Last year, one of my students turned up for a supervision meeting in a glum mood. He was supposed to be working flat out on his final year project, but instead he'd spent six hours researching the inner workings of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s. He'd only stopped when he realised he had an appointment to see me in my office. How was he ever going to become a virtual world designer when he allowed himself to be distracted by things that had no relevance to the matter in hand, and only peripheral relevance to his life in general?
I told him about the time I was supposed to be revising for a programming examination but somehow managed to spend two days reading up on pagodas. His sudden energy for learning more about the politics of the Middle East 30 years ago might have seemed inexplicably ill-advised, but it didn't mean he wasn't cut out to be a designer; on the contrary, it meant it was his destiny.
Virtual world designers need to know a little about an awful lot. When they come across something that interests them, they descend upon it with fervour. Why? It's filling a gap. What gap? Well - who knows?! Even the designer can't say. All they know is that it's something they need (no, NEED) to know, and they don't know it already. The actual subject matter almost certainly isn't significant in itself; what's important is that it adds to the designer's knowledge in a way that ignites their understanding of the world in general. My pagoda episode told me more about symbols, community, climate, belief, architecture, ceremony and family structure than it did about actual pagodas. That said, I did manage to put a pagoda into one of my games some 10 years later, so the domain-specific knowledge wasn't entirely wasted...
Virtual world designers could in theory read practically anything if they sense it will help them "somehow". When texts are directly related to what they do, though, they devour them immediately and insatiably.
This is actually a problem.
It's not a problem for designers, but it's a problem for the people who write the articles. Here's why.
Suppose you are a literary theorist. You read an author's works extensively, and you produce a treatise examining what the author is saying through his or her work. Under no circumstances do you actually approach a living author and ask: "To what extent did Joyce influence your recontextualising of antiquity for a reading of contemporary history?". You just state your opinion. The reason for this is that if you did go straight to the author, you could pollute the waters with your own views. The author might say, "You know, I never realised I was feeding off Joyce, I guess I should try to find my own path". It's like in quantum physics, where querying the status of a particle itself determines that particle's status. In order to preserve the art that they both require for success, novelists and literary theorists therefore give each other a wide berth.
Designers are not novelists, however. They will seize on literary theories in exactly the same manner that they will seize on anything else. If they find anything that seems useful, then they'll use it. This is not Expected Behaviour from theorists, who are completely unused to the object of their study reading what they wrote, absorbing it into their knowledge base, and potentially changing their behaviour as a result.
For example, at a conference this year I had a conversation over lunch with a researcher who had examined the narrative structure of several role-playing games and found that in general they were an excellent match with Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey". She was quite pleased with this result, as it showed that even with new media, designers were subconsciously adopting the narrative structures of old media. It was something of a let-down, therefore, when I pointed out that actually designers were well aware of traditional narrative structures, and that the previous year I'd been at a talk where the author of one of the games she'd mentioned spent 10 minutes explaining why he'd gone for a Hero's Journey structure rather than a Syd Field, screenplay-style structure (basically, he wanted the epic feel it delivered).
Similarly, I've lost count of the number of blog and forum posts people have made where they struggle to understand something I've said. OK, well no-one's perfect, and if I say things confusingly then I can expect people to wonder what on Earth I meant. Except, to the best of my knowledge I'm not actually dead, and it would take only a few moments to send me an email simply asking me what I meant. Yet few people do this. It's as if the act of directly questioning me would somehow alter what I thought. In fact, it might - which is why I actually want the questions! If I'm wrong, I want to know about it!
And so we come to the point of this post. The Technology Intelligence Group provides expertise and information. However, it isn't a one-way thing. We don't sit high in our wizardly towers, penning words that we feel may enlighten those lesser mortals fortunate enough to encounter them, and then paying no heed to how they interpret our oracle-like statements. We're approachable. If we say something you don't think is right, take us to task over it. If we say something that doesn't seem to make sense, ask us what we meant. If you think we're missing some facts, please tell us - we're as eager to learn as you are. Most of all, if you've acted on what we've said and have an experience to relate about it, please, please, let us know: we're not novelists - we want to hear this stuff!
We're only people. We may be experts in our subject areas, but we're not aloof, we're not arrogant (well, OK, maybe *I* am) and we're not going to mock you for having the temerity to contact us. We've just been in the right place at the right time often enough that we believe we can help. The only difference between us and a good text book is that we're up to date and interactive. So don't be put off interacting with us..!
Richard
A very interesting post. I often have the same problem of getting distracted while researching online.
Posted by: Anxiety Cures | October 09, 2010 at 05:38 PM