This is War
Beside my desk is a stack of articles. Each and every one of them is about the RPG industry. And each and every one of them says the same thing: Gaming is dead.
Oh, sure, you've got your Vampire and your Dungeons and Dragons, they point out, but what are these but temporary distractions keeping us from the real truth; the fact that the RPG industry died a horrible, screaming, bloody death around the mid 1990s, when the Internet rose to power. And it hasn't gotten any better: in 1997, the non-electronic gaming market was worth just over $1 billion, and electronic gaming lagged far behind, but by the year 2000 e-gaming had reached $1.6 billion in revenues. D&D 3e, the relaunch of the Vampire line, and a whole slew of "new blood" entrants into the pen-and-paper RPG field are doing what they can to stop the bleeding, but online gaming is no longer just the dragon in the corner that no one wants to talk about — it's taking up the whole room. To make matters worse, D&D4e is on the way now, and every indication is that it actually borrows heavily from online games like World of Warcraft. Which by now probably has more subscribers than everyone who ever played D&D, ever.
Are we doomed? If so, why is this the case? Because, they say, role-playing games don't have the general appeal of movies or comic books or any other form of entertainment. It can't compete with WOW. It's niche material, always has been and always will be. But that niche (they say) has turned into a grave, a hole in the ground where games lie buried under shovelfuls of Pokemon cards, where polyhedrons lie scattered amongst the spent shells of Quake 3 players.
Role-playing is dead.
Long live role-playing.
Gamegrene is not your typical gaming website. We're not here to give you lists of equipment or announcements about the next release of Magic: The Gathering (or whatever is supposedly "hot" right now). We're not going to publish glowing reviews of whatever products people send us for free. We're not here to be shiny and happy and blindly optimistic. We're in the trenches, my friends. This is war. Real, honest-to-God war-is-hell war, the kind with gunsmoke in your eyes and shells whistling through the air and mist on the battlefield and the stench of something rotten in Denmark, trench rot, gore, blood, pus and gangrene.
We didn't start this war. They did. The ones who are saying it's all over, that role-playing games are a thing of the past, that nobody really plays them any more, that the ones who do are nothing but aging hipsters who haven't bought into the WOW craze yet. But the way to fight this war is not to tell them they're wrong, to pretend it's not happening, to act like the Dungeons and Dragons movie is the best thing ever, to pretend that the next edition of D&D will be the one that changes everything. Because they're not, it is, it's not and it won't.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said "Fiat veritas pereat vita." Let there be truth, and may life perish. And that's exactly what we're going to do here. We're going to tackle this head on, full-bore, truthfully and up front. That's not to say that we're all doom and gloom; far from it. But if you're looking for a shiny happy gaming website, you picked the wrong one.
Gamegrene. For the gamer who's sick of the typical.
Why yet another gaming site?
Professionalism. There's a well-deserved lack of it among gaming websites. Sadly, that shows. So why not make a site staffed by the most insane gamers we know, bound together by a functional design, and updated regularly? Gamegrene strives to become a leading daily news service for the world of gaming, while maintaining a healthy dose of original material, honest interviews and reviews. Gamegrene launched August 2000, the same month D&D 3e was released; the "Second Edition" of Gamegrene appeared July 2004, the year Paranoia, the World of Darkness, and GURPS released new editions; as of early 2008, D&D 4e is a few months away, and there still seem to be two camps - those who claim the next big thing is going to change everything, and those who say the next big thing is going to flop, and ruin the RPG world forever.
Yet the indie RPG movement is strong, and there are a lot of people doing really cool things, both in RPGs and in peripheral fields. There's a lot of stuff that's not getting a lot of attention, and there are a lot of things that bear a closer look, a little deconstruction, and some criticism. That's why we're here. We hope that's why you're here too.
Contacting Gamegrene (General)
All general inquiries should be sent to info@gamegrene.com.
Contacting Gamegrene (Advertisers)
We currently sell banner advertising on a weekly basis (contact us for the latest prices). Your banner will be tracked and controlled by number of clickthroughs and views, statistics which are available at any time during your stay. Banner ads should be your standard JPG or GIF, 468x60, and less than 50k. Payment is accepted through Paypal, check, or money order. For further questions, or to start your banner on Gamegrene, email info@gamegrene.com.
Contacting Gamegrene (Writers)
If you'd like to write for Gamegrene, read and grok our information for writers... it contains a bunch of tips to start you off as well as some questions we'd like answered. We're always looking for columnists, one shots, or just regular monthly contributors — if you're interested, email us at info@gamegrene.com.
Contacting Gamegrene (Publishers)
If you're looking to send us review material, deliver to Gamegrene East; for material that might pertain to the Western half of the United States for some reason (eg. a Con, or an Interview opportunity), please CC Gamegrene West. You may also consider advertising your products on Gamegrene.
Gamegrene East
c/o Kevin Hemenway
36 Kimball St.
Concord, NH 03301
info@gamegrene.com
Gamegrene West
c/o Michael Fiegel
Address pending - email for info
aeonite(at)gamegrene.com
Who's responsible for this travesty?
Gamegrene was created by Disobey, a New Hampshire based business whose primary insanity is the aptly named Disobey.com. Restless that he had grown away from gaming, Kevin Hemenway (aka "Morbus Iff"), launched Gamegrene in an attempt to bring the same sort of uniqueness to the gaming world that he has accomplished with Disobey.
Disobey.com is home to Devil Shat, the genre horror of The Horror Section, the popular Ghost Sites, the database of Low Bandwidth, fresh news from the Disobey News Network, our gallery of Collected Works and everything else, Detergent. Disobey is also the exclusive publisher of various text based zines, available through email and archived on the web. We write software too (like the popular AmphetaDesk, as well as scripts appearing in books like O'Reilly's Spidering Hacks, Mac OS X Hacks, and Google Hacks). Disobey was honored as being one of the "most popular news and media magazines" by Yahoo!, and has been mentioned in Playboy, Time, Slashdot, Wired and far more.
Joining Disobey in supporting Gamegrene is the Silicon Valley-based aethereal FORGE, a creative services collective bringing together artists, writers, designers and other creatives from across the country and around the world to work on creative projects together for mutual benefit. Michael Fiegel (aka "Aeon(ite)" brings to the Gamegrene table a unique, honest perspective on gaming, a love of the fantastic tempered with the gritty cynicism brought on by reading one too many Cyberpunk stories.
aethereal FORGE is behind a number of online "concept" sites, including the cult hit Ninja Burger, the world's only online fast-food restaurant run entirely by ninjas; the cybergothic world of Iconoclast; the futuristic super-cool teen superheroine Power Grrrl; and the gritty alternate history world of Decay.
aethereal FORGE's content has been praised by fans and critics around the world, and lauded by those from The Onion and Wired, among others. aethereal FORGE has been mentioned in forums as disparate as the TechTV, The Food Network, and magazines such as Forbes FYI and Yahoo Internet Life.