|
Pursuit of Knowledgeby Dave Rickey Knowledge without know-how is sterile. We use the word "academic" in a
pejorative sense to identify this limitation.
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
When I first got into this business 5 years ago, I had a lot of catching up
to do. Fortunately, so did a lot of other people; at the time all of the
people with experience in designing online games could fit into a single
room, and it wouldn't take a very big one. Even more fortunately, many of
them (including Jessica
Mulligan, Gordo
n Walton,
That's a mathematical certainty; if more than a small percentage of them did
not fail the market wouldn't be big enough to absorb them. But unfortunately
for the players and the industry, that won't be the cause of failure for
most of them. The vast majority of them will be stillborn, dead before the
market ever hears of them. Most because their ambitions exceed their money
supply, more because their ambitions exceed their knowledge. It isn't so
much that making MMO's is hard, in fact each of the steps needed to make an
MMO is fairly straightforward and solvable by anyone reasonably bright. But
there are an incredible number of steps, and they all have to be taken in
pretty much the right order. More than that, there are a lot of perfectly
logical mistakes to be made, mistakes that only a careful study of history
will explain the fallacies of. Without that study, the development process
can be led down a dead-end path that can add months to the development
cycle, or possibly sink it completely.
But the Old Guard is getting tired of explaining these things over and over,
and not enough are coming forward to take their place. This column has been
part of my trying to repay that--sharing what I have learned with the next
cycle of those out to learn this trade. And along the way, I've been
studying the cycle by which ideas become common knowledge. Recently, I've
been active in commenting on entries at the Terra Nova blog, for much the same
purpose as I imagine those I named above had for going to the forums of the
late Lum The Mad's and Waterthread. That blog represents
something new, however, because it's focus is not simply that of players
speaking with a few developers brave enough to face their wrath, but instead
it is mostly academics, commenting on what they find noteworthy about the
games and the communities they foster.
Sometimes the debates are covering old ground, for example yet another
rehash of the practice of playing a character of a different gender than
your own, aka "cross-dressing". One of the characteristics of received
knowledge reaching out into new circles of community is that it gets
challenged, rethought, re-justified. But this time is different, what has
become obvious common knowledge about social gameplay design is starting to
confront, and in some cases to directly contradict, well-established schools
of socio-political thought. So far, this has only been noticed by a handful
of researchers who are not yet being taken all that seriously by the
academic mainstream. That can't last, and I actually feel a degree of
concern about what is going to happen when the mainstream does notice.
Hopefully the readers will pardon me, but I'm going to have to go pretty far
afield from game design in this week's column, into territory that I only
dimly understand. In essence, I'm going to be describing a brewing civil war
within the ranks of academia, which online game design may find itself
caught up in. In essence, the problem comes from two great splits in the
approach to the pursuit of knowledge, one old and one new.
The old one is the classic split between the "hard sciences" such as
physics, chemistry, and biology, and the "soft sciences", psychology,
sociology, and other fields sometimes referred to as the "humanities". It
arises from the inadequacies of mathematics in supplying strong models that
are capable of providing rigorous explanatory or predictive value where
human behaviour is concerned. Even economics, the "hardest" and most
mathematically pursued of the humanities, offers nowhere near the same kind
of mechanistic, "reductionist", repeatable systems that underlie even the
softest of the hard sciences, Biology. As a result, the pursuit of these
fields has focused on scholarship, the accumulation and organization of
observations.
For a long time, the general approach to these sciences has been to choose
your politics, and then organize the observations to support the conclusion
that your politics were inevitable. Ideology underlies almost every theory
about how human cultures form and evolve, and the ideologues are definitely
aware that the fundamental nature of human beings is critical to the success
or failure of the political structures they find desirable. It is this
process of fitting facts to theory that led to a very definite view of human
nature, society, and art known collectively as "post-modernism".
Post-modernism has at its core the idea that there is no inherent human
nature, that people are at least in potential infinitely plastic and become
what they are shaped to be. This means that any standard of beauty, justice,
or even of truth is not absolute, but only a result of "consensus reality",
the common agreement to treat certain things as true. This is essential to
any ideology that depends on a populace that is not motivated by personal
gain, or is centered on redressing some classical inequality; it was the
direct source of the logic behind the infamous "re-education" programs of
communist nations through the middle part of the last century.
