The two types of cricketers

Once upon a time there were two types of cricketers.

The first were Gentlemen. A Gentleman played cricket because he loved cricket. Independently wealthy, the Gentleman could play when he wanted, or not as the mood took him. The second were the Players. They played cricket because they had a natural aptitude for playing cricket, but their class meant that they could only play cricket professionally if they were paid.

Off the pitch the Player was just a guy like you or me, with a family to support, making ends meet as best he could. And if a Player didn’t play? Couldn’t play? Then it was the poorhouse.

Gentlemen did not have to worry about that. They led glamorous lifestyles and the papers and the radio loved them.

Dilletante is not just an occupation in Call of Cthulhu. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth there were plenty of folks that didn’t work for a living. Marx wrote quite a bit about them. A whole class of people whose property and stocks and family and estates did the hard graft so they didn’t have to. This way of life didn’t really survive two World Wars and a stock market crash.

Except it did, in our consciousness.

In Britain there are still two types of Rugby. Union and League. One is for folks who play for sport, the other for money. There’s something terribly grubby about money isn’t there. When I put it like that – sport versus money – you naturally assume that the sport guys have some degree of moral superiority, and that’s the legacy of Gentlemen versus Players.

We see this in our industry too.

Who loves games the most? The folk that open stores that sell them? Or the blogger who reviews them? The dungeon masters and Magic judges? Look at how liberating it is to be freed from money, from filthy lucre, from having to graft day in day out in the game mines. Stacking shelves and cleaning toilets for a living.

For money.

Emotional responses are deemed better than transactional ones, because emotion simply is, whereas transactional can be judged and weighed up against other transactions. How much did this sportsball player get paid, and were they worth it? How much is that game on Amazon?

I’m a parent. I’m a carer. I’m on the PTA. There are lots of things I do for not-money. Things I do that are emotional and not transactional. Some Players probably – almost certainly – loved the game more than some Gentlemen. But at the point where they had a transactional relationship with it, they were judged. And judged by other criteria.

Sometimes I wonder what would life look like in Star Trek? What would I do in that world? In a world of basic income and replicators? For a while in the Eighties I drew benefits and ran D&D full time, and I have to say that was pretty amazing. Emotional. But now I see folks charging $20 an hour for DMing services in some US cities. Transactional.

Sometimes I wish that my proven track record on events mattered. But there is always some club or some vanity store who can prove they love the game more. And Organised Play Coordinators are like cigarette card traders in 1910. They seem to despise the fact that ‘the game’ is all about money, despite themselves drawing a salary from it.

Every store in the world has lost players to a clubhouse that only opened for the lols. That’s ‘by the players for the players’, when really they mean ‘by gentlemen for gentlemen’. The clubs became clubhouses. As stores we bemoan this, because those stores buy at cost and sell at cost, but how could they do any different? A hundred and fifty years of cricket has led them inexorably to this point.

It’s hardwired into the consciousness. Its binary. A Gentleman who takes money is a Player. And once a Player always a Player.

Behind the scenes of course, those Victorian and Edwardian Gentlemen were in fact supported by money, the exploitation of money and the money of exploitation. They were born of empires geographical and mercantile. But we chose to pretend otherwise and so did they.

We call that hypocrisy. It’s pretty common.

But we can pretend to. It’s one of our skillsets. If I can pretend to be a dragon or a bad ass elven monk, I can pretend that my existence is not predicated on my ability to turn a profit.

Here’s the thing. In retail I don’t approach any decision I make transactionally. I tell my staff and my work experience kids that as an experiential retailer, the thing I sell is happiness. It just comes in boosters and boxes. You cannot win a transactional fight. But you can be an emotional zone that people respond to with their hearts. People buy off people they like. And they like larger than life characters, a collectable cigarette card version of you, with your batting average proudly displayed.

Never, ever tell folks how desperate you are for cash. Never. It reminds them you are a Player. Randomly give stuff away for free all the time. Promo cards are great for this. Never use the argument that Amazon or Cool Stuff is cheaper. Your customers know. Make an emotional argument. Build a place of fun and smiles and eat cold baked beans out of a can if you have to. Nobody respects your economic argument for why they should support your store, even if they then buy out of guilt. Knock them a fiver off ‘because they look like nice people’.

Nobody trained you for retail. Nobody trained you for a war against an implacable foe who will do anything to make this fight transactional. To win. Because one day Jeff Bezos is going to want you to have an emotional relationship with your delivery drone; the sinister smiling tick face of their corporate logo, to forget about the human drone pissing in bottles back at the depot.

And that, as we say, is just not cricket.