Plus Ça Change

By Rich Redman

For those who don't know French, the full saying is "plus ça change, plus ça même chose," meaning approximately "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Change is an inescapable part of our lives. Some changes happen so often they become routine, like the changing of the light as the sun rises and sets every day. Others are jarring, if not terrifying. Looking back on just over a year of business as The Game Mechanics, I see a lot of changes (and I'm not talking about the Quality Standards change to the d20 License). So this just-passed anniversary gives me an excuse to talk about change. It's not a controversial topic, I know, so I'll try to be as provocative as I can. After all, if I was fair and balanced, Fox news might sue me.

Let's face it: Gamers hate change. If you think you don't, you're either not a gamer or in denial. When JD, Marc, and I all worked in Wizards of the Coast Customer Service, we knew every Magic the Gathering® expansion would generate a hundred or so "customer contacts" with the theme "you ruined the game." Seriously. Every expansion was supposed to put the last nail in MtG's coffin. Yet there MtG is, still going strong and past its ten-year anniversary. Don't get me wrong--I respect the love that gamers have for their favorite product. I understand the emotional attachment. I had some bad feelings about MtG when it reached the point where it became more about having time to search the web for a good deck than knowing how to play the game (I never cared when it became about who could buy the best cards, because when that change occurred I still got cards free for working at WotC). I was mad when the BattleTech TCG went away, and I was madder still when Dark*Matter got cancelled before it really got started. Suck it up, you crybabies. Change is part of life. Growing up, graduations, marriages, divorces, births, illnesses, "transitioning" jobs, and yes, even deaths are all changes that make up our lives. Your favorite game is going to go out of print. Your favorite breakfast cereal is going to go off the market. Your favorite restaurant is going to close. I mean, I miss Salumeria on Hudson, but I cowboyed up and moved on (and I need to check out the Neapolitan fire-grilled pizza place that opened in that space).

Now, I said that I was mad, but I also saw the numbers for those products and I saw the plans and strategies for the company. I knew the right decisions were being made and I respected them, whether I liked them or not. Purposeful change like that means that, hopefully, someone is paying attention to changing circumstances and making appropriate course corrections in response. To an outsider, it may seem random or arbitrary, but it isn't. It's done in response to information that you don't have. Maybe a product isn't as popular, maybe it has new competition, or maybe there were distribution problems. I'm not suggesting that you automatically trust all decisions that corporations make--far from it! I've seen too many stupid decisions made by corporate leaders who thought they had the pertinent information when they didn't.

Life can be a big, scary thing. It seems like just when we think we've got a good handle on things, some lunatic crashes a 747 into the World Trade Center and we're reminded how little we control. Some change comes from chaos, from entropy. Tomorrow, when your car won't start, it's not part of some great plot. No one is out to get you. It's just entropy. When I led a tank platoon, one battalion commander taught me a valuable lesson: You can park a tank in perfect condition on Friday, and on Monday something totally new will be wrong with it. Gravity, wind, unseen and pent up torque, the sheer mass of the tank pressuring the suspension; chemical reactions in fuel cells, batteries, and even the paint; all these things work on the complex system of an armored fighting vehicle even when it sits motionless. It's just life.

In September of 2002, three of the soon-to-be Mechanics got laid off from Wizards of the Coast (Marc had already left the company). The next week, in our out-placement seminar, we were already talking about freelance work and putting together a d20 publishing company. A few months later, we had our first published product (Swords of Our Fathers). Six months later, Stan! and I were talking about an opening for a temp at Wizards of the Coast working for a friend of ours, and Stan! said that he was too busy to take on the extra work. When I got back from an interview with Artifact Entertainment (they wanted me to build and run their customer service department for the launch of their fantasy MMORPG, Horizons), I took that temp gig at WotC. I acknowledged my emotions, and talked about them with my wife, but I didn't let them color my thinking.

This past year, the power went out in Renton several times. One of those times, I got sent home from my "temp" gig at WotC (yes, I'm still a temp almost 12 months later, and yes, everyone else got sent home too). The next day we all slept in a bit, not knowing if the power was back on at WotC. When I found out that they had electricity, I drove down Martin Luther King Way an hour later than usual, and three lanes of traffic were blocked off. I don't know what happened, but I do know that I might have been in the middle of that mess when whatever it was did happen. An accident forced me to make a change, I adapted, and I benefited. Change happens, and in the immortal words of the philosopher Dennis Leary: "Life sucks. Get a helmet."

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