There are many things that annoy me about the tabletop content creation space:
- The blurry line between honest, subjective critique and paid-for promotion.
- The cliché of telling all the rules, providing a gnat’s whiskers of critique and calling it a review.
- The self-satisfied disdain of those who don’t include any suggestion of how a game plays because they’re producing critique, not a review.
- The repeated use of the phrase ‘a knife fight in a phone booth’ and variants there on.
- People who call them ‘meeples’ when the etymology of the word comes from ‘people’ which is a word that already indicates a plural (click here for the etymological explanation). It’s a set of meeple people, not meeples peoples!
- Companies who feel that a hobby-beloved word they neither invented themselves nor used in their official rulebooks for years after its creation is suddenly theirs to own and legally enforce. Such money-grubbers deserve to have their ‘followers’ desert them.
- The occasional returning idea that reviews should be purely objective, ignoring the fact that all the things we feel and consequently produce stem from our personal experiences.
[Editor’s note: At this point the Meeple Mountain editorial team decided to spare the reader from the increasingly warped rantings of the writer and have sectioned the rest of the list into a concertina. Expand it on your own accord(ian).]
- The snobbery that ‘real’ journalists have against hobbyists.
- The uppity maxim ‘we kept the hobby going throughout the bleak times at the turn of the millennium’ that hobbyists mutter in response to ‘real’ journalists.
- The perception that video trumps text, despite tabletop video media largely being poorly improvised, badly edited (in this case the definition meaning selecting and preparing the message as opposed to splicing clips together, although there’s that too) and often an excuse for someone to sell their personal brand rather than contribute meaningfully to the tabletop discourse.
- Walls of board games and the insistence on referring to people’s ‘collections’, as if we’re all wanton consumers desperate to own everything.
- References to Rube Goldberg, especially by British content creators – American Goldberg was an imitator of the British artist Heath Robinson and his ‘Contraptions’. By the time Goldberg started with his ugly imitations, Robinson’s elegant illustrations were already renowned enough to be in the dictionary.
- Questions about the number of times a game needs to be played before a review can be produced.
- The relentless positivity of 98% of reviews.
- Complaints about the relentless positivity of 98% of reviews.
- The word ‘fun’.
- A proliferation of crap hats.
- The endless harping on about replayability.
- Discussions about games being ‘art’.
- Top 10s, Top 100s and the like (although obviously not Top 6s).
- 90% of BoardGameGeek.
- Lists about the things that annoy random nobodies about the tabletop content creation space.
But there’s one thing that gets my goat more than anything else in the tabletop media landscape: the use of the word ‘will’.
Some examples of this heinous word crime:
‘During this game players will collect resources to upgrade their engine.’
‘The player with the most victory points will win the game.’
‘On your turn you will add a flower card to your grid of cards.’
These examples are made up for this soapbox, but I imagine you could search online and find hundreds of almost word-for-word versions of them out there. Remove the ‘will’ and each of those sentences will becomes sleeker and more focused (if a ‘s’ is added to the second example). Without the will they’re more direct, upfront, engaging and personal. Better, in other words.
‘Will’ is a weird word affliction that has beset the tabletop media landscape, spreading and proliferating like a meme. It’s a meaningless word in the hobby discourse. I worry ‘will’ will become like ‘like’.
Linguistically I have no idea what this use of ‘will’ is called, other than thinking it possibly has something to do with the future tense. I stopped studying the English language at the age of 16, and strangely the edge case of tabletop media using unnecessary ‘wills’ wasn’t something that was covered in the British GCSE curriculum at the turn of the century. Who knows, perhaps it is now. Or ‘will’ be.
My own theory is that people subconsciously chuck ‘wills’ into the conversation to provide grandeur: with ‘will’ there’s a sense of distance and objectivity, without ‘will’ statements become immediate and earthy. We want to sound professional and intelligent and maybe a ‘will’ here or there helps with that. But don’t be fooled – it may seem smart whilst you’re writing it but the moment anyone thinks about it for a moment you’re undone.
And look, I get it – ‘Will’ is sneaky. It seems innocuous and innocent and then before you know it the four-lettered git is next in line to the throne, slapping someone on stage or killing Aunt May.
We all occasionally fall into the ‘will’ trap. I’m not immune, as Meeple Mountain’s Andrew Lynch can attest, having recently pulled me up on a couple of ‘will’s that had snuck through the net. (Thanks Andrew, big respect) Mistakes happen and I will-inquish all claims to being a perfect writer. But I’m will-ing myself to avoid it in future and will inwardly will-t should it happen again.
So, join me and be vigilant against the ‘wills’ of our cardboard world! Cast aside the four-lettered freeloader and step into a happier (and briefer) will-free future. Where there’s a ‘will’, there’s most certainly not a way!
With sincere apologies to Will Hare!
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