Blog 16.5: The Spectrum of Making. Craft. Art. Product

Upfront, I want to be clear: This framework won't be useful to everyone. I have friends, smart, talented people, who find this whole categorization *meaningless.* One of them in particular, Tracy Sizemore, said to me that trying to label creative work this way is an unnecessary distinction, a distraction from just doing the work. And I get that. I really do. Her approach works well for her as can be seen by her very successful recent kickstarter for Han Cluster. But for me and, maybe, some of you, thinking about creative output in the following way will help clarify intention and sharpen your design.

It’s a categorization model I picked up years ago in school, that I've tweaked through years of making and playing games, designing other products, and running my own businesses. It divides creative work into three broad categories: Craft, Art, and Product.

Crafts are created for personal fulfillment. No deeper motive, no particular message to share, no angle. Just the joy of making a thing. They’re handmade dice bags, rulebooks printed on stapled paper, small homebrew games never meant to leave a kitchen table. For Crafts, the satisfaction is in the doing.

Art is creative work with something to say. It’s made to express a point, to reflect a truth, to provoke, invite, or challenge. Maybe it’s about grief. Maybe it’s about power. Maybe it’s about goblins as a stand-in for structural racism. But the key thing is that it means something to the person making it, and they want you to feel it (or something) too.

Products are made to sell. That doesn’t make them lesser, or soulless, or cynical. Products can be brilliant. Products can change lives. But their primary reason for existing *is* transactional.

I need to emphasize strongly that these aren’t strict boxes. They are not bank safes with 3 inch thick steel that a thing is put into, never to leave. They’re more like shades in a color blend. A knitter might make scarves for fun (Craft), then start including political symbols in the designs (Art), and eventually open an Etsy store (Product). A portrait painter might pour personal meaning into every canvas while still taking commissions to pay their rent. These categories are *tools,* not *fences.* They usually blend, not separate.

In the RPG world, most small-scale, indie games start as Crafts. They’re passion projects- made by bedroom designers for their friends or just themselves. Many of them never get published. Many of these creators don’t need them to be.

Some games aim to be Art from the jump. They have teeth and they have a point. Think Grey Ranks, Bluebeard’s Bride, or Dialect. They’re statements, made through play. And a lot of them also become Products, because saying something costs money, and money needs to come from somewhere. (Side note: You need to check out Grey Ranks- brilliant game with a backdrop of war, but not about war).

Then there are games that are capital-P Products. They’re made to move units. This isn't a bad thing by itself because they're really entertaining when they're well made. They can bring hours of joy and fun. A downside, however, is they often deceptively borrow the language of Art- talking about “narrative” and “representation” and “expression." They do this because that makes the game sound important, and importance sells. But, when we peel back the label, what’s underneath is marketing, not meaning. That, for good reason, galls.

I'm going to talk about these categories in the context of Dungeons & Dragons.

There are artists and craftspeople who work on D&D. Absolutely. Many of them empty their souls into what they do- regardless of working on commission. But as a whole, as a machine, Dungeons & Dragons has been a Product at least since the launch of 4th Edition. That’s not slander; 5e proved itself very successful, as has the business model behind it. The engine that drives that business model is Hasbro. And they don’t care about your childhood or personal beliefs. They care about quarterly earnings.

Regardless of what press releases say, or what messages are ascribed to any given D&D product, Hasbro isn’t making decisions based on values. They’re making decisions based on money. If inclusivity sells, they’ll push it. If murder-hobos sell better next year, they’ll swing to that.

What’s worth criticizing then? It isn’t which category, or combination thereof, a creation falls into. It’s the dishonesty behind the way a creation is presented. It’s the way corporate design mimics the language of Art while operating solely as Product. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. That doesn’t mean a game isn’t fun for millions of people. But as smart consumers, it's important to realize when this is happening. This is one of the reasons why the distinction between categories has been so useful for me over the years.

At Grumpy Corn Games, we live in the overlap between. Where Craft, Art, and Product blur together, argue, occasionally get drunk, and hug it out. Most of what we make starts as Craft. It’s born from joy, curiosity, or just something that sounds like fun to make. Whatever’s rattling around in our heads loud enough to take form. Sometimes, oftentimes, that’s where it ends. But occasionally, it keeps going.

Take our first “big” publication Sedna: Pirate Republic of the Oort Cloud. That book didn’t start life as a product. It began in a tragic campaign I ran called Hold Me Tight Until The World Ends. The premise was simple: genocidal aliens are invading, and humanity is going to lose. No clever twist, no last minute savior. Every. Human. Dies. The game was an act of shared grief, desperation, and resistance, played out over many months. And I loved it.

One of the places we visited in that campaign was Sedna, an abandoned mining-colony-turned pirate-haven orbiting the sun so distantly it couldn't remember what warmth felt like. Just a speck of metal and stubbornness twice as far from Earth as Pluto. But there was something in it for us. Something we couldn’t let go of. So I started shaping it, carving out a setting with edges and depth. At some point it stopped being "just" worldbuilding, it became a statement. I wanted people you don’t usually see in science fiction. I pulled threads from Mongolian culture, from migration and survival, from the grey spaces between good and evil. I didn’t want heroes or villains. I wanted people, some principled, some compromised, some trying to be better, some trying to be rich.

That’s when it became Art.

And then I decided to share it. I edited it, polished it, made it digestible for someone who hadn’t sat at my table. I put it on DriveThru and give all the revenue to an organization I believe in. That’s when it became a Product.

But it never stopped being the first two just because it became the latter. It was always a Craft. It was always Art. Because we started there, that layering doesn’t peel away when you sell it.

Crime Drama is following the same trail. It started as a wild back-alley idea. It became a conversation about crime, about complicity, swagger, about personal cost, silence and survival. Now it’s becoming a real book, a polished thing. It’ll have a price tag and a barcode eventually. But we’re “holding on tight” to the reason we started it in the first place.

Because that’s the goal: to make things with care, to say something worth hearing, and to put it in people’s hands

Craft. Art. Product.

In that order.

For us, always.