Temporal ignorance, elitism

August 19, 2006 on 2:49 pm | In Reporting, Industry

Two recent posts got me thinking about temporal ignorance and elitism in video gaming. That there is a lot of this that goes on in the real world is auspicious, but I'm going to focus on this industry, and my favorite genre within it.

Temporal Ignorance

For the first time in history

I won't link to the post where I read the post where I read this, because it comes up often enough that no one post is any different from others. Any post that starts with or includes this statement is either:

• A marketing blurb
• A political blurb
• From someone who hasn't been paying attention

It's not that everything has happened before per se. There is some new thinking out there after all. However, the antics of the political and professional bodies behind these games have all existed before, in one form or another. Corporate sociology is probably a fascinating field of study, given how different companies fall into comparison with various governmental systems through history, and how others don't at all. It's that the results of their actions affect a potentially large group of people that have no insight into history at all where I am most interested.

It often falls to the veterans of the genre to educate the newbies. This is a tried-and-true approach. Instead of experienced game developers having to tell a new crowd of people the same stuff they told previous folks a decade ago, they can rely on veterans who were there to fill in. This is analogous to any progressive ranking system, whether in the military, in martial arts, a well-functioning company, wherever.

Unfortunately, in this genre, even the veterans often seem ignorant of the genre at large. And this happens to such a degree that those who have seen beyond one playstyle get fed up with their minority voice and head off to havens not travelled by the newbie who could greatly benefit from their knowledge and experience, if they have an open mind. And no, I do not consider myself among the crowd of knowledgable. I've got a few years yet.

So temporal ignorance persists because the correcting agents are hard to find and hard to keep engaged in teaching. As a result, this genre is defined by those on the outside as WoW and everything else, as it was EQ and everything else before it. To me, this is why it's so easy for people to miss that every game can be a successful business model, regardless of how many people they attract.

Elitism

This one I can link to a specific post. I read about this study over at Raph's site, and he too pointed to the derision cast upon it from the "knowledgeable" of the industry. The contention:

You can always count on scientists to confirm through painstaking study what most people can figure out using common sense.

As Raph (and others) rightly point out:

Raph Koster wrote:

More importantly, the common sense of game players has no validity in, say, a Congressional hearing

Exactly. Conventional wisdom is interesting for water cooler talk, but policy does not generally come from that. It can't because the wisdom is only shared by those who have a singular view of a specific topic. And this genre is replete with singular views. I’d rather cite this sort of study than a group of gamers who see game-wide trends because of the goings-on of their particular guild.

Jumping to a conclusion is the realm of those without accountability. That's fine for those who just parrot thoughts and ideas for a living. It is not for people who need to make sociological policy decisions.