Story vehicles are not stories, for fuck's sake.

Let's open with a couple Maro quotes from October of 2020, like not long ago. Dates play kind of a part in this piece.

"The game becomes whatever you want it to be."

"The ego attachment is so strong that you're not just playing a game, you're playing your game."

Who's Maro? Fuck's sake.

In October 2020, we can safely assume that sets up until I don't know, last year's MKM, were designed even if unbalanced. The direction was there, probably all of the cards were there, artworks had begun trickling in, most or all playtests were good and done. Hasbro, and Maro's team had a clear market analysis, a swathe of projections in their hands, and most of all, knew the narrative direction the next few blocks would go towards.

Meanwhile, Spiderman Far from Home was the last MCU patch that had been rolled out, we were waiting on Thor Four More Thor (which was fucking awesome, foh), and the latest RPG fad was probably Mercer's Boiz and their catchy quotes? Or something like that.

It wasn't always like this. We remember when MCU was not the name for comics movies (X-Men were), when MtG didn't traverse 4 planes each calendar year, and DnD was... well, DnD but not this be-all-end-all modelisation of people's skewed sense of what constitutes a story.

Let's go into the data side.

Yeah, I know, looking up "MCU" and "DnD" is sus af, it says nothing.  
Only it does say something. Isn't it fascinating how their surge in popularity (for the sake of this post, yes, let's equate popularity with searches) comes way before covid - when we actually notice unexpected drops - and within a very similar time span? Of course, their form is very different as mcu surges with each new release whereas dnd seems to be steadier in its growth. I chose these particular terms because their use shows more than their reach; it shows familiarity, it shows cultural embeddedness. To use "mcu" is to know what mcu is.

What changed around 2016? We had comics movies since like the 70s, we had popular RPGs since probably 2004 or so.

What changed is capitalism. Decontextualise and rent. Do not ever produce stories, produce consumable snippets of fascination. Make them want because you never actually gave them anything.

"But capitalism doesn't change." 

How beautiful that would be... Capitalist relations with the means of production don't, indeed. Capitalism changes, it expands, it dilutes, it co-opts, it appropriates. And it came for our stories in the form of breaking them apart, making you a partial owner in terms of subscribing to them but never actually getting a clear, concise, full experience in the form of a story or a setting.

Isn't MCU a setting? MtG? For sure, DnD is, isn't it?

No, they fucking aren't. They're systems. Closed ones at that. Very much like Apple and can we, puh-leez, realise that the entertainment business, whether that be RPGs, card games, movies, or literature, functions very much like a... business? Shocking, I know. Businesses reeled after the 08 crisis. Evolutionary economics got shafted, all theories and projections went to shit, companies needed to go for the short term boom/bust profit because there was no fucking guarantee that nations' Reserves would step in to save the ass of anyone who wasn't a bank. 

Each release has to go bigger, make more of an impact, earn faster, die even more. We do not want sustainable business, we do not care for "loyalty" neither from within or without. We care for addiction, for short profitable terms that keep production going. Profits are there as long the production doesn't cease - and if it does, well, the systems are in place to relaunch it without burning stock, just refinishing it through exploited labour.

Immaterial product-systems in this business can be rebranded as "storytelling vehicles". They're modelisations of a reductive, structuralist notion of stories - I am very much an Humberto Eco fan, don't get me wrong - becoming identifiable, and more importantly, sellable. We had the 3-arc story, we had the 5-arc narrative, the monomyth, the whatever, now we have the "dress it up however, they gon get it because we got the monopoly". Wealth trickled up and they absorbed the competition.

Let's offer up a definition to the gods. This definition is mine and I retain full right to revisit and update it as often and as extensively as I fucking feel like.

A storytelling vehicle is a set of rules that may or may not define a network, linear or otherwise, of interconnected, reductive signifiers that functions as an enabler for storytelling. These signifiers may be character archetypes, character arcs, narrative nodes, keywords, or a set choice of storytelling techniques such a specific prose structure, colouring techniques, lens choices, or sound design tools with the ultimate objective being the production of a story. 

