your life and knocked out all of your other interests and hobbies.

No matter how you track initiative, you should be putting your players on deck.

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Recently I’ve been watching a really nifty web-series from Double Fine called Dev Play: They grab game designers and play through classic video games with them. The best episodes are the ones featuring designers playing their own games, like this one of John Romero playing through Doom:

Watching that brought back fond memories of Doom II. One of the things that you could, of course, do with the Doom games was designing your own levels. And way back in 1994, that’s exactly what I did.

In order to really understand and appreciate the vintage deathmatch map I’m about to share with you, though, you have to understand something about the weapon design of Doom II (which I still maintain had the absolute best weapons balance of any deathmatch ever designed). Specifically, you have to understand the quirks of the BFG-9000.

With this gun you could rain the destruction of green plasma down upon your enemies. But for a significant period of time, the exact mechanism by which the BFG-9000 worked was largely unknown. It wasn’t really until Tony Fabris, after painful experimentation, released his “BFG FAQ” that people really began to appreciate just how clever this weapon was. The short version is that the BFG-9000 deals damage in two steps:

First, there is the primary plasma ball. The plasma ball deals a ton of damage, but often not enough damage to outright kill the target.

Second, a moment after the primary plasma ball detonates, twenty invisible traces are sent out from the player who fired the BFG-9000. Each of these traces deal less damage, but the closer you are to the person who fired the gun the more of the traces will hit you. (The damage from these traces also decreases over distance.)

Note that the key feature here is that the traces emanate from where you are when the detonation happens, not the location from which you fired a gun. That allows you to, for example, fire the BFG-9000 at a wall, step out from behind the corner, and allow the blast traces to kill someone.

BFG WONDERLAND

Which brings us to the deathmatch level I designed, which was specifically designed to be an arena for high-skill BFG-9000 maneuvers. As I wrote in the original data file for the level:

BFG WONDERLAND is composed of a main central room — from which four corridors lead off. The rocket launcher is available along the northern passage, shotguns available along the eastern. If you take the western passage you’ll find a plasma rifle and a door leading to an ammo dump which will be discussed later.

The central challenge of the level, however, is the southern passage — which is several thousand units long. At the end of it is the BFG9000. Due to the great length of this corridor (and the general openness of the rest of the level) the BFG does, indeed, become a “thinking man’s weapon”. Dodging the green ball as it comes down the corridor and then getting behind your opponent before the ball detonates or racing after your ball because otherwise your opponent will be too far away before it detonates makes this an “intelligent” level with instantly deadly consequences for mistakes.

Many, many hours were spent dancing around the southern passage in LAN deathmatches. Maybe next time you get a hankering to pull out Doom II, you might do the same.

BFG WONDERLAND

Among those looking to denigrate video games (the newest of artistic mediums), a favored tactic is to compare it to other forms of art and point out its various inadequacies. Those interested in defending video games as a new art form will often point out that video games are still in their infancy and comparing its output to mature forms of art is unfair and misrepresentative.

The common rejoinder at this point is that other forms of art don’t really show a lot of growth or development. Literature, for example, has been producing timeless and classic work for thousands of years and there’s really no strong indication that works produced in, say, 1800 were inferior to works being produced in 2000. If other forms of art don’t improve over time, why would we expect video games to improve over time?

Literature, however, is a bad example for comparison because the history of literature is literally prehistoric. At best we might be able to take a peek at Gilgamesh, but even that is clearly the pinnacle of a long storytelling tradition.

If you’re looking to compare the current evolution of video games as a medium to other mediums, then you need to look at other mediums that we actually have some ability to analyze.

WESTERN THEATER

The earliest antecedents of theater are lost, but we actually do have access to some really early stuff. Based on oral histories we know that the earliest Greek plays emerged when individual characters stepped out of the choruses that were used to recite narrative stories.

In the works of the earliest extant playwright, Aeschylus, we can still see the technological limitations of his artform. (For example, he was only able to use three characters at a time, which severely limited the dramatic situations he was capable of constructing.) Tracking from Aeschylus to Euripides to the Roman playwrights who followed we can see that there was a rapid development of the artform over its first century or so: Dialogue becomes more natural. The transitions between scenes become more complicated and, simultaneously, elegant. The evolving stagecraft allowed for the presentation of more dynamic and varied sequences of action. And so forth.

FILM

An even better example, however, awaits us in film because our historical records of its development are so much more comprehensive.

Film is invented in the late 1880s. As an entertainment industry, it’s generally agreed that 1895 is the starting line.

1895 – The Derby: This was released in the first year commercial motion pictures became a reality. It’s basically the film equivalent of Pong.

1902 – Voyage to the Moon: This is cutting edge stuff from 1902. Compared to video games, that’s basically Pac-Man. (It comes 7 years after the first commercial films; Pac-Man is 8 years after Pong.)

1922 – Nosferatu: Twenty years after Voyage to the Moon, you can see that the art of film has developed significantly. In gaming, this is the equivalent of Final Fantasy VII. (If you need to, take a moment to compare Pac-Man to Final Fantasy VII.)

1941 – Citizen Kane: Twenty years after Nosferatu, this is widely considered the landmark at which the modern art of film came of age and pioneered a lot of what are now considered basic film techniques. (If you’d prefer to go with the golden year of 1939, more power to you. It’s about a 20 year gap either way.)

What’s the video game equivalent to Citizen Kane? Well, from a purely temporal standpoint we’re talking about a game that will be released in 2019 or 2020 or thereabouts.

CONCLUSIONS

You can see the same sort of progression in, for example, operas.

What are we seeing here? Well, I think it actually boils down to something quite simple: You have a technological breakthrough that creates a new medium. Neophytes converge on the new medium in great excitement at its potential, but their use of the medium is still primitive and borrows heavily from existing media. (Early Greek theater is choral storytelling plus characters. A lot of early film is basically a filmed stage play with a couple of flourishes.) This stuff appeals to a relatively small group of really dedicated fans.

About twenty years later, those fans grow up and start really experimenting with the new medium. They test its limits and push the envelope. Their stuff is still pretty primitive, but it’s good enough that it finds a mainstream audience.

About twenty years after that, you’ve got an entire generation who grew up on the new medium. Not only are the creators from this generation ready to polish and hone and perfect the techniques the pioneers of the previous generation were experimenting with, but the audience has also matured to the point where they’re capable of really appreciating the new medium.

Sound familiar?

The next 20-30 years are going to be very exciting for interactive entertainment.