I have some pretty big issues with capitalism, as an ethos. As someone who sells games for money, it plays into that exchange. And I’ve spent some serious time thinking about that, and thinking about how to move forward. What follows is my interrelated set of solutions.
You can now pay for Perfect Unrevised (and future games I release) in two different currencies: dollars, or purposeful acts of social good. If you pay in dollars, some of those dollars are going to be donated to charities that support the kind of social causes championed or explored by the game. Details follow.
A Portion of Proceeds
$5 from every sale of Perfect Unrevised (PDF or Print+PDF) will be donated to PEN Canada. It’s an organization that provides advocacy and support to authors whose freedom of expression is under attack – including authors who are facing exile or imprisonment for their journalism and prose.
In the future, when I release Monsterhearts, I plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to It Gets Better, or a similar organization that provides outreach and support to queer youth.
Purposeful Acts of Social Good
I’m going to try offering people a new way to obtain my games without buying them or stealing them. It is this: do purposeful acts of social good, tell me about those purposeful acts of social good, and then you get the game. I’m going to start this experiment with two PDFs, as I face zero risk in doing so. In addition to Perfect Unrevised, the other PDF on the table is The Grotesque, a new Apocalypse World playbook.
AW: The Grotesque
A new Apocalypse World playbook that I wrote. It was workshopped with Johnstone, who’s really good at workshopping Apocalypse World design stuff. You are a mutant, a physical mirror for the maelstorm and the apocalypse. You are unpredictable and alien, but you also have something good to offer the community that accepts you. Oh, and you can have nested drones or retractable claws or you can produce food spores.
“Purposeful acts of social good” is a pretty abstract currency to be working in, obviously. So I’ll just paint a picture of roughly what I envision, and then whatever you do will be correct. Perfect Unrevised is worth about 3 of these acts of good, and The Grotesque is worth 1.
- Baking bran muffins for everyone on your block/in your apartment building.
- Offering to walk your over-burdened neighbor’s dog once a week.
- Volunteer to do an hour of work at a community co-op radio station.
- Donating ten dollars to a worthy charity.
- Organizing a story games club for a local middle school.
- Spending an hour walking around downtown telling strangers about how they’re beautiful.
- Give a ride to a hitch-hiker, and go out of your way to deliver them to their destination.
- Spend half an hour cleaning up garbage in a local park.
- Do something subversive that provokes thoughtful discussion about the world we live in.
Once you’ve completed your purposeful acts of social good, email me at mcdaldno. That’s a gmail address. And I’ll hook you up with your PDF.
It should be stuff you weren’t planning to do already, if there’s a distinction. Go out of your way and do good, and that’s how you can pay for Perfect or The Grotesque. If this works, I’ll open the stage up for all my games, print and digital, maybe.
Why Not Free?
So, why not just give away my games for free? The answer comes down to what I want to get out of making games, and putting them into people’s hands. I want to foster an exchange and dialogue with people interested in my games. I want to feel validated for my efforts. I want people to understand these are major efforts with great worth. And, finally, I want these games to contribute to social good. I feel like, at the moment, these goals are best met by adopting a different type of exchange, rather than just giving them away. I’d love to hear other ideas, though, and to engage that conversation with you more. Comment!
Posted by mcdaldno
