Quite a long time ago now I had an idea float through my head which I jotted down to form the basis of one of these articles. I had been thinking about the fact that role playing games are a sort of niche hobby. I am aware that there are said to be something on the order of ten to twelve million role playing gamers in the United States alone, but that number is inflated by the vast ranks of those who play the many computer and console simulations of the real face-to-face socially interactive role playing games that are the foundation of the hobby. I also know that in Scandinavian countries Live Action Role Playing games have become the new club scene, gaining a legitimacy there which is unrivaled on this side of the pond; however, over here gamers will often hide their involvement due to the stigma attached to being one of those nerds who play games like Dungeons & Dragons™ or one of those Vampire goths. The hobby is a niche, on the order of building model train layouts and collecting stamps and coins, something that attracts a sliver of the population at large, no matter how much those of us within this hobby think it should expand into the mainstream.
Within that niche, however, we speak of games that appeal to a niche–a niche within a niche, a very small fraction of the population indeed. The mainstay of the hobby is the fantasy role playing game, anchored in Tolkienesque images of a western European realm of elves, wizards, dwarfs, and other wondrous creatures on fabulous adventures in a world of strong good and stark evil. Other games have found moderate success in appealing to settings and concepts which are not too far afield from this core, such as a mythic feudal Japan, Arthurian legend, Lovecraftian horror, and Vampire mythology. Still others look for areas of overlap in our demographics. That is, many nerds like role playing games, and many nerds like Star Wars and Star Trek, so a space opera game should be successful, particularly if it can get a license to use those trademarks. Similarly, nerds such as us are big fans of superhero comic books, so superhero games should succeed with gamers, particularly if the D.C. or Marvel labels can be tagged to the outside.
The hazard with such efforts, of course, is that they are generally trying to appeal to that small group of people who enjoy role playing games, and find within them a yet smaller group who like space opera, or superheroes, or spy stories, or westerns, or whatever the attraction happens to be. Of course, the big question which must be overcome by those who design fantasy role playing games is why anyone would play this instead of D&D™. That is a major obstacle to overcome when targeting a small market. By creating a space game or a spy game or a ninja game you have a ready answer, evident from the setting. However, most of the obvious alternate settings were claimed long ago, D&D™ and Legend of the Five Rings™ fighting over the Oriental adventures market, Top Secret™ going head to head with James Bond™ for the spy thrillers, Traveler™ and Star Frontiers™ staking claims on the space genre long before Star Wars™ and Star Trek™ appeared on the game scene, Gamma World™ trying to hold its own against Shadowrun™ and Twilight 2000™ in the post-apocalyptic field, and Boot Hill™ proving that westerns really are dead until Deadlands™ revived them by infusing them with the undead. And without some serious advantage, forget about trying to reach the World of Darkness™ crowd, who are pretty well locked into Vampire: the Masquerade™, breaking out only occasionally to try Werewolf: the Apocalypse™, Wraith: the Oblivion™, Mage: the Ascension™, or one of the other rather formulaic X: the Y games.
Thus the independent game designer is constantly moving into more and more obscure areas, looking for that niche no one has exploited which will bring him fame and fortune. Thus we get Big Eyes, Small Mouth™ to appeal to anime fans (although even here there is competition from a Sailor Moon™ game) and constant talk of modeling a game on every nuance of popular culture, such as attempting to base a game on Angel rather than Buffy. Searching for a niche within a niche, designers aim for smaller and smaller slices of a well-contested pie.
It may sound as if I think this wrong-headed. That might be particularly suspected, given that as author of Multiverser™ I stand at the helm of a game which seemingly goes the opposite direction, attempting to claim the entire pie with a game which does everything well, or at least well enough. I’ll plead innocent on that charge. After all, given Multiverser’s™ interfacing rules, any niche game published becomes an expansion of the possibilities for it (since Multiverser™ player characters can become characters in other games). Thus I would encourage game designers to create and promote worlds which do new and different things, because each of these becomes a new reason for people to play my game. More seriously, I do invest some of my time into game theory and assisting others in their game design efforts, despite the fact that some view this as “helping the competition”. I’m a supporter of such designs. My interest in this article lies in what motivates these people to create games for which they cannot demonstrate any real commercial interest.
