This article in the New Scientist RSS feed caught my eye. It's only a brief summary of a longer article in the magazine, but the basic premise held forth by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore:
"The over-abundance of connections reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold."
My first thought when I read this was "That's the gaming world!"
Three thoughts followed:
- Consider if you will the vast amount of energy expended in the blog-sphere defending various styles of RPG play. In the end has it added anything to our hobby? Many of the proponents of various play styles can't even agree on a definition of what they're arguing about. Other than generating an endless stream of blog and forum posts, has the debate added to the industry?
- Speaking of forums, are these gathering places providing value to our hobby or are they creating armed camps of monolithic thought? I don't frequent many forums these days, so I'm not up on what sites are defending which flavor of the month, but the fundamental question "Is the debate adding to or detracting from our hobby?" is worth asking ourselves.
- Lastly: old-school vs. new-school, not as a style, but a mindset. While there are certainly differences in play-style between the two groups, I think there is also a fundamental mindset difference. In the early days of our hobby, most players, GMs and developers worked in vastly greater isolation than today's always on, Internet-connected society. My own roots are in the pre-Internet era. When I started playing our "game store" was a KB Toys, and our gaming group was three people who all lived in a small rural town in Maryland. Is it any wonder that our play developed a unique character and that we, the players, gained a strong sense of personal ownership in that play style? Does today's new-school player have the same personal investment in their gaming style, or has the proliferation of connections homogenized the gaming world?
“Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved in the broth”
--Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
4 comments:
I can't say that I entirely agree, either with the original article or your conclusions. I agree that it is something to be mindful of, but I don't see it as a more negative than positive influence on creativity.
Although I do agree entirely with your first bullet point - internet debates are nearly always utter wastes of time, internet communities and forums are so much more than just debate threads. Although EN World, Paizo, and Planewalker are the sites I frequent the most, I've spent some time on a large variety, and although the level of pointless debate varies from site to site, I don't recall any where the number of debate threads even approached half of the discussions on even the worst forum. There is and always has been a great deal of information sharing, discussion, and collaborative creation happening on forums as well. From my own personal experience in the RPG community (as opposed to a thorough statistical survey) with the exception of perhaps 4e's initial launch, the non-debate discussions are FAR more numerous than the debate ones.
Although there are certainly opinionated people at every forum, I don't see any of the RPG community forums being "armed camps of monolithic thought" except in the eyes of extremists or those who miss the point of a site (like being surprised that people at EN World like and defend various versions of D&D).
The original article excerpt mentions that new creative ideas are easy to criticize and therefore grow best in isolation. Although I agree that creative ideas do well in isolation, I also think that in the proper communities they can thrive just as easily there. One need only look at the "City built around the tarrasque" thread on RPG.net to see a legendary example of that. Someone posted a random thought, and it has grown and thrived for years as others have built and expanded upon it.
Furthermore, greater connections lead to more information which leads to greater creativity. If I hadn't been a part of the Planewalker community, I would have never read China Mieville, for example. Or see hundreds of creative ideas from gamers all over the world - many European with a distinctly different flavor of gaming than the US Midwest experiences I've had.
So I guess my main disagreement is that fan communities already do offer up a word of encouragement and push the original poster to develop the idea further. I have seen that FAR more often than flaming ideas. Yes, we need to be mindful that fan communities are more supportive than critical. However since supportive and helpful sites will tend to draw more visitors posting creative ideas than the critical ones, it's a natural evolution in the right direction already. At least in my experience.
Yikes! Sorry, I didn't realize I rambled so long (and tried to avoid the flaming that we're arguing against). :) Just pointing out that, as I see it, we're already well on the way to where you think we should be going. (Geez, that was sure easier than 6 paragraphs of rambling.)
They call it 'tragedy of the commons' but there are possibilities in collaboration - take a look at Nevermet Press and it's distributed workshops for an example of how this can work well.
My concern is that in digging through material to fuel the blog/forum posts that I miss the point entirely of doing so. When I realised I could do my 'sekrit resurch' in the open as a series of blog posts, well, I LOL'd...
@Ken Marable - Cool summary of your first post :)
Ken and Satyre, thanks for the comments. I didn't intend to imply that I considered collaboration an evil thing. I've benefited from collaboration via forums myself. Certainly my 'armed camps' line was overstated for effect. That said I do think forum communities do bring their fair share of conformist thinking, and an unwary creator can find themselves co-opted by the local 'belief system' if they're not thoughtful in their treatment of the feedback they receive.
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