You will notice I said "signifiers". These nodes in the vehicle network are empty, they act as enablers, as multipliers of something, they label. They're not colours, they're colouring techniques; they're not characters, they're arcs and archetypes. 

This can be seen in direct action if one plays more than one decks in MtG, if they browse this, if they take timestamped notes on when certain things happen during a marvel movie. They're not even recipes; recipes dictate ingredients for an end result. They're modelisations of how to write a recipe, not even models; keywords and reductions, not descriptions; lenses, not light.

MtG started going through 3 planes since 2016, and this has been upped to 4, the past year. Narrative weight has been shot to hell, even during the All Will Be One era that was supposed to be the culmination of a decade-long war. Players will play, I sure as fuck do and love it. It got into the "Universe Beyond" thingy as well, it reflavoured cards in its Secret Lair releases, and afaik, it will launch a collab set with Marvel. I'm gonna dive head-first into that.

The MCU dressed up nicely (actually awful) in CGI, it became a subscription service where you needed to dish out 10e every couple of months to watch characters you were never invested in, fight characters that remained unmotivated with a moral greyness that cannot even impress toddlers because they've lived through more pressing moral issues when deciding whether to fling their food across the room thus depriving themselves of sustenance but gaining the immense pleasure of disrespecting urban life or not. 

Their undeniable sellability says more about their audience than it does about the product per se. We/they have been nurtured in a context of identification at all costs, a political framework of ignoring organic virtues and going for constructed values, of recognising patterns, not participants. We are content with the familiar, because we need comfort, not a catalyst. Vehicles get filled up with whatever effortless shit overworked and burnt-out labourers are dictated to put in, because the structuralist abomination they're gon unload is for some reason, acceptable. Reviews don't matter, pacing doesn't, watershed moments or twists don't. The thing sells, and market validation turns corroboration into verification. Capitalist pragmatism reigns; as long as it sells, it is good. Or adequate, who cares.

It is the very case with DnD. This... ugh, for a lack of a better term and motivation to find one, game, is not a game. Rolling a d20 adding and comparing numbers while fighting storytelling constipation, a game makes not. It is a system of justifying a need to roll dice. The wildly varying settings, the quasi-political pandering to anything remotely liberal, the half-assed design where mechanics have foregone their need for integration and organic-ity, prove but one thing. 75% of RPG players have either never played an actual RPG, or they have but succumb to a monopoly of defining fun.

Look.

Fuck the story. Play what you will. But please, for fuck's sake, know, just know, don't act on it, know that you could be having so much more fun. Sincere, fulfilling, life-changing fun. The issue with vehicles is not just the servitude to capital and the surrendering of aesthetics and gaming practices to it. They're an insult to history. They're a blackmailing of the collective unconscious as this has been shaped by post-Butlerian identity rhetorics, stress disorders, hectic sleep schedules, and the deterioration of social space.

Vehicles are not historically organic, they don't arise through physical language and experience, they do not care about their context - they enforce. They are ad hoc algorithms that try to define and limit reality. Sure, all RPGs, all board games, all movies take pieces out of reality, subvert it, retell it, and dress it. Truly, most media don't have storytelling as a core element of theirs. But, integrating your themes is a form of art in design - whether that is board game design, light design, or script writing.

There are the media that know this non-need for storytelling because they have the experience of existing in a certain evoked happenstance at their core (eg. backgammon or white noise 10-hour tracks), and then there media that are constituted by it, like RPGs, literature, and most movies. Even nature documentaries or black metal albums go for a narrative. Cryptozoic's Epic Spell Wars lets players surround its elements with stories as they see fit. The Relic doesn't. MtG suggests myriads of setting soups that within them, you, the planeswalker, enact your will under flavourful interactions. DnD imposes its flatness, turns you into a bland user bound to its market chokehold. The MCU needs you to subscribe to it for the sake of your fascination, to drown your frustration under the waves of "well, it's not like we got anything better to do". 

You're not stupid. You're just bored. Cut it the fuck out. Fuck the story. Tell it better. Because fuck me if there ever was a story worth telling besides the ones that actually draws you in enough to represent it on your own, instead of you stumbling drunk and raped to their doorstep and they rent you the doormat to pass out on. Don't let them. Your virtue deserves better.