Fandom is the most important thing in the modern media industry. Fans buy the products and advertise the brand, but are also the primary source of feedback. The media is what the community forms around, but the community is what feeds the media.

But the relationship between a work’s copyright holder and its fan community is structurally antagonistic. The IP holder and members of the fan community have fundamentally different interests which sometimes align but sometimes don’t. The rightsholder depends on the goodwill of the fandom, but at the same time there is always danger of the community being attacked by the rightsholder. The law creates an implicit hovering threat of legal violence, and the profit motive encourages bad actors to pull the trigger. This doesn’t mean the relationship has to be antagonistic in practice, but it means there is always an underlying potential for conflict that has to be reasoned with. The threat is always there.

There is a productive tension here. Fanwork can serve functions official work can’t, and the community surrounding a work is one of the main things that gives a work “value”, in a base economic sense. They’re the ones buying the products. Media companies are desperate to have more fans because that directly translates into their ability to make money.

Likewise, the health of the franchise matters to the people who love it, and official recognition of fan communities can be a good thing.¹ Fan work can be elevated, talented creators can be brought on as part of official projects, etc. Official recognition can serve as a badge of honor and help platform and encourage talent and creativity in the community.²

But the deciding factor in whether the creator/fan relationship is healthy or exploitative is whether the community is allowed to be independent. It’s fine for official spaces — fourms, Discord servers, etc. — to exist, so long as the purpose isn’t to capture and enclose a community. Media and fandom can have a symbiotic relationship, but as soon as the corporation tries to exercise control over their fans, it turns into an ugly hostility.

Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled.

I was just thinking about chapter 2, and how I would’ve loved to have found the secret twist for myself, even though it was hidden away a little. If the game has indicated there was something to find, people would have found it on their own. Instead, I’m willing to bet the experience for the vast majority of people was finding out online first and then reproducing what they saw for themselves.

Narrative spoilers

But this is not a Deltarune thing. For any narrative media, the experience depends on the work presenting the narrative flow it intends to. This includes reveals, this includes pacing, this includes characterization.

Getting information out of turn spoils the game. It does this so aggressively that breaking narrative flow has become one of the definitions for the word “spoil”, as in “ruin”. I have a much longer piece I want to write some day about information filtering in general, which is maybe the hardest problem ever?

For games like Deltarune, it’s taken for granted that people have at most a week of courtesy before the Internet is flooded with information. And of course there are some people out there who are eager to get that information as soon as possible; it is not universally true that people want to experience narrative as intended.

Except sometimes we care a lot

But is this a little silly? Is narrative purity so reverential that information should not flow through the normal channels by which ideas are pushed to us, like social media?

Here’s what piqued my interest about this today: gaming does have a reverence for not letting experiences be spoiled. It’s just very selective right now. We see this absolute demand that knowledge not be leaked, that games be allowed to communicate information to the player on their own terms. But beyond extremely new releases, we see this almost exclusively with regard to knowledge-based games or metroidbrainias, where knowledge is the gameplay mechanic.

I don’t like “events”. I don’t like it when things are limited with requirements of spacial presence and time. I don’t like experiences that only exist in one moment and then can never be relived. I don’t like ephemera. I prefer things. Toys I can play with, tools I can use, books I can read, movies I can watch, all at my own discretion. I have agency over my things. The actual lived experience from occurrence to occurrence is always different, of course, but the externalities can be repeated. I love being able to preserve the essence of a thing.

It’s one of the reasons I like computers. Or maybe it’s a psychological trait I developed because I had access to computers growing up. It probably is, I think. But either way, I love the purity of digital storage and interface. I love having an environment where experiences can be preserved and replayed at my discretion without my having to make any demands on other people.

And so that’s one of the reasons I love video games. Their mechanics are defined and can be understood and mastered. Their levels are defined and can be understood and mastered. Despite the extreme rates of “churn” — video games go out of print much faster than books or other physical media — the software is digital, and can be saved, stored, and replayed. I can look up the flash games I played as a kid and replay them, exactly as they were, and understand myself a little better for it.

Of course there are exceptions; it’s impossible to have a multiplayer game without an implicit demand that other people play with you. When an old game “dies”, it’s often not because the necessary hosting software is being intentionally withheld, but that there just isn’t a pool of people casually playing it like there used to be. That’s still a loss, and it’s sad, but that’s an unavoidable reality, and it’s not nearly as complete a loss as a one-off event being over.

So I don’t like when games force seasonal events on me. Limited-time events introduce something new, but they also necessitate the inevitable loss of that thing. And that assumes you were playing everything from the start; events introduce content that can be “missable” in a meaningful way, so if you’re weren’t playing the game at the right time, even if you own the game and finish everything you can access your experience can still be rendered incomplete. One of the things I like about games is that they’re safe, and the introduction of time-based loss compromises that safety.

That constant cycle of stress and pressure to enjoy things before they were lost is one of the main reasons I stopped playing Overwatch. I realized the seasonal events in particular weren’t good for me; they turned a game that should have been fun into an obligation that caused me anxiety.

But I’ve been thinking about this lately not because of Overwatch, but because Splatoon 3 is coming out soon. Splatoon isn’t nearly as bad as all that, I don’t think it’s deliberately predatory aside from Nintendo’s standard insistence on denying people autonomy. Splatoon 3 invokes that “people will stop playing Splatoon 2” loss, but even before that, Splatoon (a game I love) left a bad taste in my mouth because of its events.