Empty Magazines

It's hard not to feel sad and nostalgic at the news that Dungeon and Dragon magazine are ending print publication, passing to a phantasmic online existence at Wizards of the Coast. I gained confidence as a game master too late to get real value out of Dungeon (despite having been published in it), but Dragon has been a part of my life since its double digits, back when Kim Mohan was editor, and Tom Wham games were oddball, gleeful surprises.

However, I am suspicious of nostalgia. Fond memories are cheap friends. It's good times for an evening, but later, you realize you paid the bill, and got nothing to show for it. I prefer to gaze into the searing orb of the future rather than the soothing satellite of the past.

No publisher knows what to do in this awkward technological puberty. Web patrons are accustomed to freebies, and every method of monetization developed so far is too irksome. PDF sales are the zit creme of this adolescence. It'll do, but it doesn't solve the problem. What we want are the deeper voices and clearer skin, not a soothing ointment.

Eventually, we'll pass some societal or technological milestone, and we can all get on with the business of buying and selling intellectual content again. Just nobody knows how yet. My own zero-dollar bet is that publishers will get over their DRM FUD when the money finally dries up, and someone in Asia will begin manufacturing an e-reader in the $30 range that will allow you to look at and mark up text and pictures.

Bill Gates claims that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are the last great format war, but this is a lie. The next format war will be e-reader formats.

That vague future is ten years away. Maybe less. Until then, Wizards' web team will toss up some new logos on the Web site, maybe reorganize. Their content might become slightly more robust, but really they don't need to do much. They've been producing a magazine's worth of content each month since I worked there in 2001. Soon, they'll just apply their trademarks to it.

For now, Dungeon and Dragon go to long-term parking. Once the mythical "someone" develops a workable business model for publishing, they will lurch into that new format with tinny fanfare.

So, bye Dungeon and Dragon. I'll miss you, but we'll catch up in a few years.