As I was musing on this, it occurred to me that I could adduce a very similar example in an entirely different field. My mind recalled two musicians who, it seemed to me, were targeting a niche within a niche: James Vincent and James Ward. Both were known to me as artists in the field of Contemporary Christian Music; each had at some point come forward with a jazz style that was extremely atypical of such music.
Ward I knew first. It happens that he was an old friend of my cousin Peter, the two of them having gotten to know each other at a Christian summer camp in New York State. Peter had one of Ward’s albums back when I was in high school, so when Ward came to my college with a band called Elan, I made a point of hearing them. The music was avant-garde Jazz, an unusual style which had a very small following in the music world generally; the predominantly Christian audience at my school thinned markedly as the concert progressed. Ward abandoned the effort, and by the time I was at the radio station he had revamped his career with the much more mainstream (for contemporary Christian music) Mourning to Dancing album.
Vincent, by contrast, I first encountered through the radio station at which I was working when his album Enter In was released, billed as Jazz Fusion and again off the beaten track for contemporary Christian music despite appealing strongly to me personally (regular readers of this column will recall that I have eclectic tastes musically). We programmed several tracks from that disc, but I don’t think it ever appeared on the charts in Contemporary Christian Magazine.
Thus for the last few years the names of these two artists have gradually risen to the top of my list of unwritten article ideas. Finding nothing to draw these thoughts into a coherent whole, in a burst of inspiration I looked up both of them in Google™ and visited their web sites, and then sent each of them a personal note expressing my interest in this and their insights into it. James Vincent wrote back, and thanks largely to him I have realized what I had heretofore missed.
As I perused Vincent’s site, I came upon this description of one of his albums:
After a nearly twelve year departure from recording, Eclecticity was my first project. While listening to the recording for the first time in eight years with a very talented piano player friend of mine, the question was asked “why is this not available?”. The only reason I could give was “I suppose because it is not commercial in the least”. My friend stated, “who cares, it needs to be heard”.
That, it seemed, was the motivation behind so many of the game designs that were targeting a niche market. Sure, many of the designers believed they were creating the next truly great role playing game, that the world was going to beat a path to their door, abandoning D&D™ and V:tM™ in droves to play this new entry in the gaming world. But in the main they wrote these games because these were the games they wanted to play, and they published them because they thought that others might well be looking for a game very like this one.
Vincent confirmed this attitude in himself as he answered my questions in e-mail.
…[W]hen I was undertaking any musical project, I never thought of how many people would be reached by the message of the music, but rather that I just let the music flow out of me as honestly as I could. What I do with music has always had a relatively small number of people that appreciate it, and that has always been okay with me.
Vincent goes on to compare this to the Gospel of Christ, noting that those who are serious about looking to Christ to transform their lives in the present are a very small portion of all who would use the label Christian for themselves. In a sense, contemporary Christian music is already a niche within a niche, as not all who would call themselves Christian would listen to Christian music, or contemporary music. Similarly, role playing games may be the largest chunk of the hobby games industry (depending on how you count and what you include), but it’s already a small piece of a small piece of a small pie. The focus should not be on how few people would actually be interested in any particular creative effort, but on making the products of that effort available to as many of those who would be interested as possible.
Is there then no hope of commercial success for the niche game? James Ward may have given up on Elan, but James Vincent is still creating his music two decades later. “Thanks to the internet,” he writes, “I daily receive orders from all over the globe, and interestingly enough the most consistent sellers are Enter In, Waiting For The Rain, and Space Traveler.” Today it is possible for a niche product within a niche category to find its audience. Even if that audience is a very tiny fraction of the world population, the population of that world has gotten very large and considerably easier to reach. It probably won’t make you rich or famous, but if you’re willing to forego those as definitions of success, you can still produce a successful game.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