In the interest of fairness, the opposite view, that human nature is wholly
determinant and inflexible, built into our genes, was the fundamental
assumption of the "Natural Order" arguments that underlay fascism, and was
the direct source of the logic behind the "Final Solution". So these are
powerful forces we're dealing with--arguments of religious intensity that
have proven in the past to be capable of leading to atrocities.
The new split is, in a way, actually a merger (or perhaps a hostile
takeover). The split between the humanities and the sciences isn't
completely sharp: some disciplines in each camp study the same things from
different directions. For example, anthropology and sociology study
individual and group behaviours from the humanities, evolutionary biology
and ethology study them from the sciences. For a long time, the inadequacy
of the analytical tools kept them from treading on each others toes, each
side pursued its own theories by its own methods, and pretty much ignored
the other; an invisible wall of jargon and differing scopes of inquiry kept
them apart. In the 90's that wall started to break down, largely as a result
of increases in computing power allowing the sciences to gather and integrate
much larger amounts of data, and to a limited extent to test rigorous
theories in silico, that is by simulating them inside of a computer.
This led to what eventually became known as the "Science Wars", a fight
inside the halls of academia about how science should be done when it
concerned human behaviour. In essence, evolutionary biologists started
demonstrating rigorous proofs of how evolution and genetics could affect and
be affected by behavioural interactions, and their results seemed
incompatible with post-modernism, upsetting the underpinnings of many
ideologies in much the same way that Gallileo's disproving of Aristotlean
cosmology undermined the theology of the Catholic church. E. O. Wilson and
Richard Dawkins were at the forefront of this effort, and the subsequent
events were documented in Defenders
of the Truth by Ullica Segerstrale in far more detail than I would be
able to go into here. In truth, the "Science Wars" are not over, but simply
in a state of armistice.
The other piece of the new split is known as "Emergence". Emergence is an
outgrowth of Complexity theory, which is itself a product of Chaos theory
(originally the province of some very obscure and theoretical mathematics,
the best known of which are fractals like the Mandelbrot
set). In essence, emergence relies on the ability of interacting agents
operating on very simple rules to display extremely complex observed
behaviour, particularly when this behaviour can look both chaotic and
organized in ways that cannot be predicted simply by studying the behaviour
of the agents in isolation. This is important because it allows problems to
be defined and solved that are simply inaccessible to the mathematical
methods that have been the backbone of the hard sciences, and with equal
rigor. The most comprehensive work on emergent systems is A new Kind of Science by Stephen
Wolfram, which is either the most significant work of fundamental science
since Newton's calculus--or the world's most egregious case of
self-publishing by a crackpot ever (I lean towards the first, myself). The
applicability of emergence to certain problems is undeniable; the larger
question of its ability to provide answers from mathematically intractable
fields like human behaviour is still a subject of great debate. The methods
of Dawkins and Wilson are definitely emergent in character.
So a great deal of bound up tension is seething (by academic standards) just
under the surface, and online games have the potential to trigger its
release. Out of neccessity, we've had to start developing and testing
theories of human social behaviour based on behaviouristic psychology and
emergent principles, and worse yet from the viewpoint of post-modernism,
some of our theories appear to be working. This has the potential to make
the great "D&D is a snare of Satan" debates of the 80's look like a tea
party--at least then our opponents were barely coherent under the best of
circumstances, and unable to get anyone besides a few of the more extreme
christian sects worked up, and the media coverage was nearly as critical and
ridiculing of them as it was of the gamers. The people we're about to set
off have decades of experience at the cut-and-thrust of academic political
debate, impeccable credentials, and an agenda we won't even comprehend.
Don't get me wrong, I look forward to the work of academia on studying these
worlds. There's so much to be learned here, and someone caught up in trying
to build them simply can't hope to have time to study them in any depth.
We're going to need these academics, with their effectively infinite focus
and lack of fiscal pressures, if we're ever going to figure out what's going
on in here, and it is entirely possible that what they will learn will throw
light onto problems of literally world-shaking importance. But I have a
strong suspicion that things are going to get ugly. E.O. Wilson was
utterly perplexed that conclusions drawn from observations of insect
behaviour would lead to student demonstrations complete with signs labelling
him a fascist. A few years from now, we may find ourselves equally
villified, and equally confused how trying to make better games could set
off such a firestorm.
[ <— #10: Render Unto Caesar | #12: Nuts and Bolts —> ]
Recent Discussions on Engines of Creation:
|
