I’m in my tenth year of ‘writing on the internet’ at Cannibal Halfling; although I’ve arguably been writing on the internet since I had a LiveJournal in high school, joining forces with Seamus and attempting to have a consistent mission and editorial stance marked the addition of something my writing never really had before: Readers. Now, for good or ill, other people actually read my work and I have to contend with the continual stress of Being Perceived in addition to, you know, just trying to write and make it coherent. I get reminded of this every once in a while; when my post last week got thousands of hits in one day, I was once again contending with Being Perceived in a way that I had mostly avoided since leaving Twitter and opting not to engage with RPG Reddit (at least about my own writing).

One of the challenges of having exposure, of actually having people see your work, is that it’s like a drug. There are positive effects and negative side effects, and it’s addictive. Having people talk about something you wrote is a weird thrill; seeing discussions start about your writing without referencing it? That’s a 99th percentile must-experience sensation. But the thing is, and this is really true when we’re talking about social networking discourse, none of the things that make writing good or needed or intellectually durable are going to help you Be Perceived. And Being Perceived doesn’t mean you’re a good writer. It’s not even marketing, it’s more knowing a few of the right people and being just the right amount of abrasive, because conflict breeds engagement more than anything else.

I am fortunate that, in at least the most recent case, I believe the reason my writing struck a nerve is because it filled a fairly empty niche. Very few people are doing any meaningful business analysis of the TTRPG hobby, and that’s because there’s no money in it. To be clear, plenty of people are writing things about the TTRPG business, but they’re often either facile or wrong because the skills to do such an analysis aren’t compensated (or rewarded at all) in hobby games. And to be honest, a statement like ‘Hasbro is 100 times larger than their next largest TTRPG competitor’ is pretty damn close to facile, and I know it. That’s where the writing comes in; I’ve literally written about the pyramid of media in TTRPGs and came to exactly the same conclusion, but when reframing that discussion in a way that I can show receipts (even smudgy, faded ones), suddenly people pay attention. I do plan to do some more TTRPG business analysis, I weirdly find it fun and as far as I know I’m the only former management consultant who’s decided to give out free competitive analysis on the subject.

That last bit, though, does illustrate the flipside to Being Perceived and writing, and that’s how the exposure affects your writing. For nearly ten years I’ve written something on the TTRPG hobby once a week, every week. I will hit my 500th article on Cannibal Halfling sometime this year, and at my average writing length, that means I’m likely going to hit a million words of writing at some point this year too (if I haven’t already). I have a number of thoughts about my best writing, the stuff I’m most proud of. My two most popular posts, though, are a rant about D&D written in 45 minutes back in May of 2019 and a summary of the West Marches playstyle that, while I’m not ashamed of the writing, does seriously embarrass me by ranking significantly higher in search engines than the original summary of the campaign by Ben Robbins (seriously, the only search term I’ve tried that gets Ben’s article higher in the results than mine is “West Marches Ben Robbins”). SEO and being combative will get you way more visibility than the quality of your writing, but not in a sustainable way.

Sustainability is something we talk a lot about behind the scenes at Cannibal Halfling. Some of it is simply that we are humans, we have but 24 hours every day, 365 days a year, and an uncertain number of remaining years that we will be blessed with. I work and keep a home with my partner, Seamus does both those things and has two children to boot. When we talk about how to make sure the site keeps going, it’s more a discussion of what we don’t do, because burnout is real and we don’t have the same choices to tone it down for work, relationships, or childcare. But the other side of sustainability is sustaining our audience. Flashes in the pan expose us to the world, of course, but they don’t build an audience. As far as I’m concerned the audience are the ones who keep coming back week in, week out to see what we have to say and to engage with us about what we’re seeing in the hobby and what we think of it. As long as we keep writing about things we care about and putting our best effort into that writing, we will continue to sustain our audience. Being Perceived every once in a while may even help with that, and help us grow a little, but it’s just opening a door. If we don’t have something good to check out behind that door, it doesn’t matter.

I know I’m changing article plans in response to going mini-viral, and I need to keep my head in check around that. There is a fine line between ‘I can give more of what people want’ and ‘I know how to suck in all the eyeballs’, and I often don’t know which side a plan falls on until I write it. I’ve done the latter before; my third-most popular article got that way specifically because I wanted to manipulate SEO, and it was so successful I decided never to do it again. Beyond the lack of substance of it all, inviting all that attention isn’t really good for my mental health. Addictive, yes, but overall I will be a happier person in the days where I get to not care what anyone’s thinking about my writing at any given moment. I also think that not caring will make my writing better. Trend-chasing is the opposite of sustainable, which means that I need to think about what I would say; that’s what got this whole thing kicked off in the first place. My fourth-most popular article was the first one I ever wrote on Cannibal Halfling, and that speaks to the fact that, whether it’s 2016 Aaron or 2026 Aaron, people out there think it’s worth reading what I have to say.

Overall, I’ve been extremely lucky with my experience building an audience. I’ve had incredible conversations with creators I deeply respect, played games with outstanding working designers, and been able to meet industry legends for coffee. None of that came about because I went viral a couple of times, it came about because once a week, almost every week for ten years, I’ve written something. I’m saying this for me as much as I am for any external reader; sometimes the writing is easy and fun, other times it feels like work, and when you are doing it entirely for intangibles, those ‘work’ days do a much bigger number on your motivation than if you were doing it for pay. At the same time, though, the effect the writing has on the outside world does matter. Contributing to a collective conversation, putting value into the world through writing, these are much harder than Being Perceived. I think back to when Jethro Tull won the first heavy metal Grammy in 1989, beating out (among others) Metallica in what was widely considered a bizarre upset. When lead singer Ian Anderson is asked about this event in interviews, he’s usually good-humored, but often says something along the lines of “yes, this was weird, but we had been doing this for over twenty years and never won a Grammy before, why not now?” Virality is the same way. Crest of a Knave, the winning Tull album, isn’t really at the same tier of their catalog as Aqualung or Thick as a Brick. Still, thanks to an industry award, it gave Jethro Tull a profound moment of Being Perceived. And just like any other content creator, that moment came on the back of collective effort, not just the singular ‘thing’ that popped off.